Three Things You MUST Have To Profit With Facebook Ads
By Nathalia Copeland
If your Facebook ads aren’t working, chances are you’ve missed one of these critical steps.
There are several small factors that can tank a campaign (like the time of day you start the campaign, audience size, audience overlap between campaigns, etc.) – but these are the three most important things you MUST HAVE to run successful Facebook ad campaigns.
If you are a Coach, Course Creator or you sell 1-1 services online (copywriters, web designers, social media managers, etc.), this is your fast path to evergreen success.
1. The Facebook Pixel
In less than two minutes, you can copy + paste a small snippet of code that will change your entire strategy behind Facebook ads.
It allows you to do the basics:
• Track visitors for up to 180 days
• Retarget visitors to your site with ads on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger
• Bring visitors to your site to perform a specific action (ie – opt-in, buy something, view your content, etc.)
Here’s where most people mess up. They install the pixel and then completely forget about it. They open ads manager and start targeting interests like Amy Porterfield, Marie Forleo and Tony Robbins, sound familiar?
They completely overlook the fact that the Facebook pixel allows you to target your ideal client in amazing ways, such as:
• Lookalikes: Find people similar to those who visit your high value pages (ie – sales pages, checkout pages, thank you pages)
• Retarget: Target people who visited your website 2 or more times (frequent visitors are more engaged and likely to buy)
• Exclusions: Create audiences to exclude people who landed on your thank you pages so you don’t waste money showing ads to them again
This is your first stop when brainstorming target audiences for Facebook ads. And it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with Facebook targeting.
Note: You must have at least 100 people from one country to create a lookalike audience (I recommend between 200 – 5000 of your best customers). The more data you feed Facebook, the easier it is to get amazing results.
You cannot succeed with Facebook ads without knowing how to use the pixel properly, it’s the #1 thing you should focus on when getting started with ads. If you’ve been struggling with figuring out the Facebook pixel and targeting, I have a step-by-step training on how to use the Facebook pixel properly to cut your ad costs in half, Click here or the button below to get Pixel Lab.
2. Your M.V.F. (Minimum Viable Funnel)
This is actually a lot easier than it sounds and you may already have most of it in place.
A minimum viable funnel is the bare bones of what you need to get clients into your business daily and could be powered by paid or free traffic sources and look like this:
Traffic Source >> Opt-in Landing Page >> Thank You Page >> Email Series
An ad powered M.V.F. (minimum viable funnel) is slightly different.
A funnel that is powered by paid traffic is scaleable. It can grow. You are not the bottleneck of its success. You don’t have pin, tweet, post or vlog every day or every week to make it work.
For this work, you also have to know your numbers. For example, if 100 brand new people visit your landing page through an ad, there should be a specific call to action on that page. If the audience is cold (aka – people who have no idea who you are) aim for at least 20 people out of 100 to sign up for your free PDF, checklist, webinar, etc.
If you are below the 20% conversion rate, you’re either targeting the wrong people or your lead magnet is not powerful enough to resonate with your target audience.
[PRO TIP] when people click on your ad, do they actually wait for your landing page to load? If your landing page loads too slowly, this will kill your ad campaign faster than anything else. A quick fix is compressing images with tinypng.com)
An M.V.F. powered by ads also has a nurture sequence that moves people into a next logical step. This is usually done through a 5-part email series that builds the know-like-trust factor and introduces new people into your brand.
The “next step” should be a soft call to action.
For example:
• Book a discovery call
• Buy a low-priced offer ($7-$97)
• Sign up for a free webinar
• Join a free Facebook group
This “soft” call to action will eventually lead to your core offer, the main thing you are trying to sell. This entire buyer journey can take place in less than 48 hours and should be tested on organic traffic first before testing it with ads.
Organic, or “free”, traffic could mean traffic from sources like:
• Youtube
• Guest Blogging
• Podcast
Most people with failing ad campaigns do not have a working funnel that converts with free traffic. Instead of fixing that funnel, they decide to put more people into a broken funnel with paid traffic and then wonder why it’s not working.
Be 100% honest with yourself and know your numbers before considering Facebook ads. Do you really need more traffic or do you need a working funnel? Do you have an offer people actually want to buy? Is your lead magnet prequalifying the right clients for your core offer?
Sometimes the answer is not more traffic but instead, revisiting the offer and the customer journey inside your business.
3. A Budget for Buying Data
Everyone knows you need money to run Facebook ads but what most gurus won’t tell you is that you actually need to set aside money to buy actionable data. Consider it a research + development cost for your business growth.
If you run Facebook ads and you don’t immediately turn a profit, you still have a very valuable asset, the data you got from testing a particular audience or creative or campaign strategy.
That actionable data allows you to:
1. Know what works (and what doesn’t)
2. Create better audiences based off new visitors (which you captured with your pixel)
3. Refine your message to your audience
You can start with $5/day but it may take several tries to find one winning campaign and you’ll likely lose patience and join the ranks of people who spend $20 on Facebook and complain: “this doesn’t work”. I’m the creator of The F.A.S.T.™ Method so I don’t recommend this route.
Realistically, you need at least $10-$15/day for at least 3 days to test 1-2 target audiences for list building. Having a skilled consultant with experience in your specific niche can speed up this process because they can fast track you into the best audiences and creative strategies that work for your offer. This cuts down on random testing and hours wasted trying to figure it out alone.
Next step, you’ll need to decode the matrix-looking numbers on the ads dashboard. If you can’t understand the data, you’ll be looking at the ads manager dashboard like this:
You can’t make improvements and find your winners without knowing your numbers. Even if you’re not data-driven, you’ll quickly find that these numbers are the magic levers that allow you to profit with ads. In marketing lingo, this is known as your K.P.I.’s (Key Performing Metrics). These are things like:
• Cost per result
• Impressions
• Unique Link Clicks
• Cost per Unique Link Click
• Unique Click Through Rate
• Frequency
• Unique Landing Page Views
• Relevancy Score
• Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
By looking at 4-5 of the above metrics on ANY ad account, I can diagnose with 98% accuracy what’s wrong with any campaign and what needs to be fixed to make it work. Here are a few pointers to help you troubleshoot your campaigns.
How To Troubleshoot Campaigns
CLICK THROUGH RATE: This represents if people are clicking on your ad. As a rule of thumb, it should be above 1%. If people click on the ad but don’t sign up for your lead magnet, it means there’s a problem with the landing page (usually the ad copy or the lead magnet offer is not compelling enough for them to take action) or the ad copy itself was misleading.
RELEVANCY SCORE: Facebook will give your ads a score from 1-10 and you want this to be a 6 or higher. Anything less than that and you’re probably paying more than you should. This also means the creative or ad copy is not resonating with the target audience you’ve chosen.
FREQUENCY: No one likes to see the same ad over and over again for all eternity. People will start marking it as spam and that raises your costs and counts against your account history. As a rule of thumb, I like to keep this below a 4 for cold audiences.
These are just a few of the K.P.I. metrics I would look at initially to troubleshoot poor performing campaigns.
NEXT STEPS
If you’re looking for a seasoned professional to review your ad campaigns, your sales funnel and help clarify your paid traffic strategy – book a power hour session with me here and I’ll walk you through it step-by-step so you don’t have to fall down the rabbit hole of another Youtube video that leaves you more confused than when you started.
Comment below and let me know: do you have one or all of these things in place and if so, are you still struggling to make your Facebook ads work?