So you have some awesome site or product that needs to drive traffic to it quickly?
A lot of people immediately start looking into search engine optimization, trying to get free traffic from Google by ranking well in the search engine.
Now this is certainly a great idea. Free traffic is always the best or as I like to put it when visiting friends – “free dinner and no dish washing duty”.
Only the problem with search engine optimization is twofold:
- It’s become considerably harder to optimize your site in Google’s eyes over the last couple of years as Google are hitting what it believes to be sites that are “too optimized”
- Search engine optimization is a LONG TERM STRATEGY. You won’t rank in the top 10 easily (unless you have some silly super long keyword with no competition – or searches)
So what can you do if you want to drive traffic to your site quickly? Well, there is no way around paid traffic.
If you’re just starting out with paid traffic you are most likely wasting your money.
So what do I mean by this?
Most people I’ve seen starting out with paid advertising like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads end up spending a lot of money and then quitting after a while because they spend a lot of money but don’t really see any results.
I know – I was one of them 
Over the last couple of years I’ve wasted thousands of dollars for not simply paid advertising, but as well for people who helped me in my endeavors to lose money.
Back in the early days when Google AdWords totally disrupted how we could do online paid advertising with its “cost per click” (CPC), everything must have been easier.
Because of the low number of businesses using the platform, it was easier to find a low CPC for your adverts.
But if we fast forward to today, EVERYBODY is doing paid advertising – not only with Google AdWords.
Now I’m not saying that you can make money using Google AdWords. I know several who have very lucrative businesses leveraging Google AdWords.
Merely what I am stating is that the game has been much worse and the days where you could set up a simple campaign with a few advertisements and pull in money, are long gone.
My shift from Google AdWords to Facebook Ads
In this situation I won’t prove you the basics on how to begin with and set up your first Facebook Ad. You can probably quickly Google a couple of thousand guides on this. Instead, I want to take it a bit deeper and show you some of the more advanced strategies that I’m using in my business.
Whoa… Weren’t we just talking about Google AdWords?
Yep, so let me tell you a little about why I ditched Google AdWords.
I was managing a campaign for one of my jobs that supply professional
SAP Project Management Training. The idea was to get leads from Google AdWords and then sell them in our program.
Initially I had gotten some help from a Danish freelancer who had done the initial keyword analysis and setup the first campaign. We spend $200 on ads but did not see that much results. Of course, as we pay per click, you might think that our page wasn’t converting as well as it should.
You are of course powerful, however clicks in the SAP industry are expensive, hence we didn’t actually receive that many visitors and only a few ended up as hints.And then after being a bit put away by this, I decided to engage someone to tweak our campaigns more over time, someone who knew Google AdWords and could follow up on the progress and make small adjustments along the way.
Comfortably, he knew his stuff, but we didn’t take many clicks. In the end, I spend a lot of money on him, actually 3-4 times the amount we ended up paying Google for the ads.
So what was it that ultimately made me fire him?
In a period of a couple of weeks we’d only gotten 10 or so clicks on AdWords, but in less than a week I had gotten more than 300 leads (not clicks) through Facebook ads. And I’d done it all on my own.
So I fired his ass and concentrated my efforts on Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads Ninja Tricks…
Hence today I want to present you some tricks that I use myself and that you give the sack also. These tricks will optimize your results when using Facebook Ads.
Before you venture into these tricks, please make sure that you have:
- Great ad copy
- A fantastic and converting landing page
The tricks won’t do you much good if you can entice people to click on your ad or convince them to take whatever action it is you want them to take after they’ve clicked.
So let’s get started with the first tip…
#1 Don’t Pay for Page Likes
When you set up ad campaigns on Facebook, you can choose Page Likes as the target.
You might think that Likes on Facebook will show people how successful you are, however the use for likes these days are almost nothing.
The problem is that Facebook are not showing your Facebook posts to all the people liking your page anyway.
This implies that you will pay a great deal of money to get looks from people who won’t even view your posts.
In order to get people who like your page to actually see your posts, you have to… oh wait for it… “Promote” (that means “pay” guys) your post.
Thus or else of being focused on Likes for your page, you might as well skip this step and move right on to promoting what it really is you want to promote.
