The holy grail of Facebook is to pay the least amount of money for the largest amount of traffic. Actually, when you think about it, that’s the holy grail for any type of advertising but in this article, we’re talking about Facebook.
It’s one of those things that everyone is trying to do, and yet very few people actually do so. What do you do? Well, the bottom line is this is you have to try different things, different ways in order to get there. And, if you ask 10 people how to advertise on Facebook you will get 10 different answers.
I have my methods, but I’m not stuck on them. I realize that nothing’s perfect. There can always be a better way to do it. So, I keep trying new methods consistently trying to milk the most traffic for the least money.
A while back I was getting frustrated with my Facebook advertising. I was targeting a very select group of people and my click cost was getting out of hand. I was paying $1 to $2 per click.
Let me back up a bit here. I know you’ve heard me talk about rates like that and saying it’s okay, and that’s correct if you have a high-end product, and the clicks are converting. But for what I was doing it was not okay. It was just too much money. So, I started playing around with conversion methods.
The first thing I looked at was barrier to entry. In this case I was giving a free ticket to an event so cost was not a barrier. I know you may find this hard to believe but not everyone wants to come to my events, but with a free ticket I should be getting some good conversion rates.
One thing that really bugs me about the Facebook conversion tracking mechanism is that it doesn’t always work.
You set up the conversion pixel, test it and it works just fine. Then as time goes on and you know you are getting conversion, but they don’t show up in your stats you get frustrated.
What can you do?
The answer is not much except remove the conversion pixel and set it up again, hoping it will work this time. And that’s what I did each time it stopped working. Then I had an idea. I decided to see if I could trick Facebook.
I realized that Facebook ad rates are determined by an algorithm that depends on a conversion action, so all I needed to do is get as many conversions as I could. It was easy to do. All I did was set my conversion action as a page view. In other words, whenever anyone came to my opt in page it was counted as a conversion. Normally you would set it to count every click from your ad to your page.
The problem is, Facebook doesn’t count every click.
In order to check this, I tracked every click that came to my website from this Facebook ad set. I found that 128 outbound clicks from this ad set actually came to my website, but Facebook only counted 41 of them as actual conversions visits.
I researched to see what the criteria was for Facebook to call it a conversion. They said that any click that took a person off Facebook was considered as an outbound click and thus considered a conversion. And, in my case, they had only one place to go and that was my website. I knew they all came to my website, yet Facebook only counted 41 of those 128 clicks as a conversion!
So, as I said earlier, I changed it so that anyone who just came from Facebook to my page was counted as a conversion. Did this work? You bet it did.
I now easily meet the minimum daily conversions Facebook needed in order to lower my cost per click—instead of paying
$1 to $2 per click, I got it down to nine cents per click. I set up multiple campaigns like this and was enjoying the low click cost.
This was good. I was getting them to my website (opt in page) for as low as nine cents, but I wasn’t tracking to see how many opted in once they hit my page. I let it run for a day just to let things settle out. To be honest, you should really let it run for more than a day in order to settle down after you make changes.
Remember all these are counting as conversions if they just arrive at my website…this is great in relation to the rates Facebook charges but to be valuable, to me, I need to track the actual opt ins (which is a real conversion).
So now I changed it to track actual opt ins before they could be considered a conversion. What happened? I discovered I was getting opt in conversion for about $1.57 for each confirmed person who actually opted in to attend the seminar.
I am happy with this. You need to realize this was for a person opting in to attend a seminar, not just to get a free report or something similar. If it were for a free report, or something like that, I would like the “opt in” cost to be a lot cheaper. With seminars, you can expect to pay $5 to $10 per confirmed person, so you can see why I’m very happy with this $1.57.
That’s all well and good, but why am I telling this to you? What’s the point of the story? It’s not to teach you how to advertise on Facebook. It’s to point out that you need to be open and try different things. You can’t just advertise the way Facebook or Google tell you to. You can’t just advertise the way someone else tells you is correct. You start with what they say but you then need to become active and try other possibilities.
You can’t just put up a campaign and let it run. You need to take charge and massage it to get the best performance possible.
I understand that we all need to work within our budget. We need to continue what we are doing but always try some new steps and see how they work. If the new thing doesn’t work, stop it and try another, etc.—always running you regular campaigns in the background. When you test something new you should let it run three or four days in order to get a realistic test.
