The One (1) lesson I learned from spending $304,000 in Facebook Ads!
And how to calculate REAL Facebook ROI.
I love this quote from Roy H. Williams on…
“Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behaviour is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.”
The commercial world we live in merely an aggregation of cultural trends… trends that come and go, and eventually, come again!!
The brands who manage to reinvigorate those trends and harness cultural attention are the ones who WIN — ‘Checked pants, high-waisted jeans, platform shoes, Champion and Kappa revivals… Sound familiar??’
We have all seen it before and now we are seeing it again!!
And that’s exactly what I have learned…
While you can invest in a staggering number of advertising options, none will help your growth as much as FB Ads and in specific, RETARGETING.
YES! Retargeting is THE GAME!
If you look at every (non publicly listed) successful company selling online they all have ONE thing in common.
→ It’s NOT better products (although that’s really important)
→ It’s NOT better service (although that's really important)
→ It’s NOT the latest and greatest marketing tech!
The one thing they have in common is CAMPAIGNS that PERSUADE first, and SELL after!
Here’s what interesting about that. Most people in or outside of Facebook don’t think in terms of Campaigns! They think about ads, target market, landing pages, or email copy… And while all that is very important, its nothing compared to the full potential of a true Campaign!
A Campaign should be divided into a number of Ad-sets, split tested to find the right niche and versions of Ads (also split tested) to understand the right creative.
In addition, pixel tracking to turn those cold leads > into warm leads > into conversions.
YES! Re-marketing is absolutely essential! And bombarding your ad message, service or product, contextual to your target audience should be the first technology you focus on.
1. It’s NOT them. It’s YOU!
First of all, forget everything negative you’ve heard about Facebook advertising so far.
→ It does work!
→ It works unbelievably well!
→ Exceptionally, if I may!
Second, forget everything negative you’ve heard about retargeting so far.
→ It’s not online stalking.
→ People don’t actually find it creepy.
→ And if they do, simply tell them to burn all their devices, and move to an unknown island in the middle of the South Pacific… This is how the world has evolved and we’re not going to go backward!
An ad is usually the first touch point for the customer, but it’s the last step when creating a marketing campaign. You could create the most magnificent Facebook campaign of all time, but if no one wants what you’re selling, or gets your message… it will fail.
Paid traffic is the last step, and if the rest of the customer journey is failing, your ads will fail too.
“My creative is great, my targeting is niche, my copy impeccable… Why aren’t my Ads working?”!!
The magic happened for me the moment I changed mindset going into the development of the Ad-sets. Its a fine line between having the confidence to know what is going to work and having the humility to reverse engineer your end-customer.
→ What do they want?
→ How is this going to add value to their lives?
→ What are some of the strong beliefs I might need to break through in order to get my message across??
When you’re not guessing the formula is pretty simple. Put out content, A/B test it and TEST it again!!
Once you get it right, FB retargeting is the only way forward!
Essentially, FB retargeting is a type of marketing approach that hows ads for your business to people after they have visited your website, used your mobile app, or given you their email address. People will see these ads when they visit or shop on other websites, use social media, watch videos, use other mobile apps, or search on Google.
And it can be your most powerful tool!
People are busy and easily distracted. They can leave your site or abandon items in their cart for any number of reasons — an incoming phone call, the need to answer a pressing email, stopping to watch a YouTube video, or an Instagram DM from @iblamesid about a must-read story on ‘The Art of Learning a New Skill!’. Whatever the reason, they’re gone.
Retargeting helps you to reach a huge percentage of those people who came to your site and left without converting — potentially several times per day or week, across a variety of websites, over the course of 30 to 60 days or more.
Think of your re-marketing efforts as a gentle (or aggressive) reminder, one that encourages people who visited your site to finish what they started, while reinforcing your branding and messaging to that user every time they see you around.
2. Brand Recall before ROI
Unforgettable…that’s what you are. Or at least, that’s what every brand wants to be!
I have seen this with a number of different clients; before they became a well-established business they had a serious brand recognition problem.
In my experience, they had invested heavily in SEO, which brought them lots of organic traffic, but just 3% or so of those monthly views came from branded searches.
In many circumstances, their investment in SEO had greatly outpaced their investment in brand building. They ranked well in search and got plenty of traffic, sure, but nobody remembered who they were!
