Building an highly converting and effective Facebook campaign

Facebook campaigns are widely used these days and account one of the highest advertising sales each year on the internet and are just behind Google Adwords. Same like Adwords you’ll need to think a lot and plan before you put in your money, I’ve had two unsuccessful campaigns, but fortunately I had used a coupon rather than my own money, and I think most of you should while your starting off as it helps you get a touch of it before you risk your own money.

Unlike Google, Yahoo and Bing, Facebook allows you to use ads to spread viral and keep getting the traffic consistently forever, but the complications in launching one are above all the three, though Facebook as a lower competition than them. So this guide will teach you how to launch a Facebook advertising campaign which is effective in generating traffic, sales, builds a network and also at a cheaper rate, which requires planning and equal implementing, unlike Adwords you need to keep monitoring your ads almost everytime, in order to make sure that you aren’t loosing money.

The 3 types of audience

On facebook ads you can target three types of audience and its recommended that you always go for the smallest. Here I’m not talking about interests and age groups, but the targeting levels which Facebook itself provides us. The first one is the fans, the second ones are those who aren’t fans and the third is the friend’s of those fans.

Its the fans and the friends of the fans you must target, what I mean to say is if I’d launch a campaign for my blog I’d firstly search for one or two in my niche, for now lets take Shoutmeloud and SmartPassiveIncome as they are both related to my niche and are hugely popular, so I’ll have the reach of the total of both their fans who’ll be shown my ad, if I target their friends then it would multiply by a hundred times, but the efficiency of targeting would reduce.

You can do this only if you have no age, gender or geographical restrictions for your audience, even if you do you can, but you’ll need to target more number of networks. This is extremely useful when you want to compete with someone, as you’ll be stealing their fans, very soon you can impress your fans more than your competitor.

Fan pages Vs Landing pages – make your pick

There are two places you can send your advertising traffic to, the first is your own site landing page, secondly your facebook fan page. Both are equally important and have their own advantages, but it depends on your needs on what works better. According to my analysis a Facebook ad redirecting to your landing page results in a bounce rate of about 67% on an average, so only 33% of the traffic actually spend time, only 10% would return to your site and 5% would make a sale instantly. It is profitable as you make instant sales everyday, but as I said it depends on your needs.

The second option, which is leveraging traffic to your fan page is also profitable, its common to see about 80% become your fan and a few of them will visit your site and even fewer would generate leads. One thing positive in this that you can always get back those visitors and this is true sense of viral marketing, its recommended that you keep your page active as once you get a few thousand fans many of them will share your links helping you go more viral.

So as you can see both are equally good in their own ways, the first method allows you to boost instant sales and get immediate returns, but most of your traffic has no return rate and their is a huge exit rate. The second method helps you grow your followership by a huge rate, it is sure to keep bringing in more and more traffic and also helps you build a solid brand, though sales will be low initially you can make up to it later, there is no guarantee that you’ll earn back all your investment initially, but you surely will in a few months time.

As I said this decision is totally based on your needs, if your looking to promote your blog or something which has constant updates or mainly runs on pageviews, then I’d strictly recommend you to use your Facebook fan page, but at few instances you can make it convert by leveraging it to your blog, this is by optimizing your landing page for Facebook traffic. If you are advertising an affiliate link or page or any product of your own, then direct to landing page will be the best.

Landing page / Fan page optimization

After you’ve made up your mind on which of the above you want to use, its necessary to optimize it to highest extent to get the maximum conversions. I have also mentioned above that both the circumstances can be defied of their principles if you optimize your landing page/fan page, but such optimization takes a hell lot of creativity and a lot more graphic design skills than most of us could afford.

So if you can’t do so, then its better to stick with your plans above and optimize your selection, either fan page or your landing page, in case of a fan page there are many apps and methods to customize it efficiently. You can do this easily with the help of Facebook’s static FBML, tabs, videos app and a few banners. Just a few a changes would give your fan page a staggering new look, this takes very little technical skills and more of creativity. To learn more on this do refer to our article – Creating a unique and innovative Facebook fan page.

If your directing your traffic towards your landing page, its seriously not advisable to direct it to your home page. For increasing conversions you must create a whole new separate landing page for Facebook traffic, it requires a catchy design which would look social like Facebook, you need to find a way to welcome Facebook users and make it easy for them to invite their friends. I know that my description isn’t clear enough, but I myself have no idea on how to optimize this, it takes huge creativity and skills to pull this of successfully, you can always hire someone to do it, as you are spending money on this.

For the landing page, the design and optimization isn’t everything as your targeting and efficiency of your ad too matters, so you can’t consider your landing page to be everything, but yes it surely does help increase leads.

Target less and increase ad volume

As a marketer its a common sight to see many people targeting all of their audience and all of their services with a same ad, this causes huge bounce rates and at times very little returns. So what most experienced marketers do is launch about 10 campaigns for just a single feature, each targeting different demographies, likes and interests.

For example, if your advertising a dating site, the effect would be really low if you title it ‘meet new boys and girls online’ and target both boys and girls with it, but if you create two separate ad campaigns, one targeting only girls and the other targeting only boys, then you’ll surely get good conversions. This one was just a basic example, but the true effect comes when you start a multi-level campaign when each feature gets different campaigns. It was of great effect in Adwords, but Facebook too is no different.

The idea is to promote the same page to people of different geographies, interests, age and genders with different campaigns, each having a personalized approach to its audience. This allows you to save on the wasteful impressions and clicks which would mostly takeaway half of your budget.

Create an attractive ad

Hope most of you already new about this, the main aspect for you to gain clicks would be the attractiveness of your ad, this is the most important aspect to improve your click-through-rate after effective targeting, so you must never lack behind on this as you may loose all your effort you’ve put above with this one thing.

You can just add a title of your product and your logo and make it your ad, you’ll have to be more creative and use attractive words, because thats what makes the difference. The image you upload may not have to be your logo or anything containing your name, just something related to your niche is enough. Its common to see many people trying to explain too much in the description, but its better to keep it small, but something which gets a user interested, after you get his interest you’ll have pages to express yourself.

On to our readers

These are few of the basic tips for you to get started with, but one can become an expert only with the help of experience and thats why Facebook provides coupons for advertising. I’m sure many of you will have your own tips and tricks that you’d like to share with us, so please do share your Facebook experience. To keep up with future posts of this sort do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.