Facebook advertisements is my specialty, but getting to the point where I could regularly get a huge return-on-investment off of Facebook advertisements took a little while.
You see, it’s not as easy as pressing “go.” It’s not as easy as learning about Business Manager. It’s a tough process that requires lots of testing & great analytical skills.
It all comes down to strategy. Let’s face it, you don’t really have a clue what you’re doing, and if you did you wouldn’t be reading this.
In today’s post, we are going to cover one strategy I use to find a “winning” Facebook advertisement. Winning means that it gets you a high return-on-investment.
If you’d like me to do this for you, click HERE to check out my online marketing services, or send me an E-mail at Michael [at] DrivingTheUniverse [dot] com.
This is complicated & not easy to understand. For more help on understanding this, contact me.
First, Give Up Everything
First things first. You have no clue what content will exactly please your customers. Furthermore, you can’t even be certain on the exact demographics and psychographics.
Psychographics refer to the psychological traits of a buyer. An example of a demographic is “males 18-25,” and an example of a psychographic is “people interested in cars & motorcycles.”
Preconceived notions are what fails people in digital marketing. Before continuing, give up all preconceived notions about your customer demographics & psychographics.
At the end of the day, data speaks volume, and you might be surprised what you discover.
The Testing Phase
By giving up what you think might work, you can begin testing to see what might actually work. The results might surprise you.
You can test for as little as $10 USD per day, but obviously the higher the budget, the better. For most businesses I would recommend minimum $30 USD per day, upwards of $250 USD per day for testing.
No matter your budget, you can do what I will teach you in this article. It will just take longer to figure out what will work.
Campaigns, Audiences, & Advertisements
In Facebook advertisements, audiences refer to the demograhpic & psychographic information of people that you are targeting. It also has other information such as budget.
The advertisement itself is what people see, such as the Facebook post with image.
In order to profit with Facebook advertisements, you need to properly test audiences & advertisements to find out what the best match is for your product or service.
The campaign itself is what holds all of the audiences & advertisements together. You can have multiple audiences inside of a campaign, and multiple advertisements inside of an audience.
It is recommended to keep your campaign focused on one product or thing. Audiences is who you want to target under that campaign, and the advertisements are what the Facebook users see.
Are you ready to learn how to set up your Facebook advertising campaign for optimal testing? Here’s how:
Setting Up Your Facebook Advertising Tests
The purpose of this test is not to make a profit or even many sales, however that may come as a result. The purpose of this is to figure out what people engage with, so you know who you should target to sell to later.
This is extremely important. Too many people jump into Facebook advertisements trying to sell, but they don’t sell anything because they are advertising the wrong products/services to the wrong people.
I said earlier to give up all pre-conceived notions about your audiences, products, and advertisements. You need to test from scratch, unless you have proven data to work with.
uld regularly get a huge return-on-investment off of Facebook advertisements took a little while.
Step 1: The Campaign
First, you will have to create a new campaign in “ads manager.” There are multiple types of campaigns you can choose from, but for this test we will be selecting “pay per engagement” for your Facebook posts.
This objective is the cheapest for testing, and you can sometimes make sales also! I have one friend that makes videos & posts so engaging that it’s cheaper to sell with “pay per engagement” than it is to sell with “link clicks” or “website conversions.”
The reason we are choosing pay per engagement is because it is cheaper, and the audiences & advertisements that have the lowest cost per engagement will give you information for what is the best Facebook advertisement & audience combination.
Once you have named your campaign and chosen “pay per engagement” for the post, you are ready to move onto step 2!
Step 2: The Audiences
Under your single campaign, you will want to create several different audiences. This is key. You do not want to advertise to just one audience, but many.
Remember, we are testing to figure out which demographic & psychographic is most likely to engage with your products & content, so you know who it would be cheapest to sell to.
You should test 5-25 different audiences, depending on what your product/service is.
Let’s use the example of selling yoga pants. For the first audience, I would target “females 18-25 interested in yoga.” For the second audience, I might target “females 18-25 interested in meditation.” For the third audience, I might target “females 18-25 interested in both meditation & yoga.”
You could also target females 35-45 interested in running, interested in working out, interested in both running & yoga, so on and so forth.
The key here is to figure out what exact interest your buyers have. Even though you’re selling yoga pants, the females interested in meditation & running might be more interested in purchasing in your yoga pants instead of women interested in yoga.
You do not know which audience will be most likely to engage with your content. Common sense is not so common. You might think that the females interested in yoga would want to buy the yoga pants, but that might not be the case.