We stepped in and retargeting changed all that. After implementing pixel tracking and event recalls, we saw a serious increase in direct traffic and people began to find their sites by searching for the company brand.
There’s a certain magic to display ads that a Google search just can’t replicate. The right creative will always make an impact — and help people remember you and your message.
Obviously, brand recall comes with its fair share of benefits. Its unaided awareness, and it plays a crucial part in getting customers to stick with your company as long-term customers and advocates Being the first company to pop to mind when someone needs something from your niche means that you don’t have to work as hard to maintain a consistent revenue. Stop looking for that weekly ROI positive campaign and look at the longevity of your Ad-set reach!
People always overestimate what they can do in 1 year and underestimate what they could achieve in 10!
So the next question that is: “Are you telling us that ROI is not important when looking at FB ads and retargeting strategies”?
Absolutely NOT! However, branding should be at the core of your client acquisition strategy!
While I generally prefer ROI as an overall business metric, there is a lot of value in understanding that ROAS (return on ad spend) should be your only metric of focus in the short term. And naturally short-term proof tends to be quite important when running ads for other businesses!
Here is how to calculate Facebook ROI:
→ ROI Formula: ROI = (Revenue — Costs) / Costs
→ Percent ROI = (Revenue — Costs) x (100 / Costs)
Here is how to calculate Facebook ROAS:
→ ROAS Formula: ROAS = Revenue / Cost
→ Percent ROAS = (Revenue — Cost) x (100/Cost)
3. Be Money Smart
Why does anyone advertise? To grow their business and pad their wallet. And with social media, it is easier than ever. 70% of B2C marketers have acquired customers through Facebook, according to statistics in 2017. And that only has the potential to grow.
Retargeting isn’t free-but nothing in marketing that drives effective, real growth is free. Still, retargeting is considerably underpriced to this day.
When running Facebook Ads, you want to make sure you’re converting or squeezing the value (which can be monetary) from people who are already in the market for your stuff. This is your low-hanging fruit.
Sponsored ads average around (AUD) $12 for 1,000 views. Not very expensive at all!
These ads can cost anywhere from two to 100 times less than search ads in super-competitive industries, and though the typical click-through rate is extremely low (about 0.2 percent), the conversion rate is competitive with search ads in many industries.
Instead, retargeting gave us a second chance (and third and fourth, etc.) with people who were already interested in the brand or something the business offered.
Chances are you are spending enormous money and effort to get people to your site in the first place. Only a small percentage of those people will actually do what you want them to do, whether it’s to make a purchase, a booking, or sign up for a white paper, free trial, newsletter, or something else.
A successful retargeting growth strategy here is to examine the intent of the people on your site. This is FB pixel and events come into play (but this is a more technical explanation for another time). In short, a person who tries your product indicates greater intent to become a lead than a person who read one of your blog posts. For a retailer, a person who abandons a cart is more likely to convert than a visitor who browsed a few minutes and left.
So what do you get for your retargeting investment?
In my case, (on average, across different FB accounts) before retargeting, businesses saw less than 2% of traffic converting. After retargeting we improved repeat visits by 56%, increased website visitor-to-lead-form-submitted conversion by 59 %, and grew time-on-site by a staggering 310%. These are huge numbers for relatively minimal investments.
In an ideal world, a customer would search for you, visit your site, never be distracted, spend time exploring your content or product pages, sign up, book, buy, and become a loyal customer forever. But we don’t live in such a world!
In this world, in 2019 you’d be absolutely crazy not to use Facebook ads and you’d be even crazier to not use Facebook Retargeting.
If you’re investing a good chunk of money into your marketing — your search, content, and social media — why would you spend all that time and money to get people to visit one time? That’s insane!
Yet many businesses fall victim to this definition of insanity-doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Do something drastically different in 2019. It’s time for Facebook Ads… Its time for Retargeting!!
All I’m trying to do…
…is write stuff that’s worth your time and can bring you value. If you enjoyed the read please click the💚 below so other people will see it too (you can click up to 50times)!!
Also, it would absolutely make my day if you reached out and said ‘Hey!’ on here. Really looking forward to connect! 😊
- SIDNEY -
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