After my Digital Marketing Ask Me Anything worked so well I thought I would do another one about a subject that came up quite often, Facebook Advertising.
As a quick intro to my Facebook Ad knowledge is I am a Strategy Director for a Lead Generation Agency in the UK operating across various sectors, but typically Solar Energy, Renewable Energy, Legal, Real Estate, Financial, Education, Home Improvements and the odd one or two Retail clients. Me and my team have managed a spend in excess of £1.6m on Facebook in the past 12 months (With screenshot below to show).
Facebook has become a lot more competitive in the past 12 months with costs increasing across the board so I realise it could be even more daunting getting started in Facebook or simply working out what to do next. Facebook is by far one of the most effective advertising platforms there is with a bulk of our spend for the next 12 months planned to be majority Facebook and Native rather than PPC.
A typical strategy for local businesses such as gyms is, to do “lead ads” and use tools so that the client gets immediately the contact info of a lead.
Hey alukus, I recently built a dropshipping store with a lot of practical info around the products. Would you promote the info itself or the products directly?
Since youre doing a lot of lead gen, have you seen that staying on Facebook instead of sending them to a custom landing page converts more or do you think having them sandboxed in a squeezing landing page converts more? I ask becuase I am interested in offering FBA to real estate clients I already have with ig growth but the CPA on facebook is now up near what other lead sources offer for real estate services in the US
that sounds like a perfect A/B test with the same product image and two different sets of copy. Once you know what works, you can test the approach of the copy using the same image and so forth.
Hey @RaphaelReborn we don’t actually run any campaigns for dropshipping stores, but in the past this is the strategy I’ve used.
Run a video ad optimised for ‘Post Engagements’ for a couple of days to your audience, you want your cost per post engagement to be under £0.005.
After a couple of days and ad has comments/likes create a new ad set that uses the same Post ID and run it to the same audience but this time choose ‘Conversions’ as your objective. If you’re using a fresh Facebook set your Pixel event as ‘Add To Cart’. If your pixel already has data then choose ‘Purchase’. You want your Add to Cart to be around £2.50 or below.
Once you have enough data in your Pixel build lookalikes based on Purchase data.
Hi @ian It largely depends on your requirements, but we typically find Facebooks automatic bidding is pretty good. The only time we really set manual bids is when we have quite tight margins on our generating cost compared to what we sell a lead for.
We operate on 2 different pricing models depending on the clients spend and what suits them.
Cost Per Lead Model
We charge no money for management, but we sell Qualified leads direct to the client. We agree a lead price that they will buy for and how much volume they want typically per week. For example we can generate a Solar lead for £8 and we agree to sell the lead to our client for £40 then £32 is our margin.
Spend Model (We’re moving away from this model)
We don’t charge money per lead generated but instead charge a percentage of the clients budget with a flat initial rate and a sliding scale on the percentage of spend ranging from 20% to 5% of the clients budget.
Hi @SkinnyGirl For these type of businesses I would use Engagement ads initially, especially video ads due to the (hopefully) pleasing aesthetic of A restaurants food or the tattoos that a tattoo studio does to generate that initial buzz and then run lead forms/landing page ads to an audience that has viewed a certain percentage of the video ad or engaged with it and then build out Lookalikes from there.
Hi @grown If the product is something that is well known or simple enough that people already knows what it is and what it does I would go direct to promoting the products and look for purchases. If it is a new product or a problem solving one I would 100% educate the audience on this first. Show the products worth, how does it help them? Why should they buy it?. That is what you should be asking yourself and then tell the audience!
Hi @InterNEDA the BIGGEST mistake we made initially was getting too caught up on getting the lowest cost per lead. I realise that sounds crazy considering that’s essentially how we make profit, but typically if the leads are too cheap it’s because they suck and that is what we found using Lead Forms through Facebook. People would just fill the form in with their auto populating data and they would just be really poor leads. They’re never going to convert. Instead we focus on building bespoke landing pages which educate the customer with their problems, why they need fixing and then the solution as to how the product/service we’re generating for can fix it.
I’d go down the route of having a great landing page with plenty of pictures of properties etc. People want to see beautiful houses and imagine themselves living there. Not a boring form on social media.
Hey @Koven A great starting point is Facebook Blueprint. It’s Facebooks own education platform but it is definitely where I would start. A YouTuber I’ve also found to be quite knowledgeable is Gabriel St Germain. He’s a dropshipper, but still has some good bites of info.
