Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Previously I talked about Facebook ads, and how you can use them to explode your traffic & leads, virtually overnight.
In this post I’m going to share 5 little known Facebook advertising tricks for getting higher click-through rates and cheaper traffic!
In this guide
1. Bidding Strategy
When it comes to bidding on Facebook ads, there are two schools of thought. One says that you should bid really low, and keep increasing the bid incrementally until you start getting enough impressions and clicks.
The other is to start a few cents over the bottom suggested bid. Both strategies have their own advantages. If you have a small budget, starting low will allow you to start getting cheap clicks, but it won’t be very quick. Starting just 2 cents above the bottom suggested bid will ensure Facebook gives your ad enough visibility to start getting clicks immediately.
By getting clicks immediately (at a higher price), you can work to increase your ad click-through rates and in turn lower your suggested bid. Facebook will lower the suggested bid as your CTR goes up.
2. Split Testing Ads
This is the single most important thing in Facebook advertising; split testing your ads! The secret to Facebook advertising is matching your ads to the right audience. When you create an ad that perfectly resonates with its target audience; it’s going to get a LOT of clicks.
Lots of clicks mean a high CTR, which means lower CPC. Always start with at least 20 ads. 5 different images, 10 different headlines, 2 different ad copies.
Set up the ads, same targeting, run some traffic. Spend $50, $100, $200 – whatever suits your budget. After running the traffic (if your targeting is good), you’ll have some very useful data back. You’ll be able to select the best converting 2 images (throw the others) and the top 3 converting headlines. Also delete the worst-performing ad copy.
Now set up 6 ads, an ad with each image and headline. At this point, you should have a relatively good ad to test with. You can always repeat the process/change it slightly and create several other ads to work with.
Now is the time to split test your targeting. Start by split testing age groups, throw out the non-buying age groups and keep the others. If one age group is buying 70% of the products, zone in on the group and leave all others out.
Next, you can start split testing the interests.
3. Targeting Desktops ONLY With The Power Editor
This one simple trick cut my lead cost in half. A huge percentage of Facebook visitors are on their mobile phones. Facebook automatically makes their website look sexy for mobile users.
Your capture pages and ads however, don’t look nearly as good on mobile along with several other reasons which lead to BAD conversions and expensive traffic.
The best ‘trick’ that will give you significantly cheaper traffic is simply targeting desktops only. You can do this by going to the Power Editor in Facebook.
When you go to the Ad manager, you’ll see the ‘Power Editor’ in the navigation menu on the right. On the first page of the Power Editor under the targeting, you’ll find ‘display options’ at the bottom of the page.
You’ll be able to choose from desktops, mobiles and several other options. Select DESKTOP ONLY and update > save.
4. Targeting
Targeting is the single most important element of Facebook advertising. Bad targeting = low CTR and high CPC. Good targeting the opposite.
The real secret to cheap FB traffic is great targeting and ads that resonate with the target audience. For example, lots of newbie advertisers get on Facebook with some kind of product to promote.
Let’s say Bob wants to promote his golf training course. He goes to the interests part of the ad creation page, and enters ‘golf’, he immediately sees that #Golf has an audience of 20,000,000 people.
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Bob thinks he’s finally found his road to Internet Riches.
Unfortunately, the reality is that just because someone likes Golf, does not mean that they’ll be interested in a golf training product. Bad targeting, high CPC > broke BOB.
Now if Bob was smarter about it, he’d target people who were only interested in learning Golf. Which isn’t always easy to do.
To get started, Bob might target #Golf Player, #Playing Golf, #Learning Golf, #Golf Coach. These keywords will generally be people interested in learning golf.
The point is it’s all in the targeting. Do not target generic keywords. Think about the kind of pages and things your target audience will be liking on Facebook. Target those keywords, start small. Split test. A targeted audience of 50,000 is better than a not-so-targeted audience of 500,000.
5. Get Your Spend Limit Increased
The final #5 is to get your spend limit increased. For some reason, Facebook limits your ad spend. They start you off at $10/day and you can slowly increase it.
If you want to drastically increase the budget, you need their permission. Facebook likes to make sure their advertisers can pay their bills before giving you a big budget increase.
Before you get your spend limit increased, you should have been advertising on Facebook for at least 2 months paying your bills every time.
The only way to increase your limit is to email them, file requests, keep paying your payments and emailing them some more! Simply go to the FB ad help center.
Click on any of the Q&A’s, scroll down the answers and you’ll find a ‘my question wasn’t answered’ tab. This will lead you to a form where you can contact them. Ask them to increase your ad spend. It’s as simple as that, the more you bug them the more likely they’ll increase your limit.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more Facebook marketing tips, tricks and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Matt DiMaio, August 29 2013, 14:30
Thanks for this David. Learned some good stuff here. Regarding #3. Am unable to find the ‘display options’ that will allow me to select DESKTOP ONLY. Got a screenshot of where it is?
Tyronne Ratcliff, August 29 2013, 15:45
Solid content Dave. Targeting ONLY desktops is an awesome facebook advertising trick. The other tricks are also good as well. What I like about advertising on facebook is the fact that you can get started for as little as $5 a day. They also have free advertising credits as well.
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The desktop-only targeting trick is the one that’ll age fastest here — mobile behavior on Facebook has shifted enormously since this was written, and ‘just exclude mobile’ stops being free money the moment your competitors figure out the same trick, which they always do within about a year.
Gus, the more basic problem is the post never gives a timeframe for when desktop-only stopped or started working — it states ‘cut my lead cost in half’ as if that’s permanent, with no date attached to the observation. Any tactic tied to a platform’s current ad inventory needs an expiry date stamped on it.
Raj’s missing-date point is a character point too — ‘this one trick cut my cost in half’ with no year attached borrows a fact’s authority while dodging a claim’s accountability.
Gus’s point about the yearly arms race reminds me of stocking bikes — the model that sells because nobody else has it stops selling the second the shop down the road gets the same delivery. Every ‘trick’ in advertising is really just a temporary information asymmetry with a shelf life, and this post is basically a snapshot of one particular week of that asymmetry.
Gus is describing what’s sometimes called an information asymmetry advantage in market research — the gap closes the moment enough people discover it, and Facebook’s own algorithm changes actively work to close exactly this kind of gap over time, since arbitrage against their own ad delivery system isn’t something the platform wants to reward long term.
The ten dollars a day starting spend limit, and the process the post describes for raising it — simply emailing them repeatedly and filing requests until they agree — does this actually work the same way for advertisers who are not based in the United States? I ask because in my experience running ad accounts from Turkey, I have had accounts flagged for review that, as far as I could tell from comparing notes with colleagues, never happened to people advertising from American addresses with American payment methods, even when the campaigns themselves were very similar in content and spend. So I wonder whether ’email them repeatedly’ is genuinely the whole mechanism the article describes, or only the visible part of a process that also depends quite a lot on where you and your money are coming from, which the post does not mention at all.
Bug them enough and they raise your limit. Not exactly a system so much as a mood.
Small correction — the spend limit and the review flag aren’t the same mechanism. One’s automated from payment history, the other’s compliance, and yes, it skews by region.