5 One-Minute Strategies to Boost Your Facebook Ad Conversions And Increase Sales

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5 One-Minute Strategies to Boost Your Facebook Ad Conversions And Increase Sales

5 One-Minute Strategies to Boost Your Facebook Ad Conversions And Increase Sales

Do you advertise on Facebook? Are you looking for ways to optimise your ad campaigns and boost conversion rates? 

In this blog post, I'll show you five simple strategies that you can use to improve your Facebook ads, hopefully saving you money and increasing your returns!

1. Use Custom Audiences to re-target existing customers

With Facebook ads, sometimes the temptation can be to shoot for a brand new audience of people, but for many brands,  targeting their existing customers will provide the most fruitful returns. After all, if they've bought from you in the past, chances are higher that they will do again. In addition, you will already be familiar with the make-up of these group, so in a better position to shape your marketing message and product offering. You can do this is through custom audience targeting. Facebook will allow you to target users by email (upload or import your own list), app user IDs, or phone number - and your ads will be fed to them if they are on Facebook. 

2. Use a CTA button to drive click-through rates 

When creating your ad, Facebook will ask you if you want to add a call-to-action button to it. These buttons - including Shop Now, Sign Up, Call Now, and Download - give customers a stronger indication of what the purpose of your ad is, and a precise course of action for them to act upon what they see. Make sure that you match the correct CTA button to your campaign. Doing so will help to drive click-through and decrease bounce rates from your website.

After a one-month review of AdRoll advertisers’ running campaigns with CTA buttons, the Facebook found that those ads experienced a 2.85x higher click-through rate compared to ads that didn’t have a CTA button. They're free to use, so definitely worth considering!

3. Experiment with video ads

Currently, video ads only make up small proportion of brand marketing efforts on Facebook, but with estimates suggesting that that digital video advertising will make up 15% of the total digital advertising market by 2017, there's never been a better time to get in ahead of the curve. And according to an analysis by Kinetic Social, a Facebook marketing partner, paid video placements maintained a higher clickthrough rate (CTR) than all other types of US Facebook ads served to desktop and mobile via its platform throughout 2014. 

Why are Facebook video ads performing so well? Putting aside their relative novelty, research shows that the auto-play ads in News Feeds - even if watched only for a few seconds - helps to drive value and purchase intent.

"...data shows that people who watched under three seconds of the video ad created up to 47 percent of the total campaign value, and people who watched for fewer than 10 seconds created up to 74 percent, depending on the metric. That means that while lift continued to increase the longer people watched, people didn’t have to watch a whole video to be affected by the ad."

Facebook recommends that brands experiment with short video ads, remembering that value increases the longer people watch. I would add that it is not always necessary to focus on product; use video to educate, inspire, bolster your existing content strategy, and overall brand awareness.

4. Run ads at the optimum time of day

image via adstage

image via adstage

It might sound obvious, but if your ads mostly run at a time when your target audience isn't usually online (or at least not actively in the mood to purchase), then you're pretty much throwing money down the train. Use the knowledge of your audience to decide when they will be most active, and willing to buy!  If you've set a lifetime budget for your ad, you can schedule specific times of the day or days of the week to run your ad by going to Ad Scheduling, clicking More Options and then selecting Run ads on a schedule. (you may need to click Show Advanced Options first.

5. Make your ad offering simple and specific

No one really wants to see ads in their News Feeds, but if yours are to be engaging and successful, they need to influence users after just a glance; keep headline, link, and main copy jargon-free. It helps to narrow the focus of your ad campaign to one specific offering. In addition, where your ad takes viewers once clicked, should be right where the customer expects. For example, if your ad promotes a 50% discount on one of your products, the landing page should be the product page for said item, not your website's home page. 

Over to you

Have these strategies given you some ideas about how to optimise your Facebook ad strategy? Do you already use them, or do you have any more ideas? Let me know in the comments below!