That’s kind of what my test told me two years ago when I did some ads for a realtor friend. Im glad to see my speculation was not far from an experts. The lead forms leads sucked for the reason that you mentioned. Some converted becuase we used them in spanish but more did not and were just put into the work pipeline for future contact but overall the ROI was not efficient as the leads were not quality. Sure they cost $0.93 but they sucked. But one did convert and it paid for the entire campaign but I think that was an outlier. Back to learning Thrive Themes I go, Thank you for the insight @alukus I appreciate your time
Hi @alukus great to see you back with another Guru-level thread, nice one
I’m preparing to branch into this direction, a lot of my clients ask for Facebook Ads management and I like the idea of adding white-hat balance to my more black-hat activities. So this thread has been bookmarked and will likely be re-read many times At this point I am still in the exploratory-learning phase so excuse any stupid questions.
I read that you prefer to use good landing pages as opposed to gathering your leads directly on Facebook. I was wondering if chatbots (manychat?) play any part in your process, either on Facebook or the Landing page?
My next question has to do with targeting smaller markets. I see you do Real Estate, that must be very targeted and with a small total market size for any given area. Don’t you run out of audience very quickly? Do you just keep coming up with new ads and run them again at the same audience? What are our options for squeezing the maximum out of the smaller markets and locally targeted products/services?
No worries @InterNEDA! Lead Forms is okay for some clients who have the time and resource to sift through 100s of bad leads to get that one that converts (Providing they’re being generated cheap enough), but for most companies it isn’t effective or they simply don’t have the resource to do it! Take a look at Instapage, we actually build the majority of our landing pages in this now as it is great for most of our needs, cheap enough and you don’t need any coding skills! It integrates into almost everything as well.
Great to hear @Koven ! Let me know how you get on.
Cheers @delagarde good to see you still around! We currently use Manychat for one of our Legal clients at the moment as part of the information we ask for is actually images of the damage the customer wants to claim for which they can easily send to us via Messenger. We’re also currently testing LandBot which is conversational landing page, ManyChat has this functionality also but I think LandBot suits us better for the page.
Our Main client in ‘Real Estate’ is actually a Home Builder rather than a company that just sells homes. You’re correct though our target audiences for these development areas usually range between 2,000 and 30,000 people in the predicted audience metric. With the homes this client selling being £400,000+ (Average in UK is £226,906 so well above average) the decision is a big one for the customer, so it doesn’t hurt to keep hitting them with ads over and over again. Especially with offers such as free flooring/carpets, Help to Buy schemes etc all as incentives for the customer that we can offer to keep things fresh. We also refresh the ads monthly so that people don’t think they’re still being shown ads for the same thing.
Our cost per lead varies so significantly depending on what market we’re generating in but ranges from £4-£30 cost to us and we sell leads to clients from between £30 and £120.
Yeah I’m still lurking on some non-botting related threads
This is very enlightening! I will have to consider which clients can really benefit from using a chatbot for specific business purposes like your example. Landbot looks like a very interesting option for gathering leads from landing pages, I guess your tests will determine if its better than a regular landing page or not but it looks really promising.
This perfectly answer my question, thanks for the insights @alukus
Definitely! There isn’t a one shoe fits all way of generating leads and anyone who says there is, honestly is a liar. Everything should be done to make it as simple for the user as possible to hand over their valuable information even if that means having leads being generated on completely different platforms for each client.
From our experience so far we’ve found the following to work best.
Solar - Facebook Ad linking to Mini website
Renewable - Facebook Ad linking to Mini website
Legal - Facebook Ad linking to Instapage
Real Estate - Mix between FB Lead Forms and Instapage
Financial - Instapage
Education - Instapage
Home Improvements - Facebook Ad linking to Mini Website
Retail & Leisure - Manychat
What are you thoughts about advertising Instagram Growth Services on FB? A lot of ad accounts have been deleted using keywords around ‘Instagram Growth.’ As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed a lot of companies are NOT advertising on FB anymore in my space. One company that was was weirdly shut down a few weeks ago.
Facebook definitely clamp down on any pages or ad accounts that are promoting these services. My own ad account has been disabled 3 times now for violating Facebooks advertising guidelines even though none of my ads or content on my page does. All 3 times I have appealed I have had the account reinstated almost immediately.
The key is being very selective with the wording you use and also what your website landing page says. When you appeal and that Facebook rep checks everything out it needs to be fully compliant. They can slow us down at the moment with the random disabling, but unless they change their guidelines and policies it will just keep getting reinstated as I’m not in breach of anything.
At this point I am still in the exploratory-learning phase so excuse any stupid questions.