The key here is to target several different types of audiences- anyone you think might possibly be interested in your product or service.
Also, be careful to know exactly what you’re targeting. I’m writing this assuming you already know the basics of Facebook ads, but here’s a refresher for you:
You can target people interested in “meditation or running,” which means that people only interested in meditation and people only interested in running will see your advertisements. For combinations, make sure to select people interested in “running and meditation” for this example.
The total budget for every single audience should be minimum $5-$10+ total. If you’re a larger company, I would recommend a larger total budget because it makes the data that much more accurate (so $15-$25 per audience total).
The daily budget can be as low as what it takes to achieve this goal. Ideally you have the budget to spend $100 per day on 10 audiences, so that the testing phase can be done in a single day.
If not, then reduce your daily budget to something you can afford, but make sure to still test as many audiences as possible.
Again, the key here is that we are testing as many demograhpics & psychographics as possible. Marketing is not intuitive or common sense. At the end of the day, the data tells the true story. Figure out which audience is the cheapest.
Step 3: The Advertisements
Once you have your campaign, and all of your audiences setup, you’re ready to create advertisements under every single audience (assuming the ads apply to the audience).
I’ve found that image & text is what performs best with pay per engagement, so you should do that.
The key with the advertisements are to test several different images with several different “copy.” Copy is the text written on an advertisement.
You should write a few different variations of copy, and have several different images. Let’s say you’re selling yoga pants. You will want to test every single different photo you have for the yoga pants, and then test each photo with each variation of the text.
Yes, this ends up to be quite a few different advertisements. At the end of everything, you should have hundreds of advertisements in your campaign!
For example, for audience 1 you will test image 1 with copy 1, image 1 with copy 2, image 2 with copy 1, and image 2 with copy 2. The same will continue for audience 2, 3, 4, so on and so forth.
This strategy allows you to rapidly test several different images with several different text variations across several demographics & psychographics all at once.
Do you understand what I’m getting at here? If not, contact me at Michael [at] DrivingTheUniverse [dot] com.
Step 4: Run The Advertisements!
Once you have your campaign, all of your audiences, and all of your advertisements, you’re ready to “press go!”
Sit back, grab a coffee, and wait for the data to pour in. Once your audiences have all spent at least $10-$25, you are ready to begin to analyze this data.
If you’ve done this right, you will probably have hundreds of advertisements under your single campaign. You will have one campaign, 3-10+ audiences, and 5-10+ advertisements under every single audience.
This is going to give you a ton of data. We will be able to use the information to figure out what is the best audience that you should target to make sales, and what type of images/text this audience wants to see.
Step 5: Analyzing The Data
Once this complete, you are ready to analyze the data! Be very careful here as to not draw incomplete conclusions by misinterpreting data.
Assuming you’re in the USA or Canada, we are shooting for a 10 cents cost per engagement.
Click on the campaign, and then click on the first audience. Take note of which images, which text, and which image/text combinations were the most expensive, and which were the cheapest.
Do this for every single audience, and then look at all of the audiences to figure out which audience was the cheapest.
You may find that certain image/text combinations performed better under certain audiences than others.
For example, image A with text B might do best under Audience 1, whereas image C with text F did best under Audience 2.
This is great information. By analyzing this data, you can figure out what people like to see in each of these psychograhpics. This allows you to create more engaging advertisements, so that when you are selling the cost to make a sale is much cheaper!
You will also figure out what people don’t like. Anything greater than a 10 cents cost per engagement is unlikely to be affordable to make money off of until you have a better sales funnel (but that’s a story for another day…).
Step 6: Create Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve analyzed the data, you will know which audiences, images, and text perform best. You will know exactly who you should target your product/services too, and what type of images & text they want to see in their timeline.
Now is the time to make a marketing strategy and actually use this data.
Knowing now what type of content your target audience wants to see, it will be much easier to curate proper content for them. I recommend continuously testing while making sales as well!
By targeting the right audience & giving them the right content, your cost per sale will drop drastically. Facebook advertisement will magically become affordable as you scoop up a huge return-on-investment.
Facebook Ads, The Easy Way
If you need help understanding this, or would prefer to have an expert do it for you, you can!
Sometimes it is wisest to sit back, relax, and let the expert handle it for you, while you focus on increasing the value of the product or service. Hiring an online marketer like myself allows you to increase your profit so you don’t waste time learning something when you could be improving your products/services.
Send me an E-mail at Michael [at] DrivingTheUniverse [dot] com, and let’s see what I can do for you!
I hope you found this article useful. Have a great day.
-Michael
