There are many philosophies about how to structure your Facebook ads for success. And while there are multiple roads to success, the one that we stand by is to take a full marketing funnel approach.
As a quick reminder the marketing funnel is a concept that explains how people go from having never heard of your product or service to completing your marketing team's final goal. The final goal might be that they actually purchase something and make a sale or that they are vetted as a qualified lead to pass onto your sales department.
Basically the marketing funnel describes the steps and process of getting leads and driving sales for your business.
The marketing funnel is usually broken up into 3 main steps.
1) Awareness - this is where people have never heard of you, your product or in some cases even the problem at hand. During this stage of the funnel your job is to get your audience's attention and build initial curiosity as well as explain that you could solve their problem.
2) Consideration - This is where people are aware that they have a problem or desire they want to solve and they begin looking for products or services that address this. At this stage you’ll want to differentiate yourself from your competitors and lead with your best qualities.
3) Conversion - This is where people buy ,sign up, or otherwise take the action you want them to take. At this point they’re making their choice and you’re hoping they choose you. In this stage you’ll want to go for the sale or conversion. As an example, it is at this stage that you may want to offer bonuses or discounts to get your potential customers across the finish line.
With this in mind we’re going to share the 4 steps you need to take to structure your Facebook Ads for success.
STEP ONE: CAMPAIGNS & Objectives setup
Your first step is to map out your campaigns and objectives on Facebook. We recommend having a separate campaign at each major stage of the funnel. The bare minimum would be to have two campaigns.
A standard campaign setup might look like the following
AWARENESS CAMPAIGN - Objective : Reach, Traffic or Engagement
CONSIDERATION CAMPAIGN - Objective Traffic or Engagement
CONVERSION CAMPAIGN - Objective: Conversions or Lead Generation
A Condensed version we sometimes use would look like:
AWARENESS + CONSIDERATION CAMPAIGN - Objective: Reach, Traffic or Engagement
CONVERSION CAMPAIGN - Objective: Conversion or Lead Generation
Depending on what your end goal is, your objectives can be flexible. Looking for leads for your sales team will have a different desired end goal than if your product or service is something people can buy from your website directly.
STEP TWO: SELECTING AUDIENCES
Once you’ve planned out your campaigns and objectives the next most important distinction to make is WHO is going to be best served by ads from each step.
In general you want to move from broad targeting in the first stage to more and more detailed data driven forms of targeting as people move down your funnel.
As an example targeting for the above 3 Campaigns might look like this:
AWARENESS CAMPAIGN: Interests, demographic and behavioral targeting
CONSIDERATION CAMPAIGN: All of the above + Look-alike-Audience targeting from past conversion data, site engagement data or page engagement data
CONVERSION CAMPAIGN: Remarketing, Ad Engagement & Site engagement
This will make your campaigns more effective especially when done in conjunction with Step Three…
STEP THREE: SPEAKING TO YOUR AUDIENCES
The next step is in planning what you will talk to your potential customers about at each step of the funnel. The key at this step is to recognize that at different stages in the buyer's journey people are seeking different answers.
Once someone is aware of your product and what it does (awareness), it’s time to tell them about it’s features and benefits. This is more important to them than a discount at this stage as they may not yet be ready to convert.
STEP FOUR : SETTING UP TRACKING AND EVENTS
The final part of the Facebook Ads plan is to ensure that at every step of the funnel you can answer the question: Are people doing what I want them to be doing?
Every step of the funnel can be broken down as having its own conversion event, and at this point we make sure that every conversion event is being tracked. This often means setting up a Facebook Pixel on your website and any other web based properties you are sending your traffic to, so that you can collect data.
As a final example here is what the conversion points specific to the point in the funnel would look like:
AWARENESS CAMPAIGN - Conversion Metric = Ad views + Ad clicks + Ad Video views
- These are all already tracked by Facebook so no further action is needed.
CONSIDERATION CAMPAIGN - Conversion Metric = Traffic to landing page + Time on page
- These can be tracked partially by Facebook, partially by a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics
- At this stage we also need to ensure we have a pixel to allow for retargeting
CONVERSION CAMPAIGN - Conversion Metric = Purchases
- This will need to be set up within Facebook using it’s event manager or an existing API between your conversion platform (in the case of ecommerce) so that Facebook is aware of when and who converted.
With all of the above setup your Facebook ads are primed for success. There is still a lot deeper that we could go into the planning and preparation of a Facebook Ads Campaign but this is the high level point from where we start.
Was that a lot to take in all at once? Don’t worry it gets easier as you spend more time with the platform and its nuances. And if it still seems too daunting, you can always reach out to us here at TechWyse.
Our team specializes in helping small businesses achieve their goals with paid media, and we’re always just a call or email away!
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