Your Burning Facebook Advertising Questions Answered ~via @JennyBrennanMe
Every month I send out an email to my community and ask them for their burning Facebook Ads questions. I love doing this because it creates interaction and really gives me a sense of what people need help with.
This month was no different, except instead and in addition to replying individually I decided to share with blog readers too.
Below is an overview of each question. If you have not joined my FREE group Online Marketing Stars, you can do that here:
Q1 HOW DO YOU SPLIT TEST FACEBOOK ADS
Sacha Liddiard is an amazing entrepreneur and you can connect with her on Facebook here. She is a Network Marketing Sales & Social Media Coach with 30 years experience in Networking & Sales enabling you to grow a successful online global business.
Running Facebook ads for e-commerce can be a lot of fun, but it can also be very frustrating. When you are testing a lot of variables it can sometimes be hard to know what iterations (changes) to make. Sacha wanted to know when she should decide to kill an ad and how to decide which ones were worth duplicating.
This is a really great question and something many people struggle with. It is not uncommon to burn through audiences quickly and so you have to change up your ad creative frequently so that people don’t see the same advert for too long and get bored. This works, but it is time intensive. In terms of switching off an ad that is not delivering, well that makes sense but you need to split test properly to find out which audiences are responding.
Here’s my reply to Sacha and an example of how I split test. You’ll also find some other suggestions at the end.
Here is how I personally split test. Now other people have different ways and that is fine too. There are no golden rules with Facebook ads and you have to perfect a system that works for your business and your market.
START SPLIT TESTING
In this example, I am going to go on the basis that we are optimizing for clicks. My goal is to drive traffic to a website. This is when I am targeting people at the top of the funnel and want to generate awareness and demand for what I will eventually sell. In other words, I want to get my business in front of new people.
GET YOUR BUSINESS IN FRONT OF NEW PEOPLE
I first do my research in Audience Insights and choose all the interests I want to target and put them into an individual ad set. I do this rather than bundling them all together. Once I have my best performers, I can pause the ones that were unsuccessful.
I always drive traffic and awareness at the top of the funnel so I can get people to my website and make sure that I have the Facebook pixelinstalled so I can create a website custom audience. This means I will have an audience to target later when I want sign-ups and sales.
I usually spend €/$10 a day per interest for 3 days as the algorithm needs a chance to optimize the ad. I also make sure that the page I am sending them to has a strong CTA so I can at least capture a percentage of the traffic that gets to that page.
Create lookalike audiences of 1% – 5% lookalikes off customer lists for both traffic and for conversion ads. It’s argued that the broader the lookalike %, the less likely they will be to take an action, but I recommend you test as 5%-10% audiences have worked for me on e-commerce ads before. I do tend to layer them with interest targeting too, but again you have to test.
With bidding, I usually use automatic bidding for clicks and test Manual vs Automatic for conversion ads. If you are getting less than 10 conversions a day FB will usually stall the advert, so you do need to be getting a good number of conversions every day. I would also recommend that you test bidding options on campaigns. It all depends on what you want to do.
If an ad dies and stops delivering, I duplicate the ad set and make an iteration. I look at the report for the dying ad and try to see where things changed and try to ascertain if I can breathe new life into the ad for this audience. Sometimes it’s just a misfire as I call it. We generally assume that because someone has a certain interest they will like our advert – not always the case.
EXAMPLE SPLIT TEST
Audiences : Test all audiences with same copy and visual
Visuals: Test winning audiences with different visuals
Copy: Take winning audience/s and visual and test copy
= WINNING ad. I give FB 2 – 3 days to settle – can be a pain and you need to alway be moving. Never set it and forget it as I am sure you know anyway.
ecently I started using Ad Espresso for all my split testing and recommend it to all my clients. It does all the heavy lifting for you and if you. Check it out here.
Q2 WHY ARE MY ADS WITH TEXT REFUSED BY FACEBOOK?
Great question from Eileen Comerford. Eileen runs a leisure centre in the sunny south east of Ireland. You can connect with Eileen here.
Eileen has noticed that many people run Facebook ads with a lot of text. They show up in her newsfeed all the time.
This is not uncommon, you will find that other brands get away with it. To be honest it’s by luck but usually, Facebook catches up and disables these ads. It is against Facebook TOS to use more than 20% text in your ads. However, Facebook is currently running a test on the 20% test rule. It was brought in originally to make sure that users would have a good experience when they saw and ad and so that businesses would not go to town on text in visuals.
I’ve seen some pretty spammy looking Facebook ads with text that have slipped through the net. This was my impression as a user.
Here’s a really great overview from Jon Loomer Digital of the test and what it means for businesses.
My take on this topic is that certain visuals should be left to do the talking, but that is my opinion. I find that having text in my own ads helps people to see what blog posts are about. It’s all in the testing as you’ll have seen above.
If you really want to get a lot if text in your ads, you could create an ad in Power Editor and this gives you the option to include more ad text in the top part of the ad. This is a full overview from Facebook about the 20% text rule.
Q3 HOW CAN I PROMOTE MY FINANCIAL SERVICES BUSINESS WITH ALL THE COMPLIANCE WE HAVE TO ADHERE TO?
This question came in from Margaret Conmy in Ireland. Margaret is a Financial Advisor and she wants to start using Facebook ads to promote her business. The financial services sectors differ from country to country. The first thing I would do is get very clear on what you are and are not allowed to do on social media.
I am no expert in this field, but it would be great if you could leverage all of the possibilities on Facebook. Firstly there are industry regulations to remember and then there are Facebook’s own TOS. Read them fully so you know what you can and cannot do.
Once you have a clear indication of what you can do, here’s an example of a strategy that a financial advisor could try.
Selling financial products is a HIGH trust game. Like other ways of generating leads for your business, you need to gain the trust of potential customers. I would first make a list of the specific products you want to promote. Perhaps break them down into seasonality. Try not to focus on too much at one time.
Once you have chosen your topic and let’s say for this example it is life assurance, you need to define your audience. Write out what that person looks like, give them a name and imagine what their life actually looks like. Try and get as clear in your head as possible what they look like. Now, you may have a few profiles and that is ok.
Next step is to brain-storm all the questions you get asked daily by your clients. Put those questions in their language. The first thing you can start to do is turn these questions into blog posts, tips and video content.
For the purposes of generating leads, I would create a simple FREE guide or download that people can access. For example:
TOP 10 QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR FINANCIAL ADVISOR BEFORE YOU APPLY FOR LIFE ASSURANCE
I would turn this into a 2-page download. Use the download in your Facebook ad and ask people to subscribe to get it. Now you have their email and an opportunity to gain their trust. Don’t make the mistake of going straight in for the sale, I would make sure that you have a solid email drip campaign ready to go and use a service like MailChimp to do this.
You can follow-up on leads with Facebook ads by creating what is called a custom audience. This means that you upload your email list to Facebook and you can then target people who already know you. If you do this right, you can scale the leads you get every week and grow your business effectively on Facebook.