Now if you have a new page and feel that you should have some “social proof” with all the likes you got, by all means pay for some likes and make your competition frustrated with your “overnight Facebook success“
But recognize that its wasted money and you cannot use the likes of anything. I know several people who have wasted thousands of dollars on getting likes this way of Facebook and are now having pages with a lot of likes, but no interaction on their posts because no one are seeing them.
#2 Target Your Existing Newsletter Subscribers
Who will respond better to your ads and message?
Those who already know and trust you!
Do you have an existing newsletter? Chances are that those people on your list are also on Facebook (well isn’t everybody ;))
You can now import all your newsletter subscribers into Facebook as a “custom audience”.
When you are using Mailchimp then there is a super easy direct integration, if you are using another system, you need to export all your subscribers (just their email addresses) and import that into Facebook.
Only choose your text file containing one email address per line and tell Facebook that its emails and take hold of a cup of java.
.It’s super easy and you will get a much better click through rate (CTR) from people who already have shown interest in your company/product/message.
#3 Easily Quadruple Your New Audience
“But Rasmus, my list is only like a hundred people or so…”
There’s a solution to that too…
Facebook supports what is know as “Lookalike Audiences”.
You feed it an existing custom audience, like the one you just created from your email subscriber list, and tells Facebook to get people who lookalike the ones from your list.
The further you drag the slider, the more people you will include in the new lookalike audience (and the less they will have in common with the people in the original audience).
This feature is super powerful and can actually possess an impingement on your reach while keeping the cost per click or conversion down.
#4 Retargeting what?
The current buzzword in the SEM industry (that’s “search engine marketing”) is Retargeting.
As usual, you can get the full scoop over at Wikipedia, but the short story is that it’s a way to target people with ads based on their previous actions online.
You are probably questioning why you are getting hammered with the same advertisements over and over for a product or service you just checked out at one time, right?
That’s retargeting for you. If you looked at say a new Toyota on some dealer website, you are probably much more likely to actually buy it than someone who has never owned a car.’
And then by targeting those who have already shown interest in your product or service, you make a much higher CTR and conversion.
The good thing is that it’s super easy to use for you as well.
Again, it’s only about making a custom audience, but this time select Custom Audience from Your Website.
Enter a name and then you get a small piece of code that you need to stick on your website. Chances are that you already know how to put stuff like the Google Analytics script on your site, so this is the exact same.
If you don’t cognize how to install it, your 14 year old nephew can probably manage it in five minutes!
I usually stick on all pages on my site, but you can select to narrow it down to say only a single product page (if you deliver multiple products), to effectively target the great unwashed who’ve expressed interest in one of your products.
You can set this up in five minutes, so if you’re doing Facebook Ads already, there is really no excuse not to do it.
As you attract people to your site who also have Facebook profiles, your new custom audience will set off.
As you attract people to your site who also have Facebook profiles, your new custom audience will sett-off.
#5 Become a Professional Ad Designer Overnight
You’ve likely heard me say this before, I’m aesthetically challenged.
I know my way around tech stuff and cold, but I can’t really design anything that looks good (although I do have an opinion on what is good design and what is not).
I normally just create ads in the news stream, not in the right hand panel. The ads sitting to the right might be cheaper if you pay per click, but you also get much less interaction.
Also Facebook got all these rules about how big pictures should be so the ad will end up displaying correctly on both desktop and mobile devices.
Hence if you want to design a real kick ass ad like the one below, what exercise you answer?
While I of course got the photo of myself on my hard-drive, the above image – in the perfect Facebook ad format of 1200×627 I might ad – was created in less than 5 minutes.
The tool is gratis and online and called Canva.com
It’s a simple drag and drop designer for images that even your mother will be able to use.
.
I’ve used this tool for generating image ads for whole campaigns quickly, and if you’re not a kick ass designer, I’m sure it will be a valuable tool in your arsenal!
When doing images for ads, remember that Facebook won’t allow pictures with more than 20% text. So don’t overdo the text in your image
(
If they get rejected, just remove some text or make it smaller and resubmit the ad – no harm done).
Clients tell us that we provide a flexible, responsive, and personable experience for them. And at ProPharma Group, those clients come from all over the world.
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