Having been a marketer since Facebook introduced ads way back in 2007, and with approximately 10 years of experience as a social media manager running ads on Facebook, I have been very enthusiastic about the results that the platform provides from a targeting perspective as well as a cost-efficiency standpoint.
Over the years, competition has increased, which brings up the cost of results. Based on our own data, we have seen cost per click (CPC) increase an average of 37% since 2016. As costs rise, smart marketers should be looking for different ways to control costs, while also maintaining the quality of incoming web traffic.
In our search for new tactics, we discovered Facebook Conversion Ads, and I have to say, they have helped us increase the amount of traffic to our sites, decrease CPCs, and increase the quality of traffic that visits. It is almost too good to be true!
Before we get too deep into the conversation, it is important for you to know exactly what a Facebook Conversion Campaign is. Essentially, a Facebook Conversion Campaign optimizes ad delivery to people who are more likely to take a specific conversion action on your site. The key word here is people.
The typical Facebook Ad Campaign encourages people to click a link, but not do much else. Smart marketers want people to click links AND act on the website. Facebook lovingly calls users who click links without any meaningful action “Clicky Users." These types of users tend to click links either on purpose or by accident and bounce from websites quickly.
Your visit metrics might look good, but these users are 5.5 times more expensive than users who are less “clicky." Furthermore, simple website clicks have less than a 1% correlation to business-relevant metrics such as Ad Recall, Brand Awareness, and Purchase Intent.
Facebook Conversion Campaigns move from focusing on the click to focusing on the person and what his/her intent might be with your brand. By focusing on users and not clicks, you can avoid having poor data (based on cookies) lead you astray. A few interesting data points:
When you focus on people-based measurement with Facebook Conversion Ads, you can focus on real outcomes and more accurately measure what matters most for your business instead of relying on click data.
I would be remiss if I didn’t address the main thing that kept us hesitant in testing these campaigns. When you think of “conversion,” you typically think of the intended result of the ad (i.e., a sale, form completion, or newsletter signup). Since we know that most people don’t click ads and immediately convert, it would be a waste of time to focus on that action alone.
With Facebook Conversion Campaigns, you can set any action on your website as a “conversion,” thus giving you many options for which you could optimize. If you are going to test these campaigns, think outside the box in terms of what you want people to do and where your campaign fits into the buyer’s journey.
Setting up a Facebook Conversion Ad Campaign is very simple and only requires a few steps:
1. Make sure the Facebook Pixel is installed on your website.
2. Define the Custom Conversions that you want to track on your website.
3. Set up a new campaign with the Conversions Objective.
4. On the ad set level, select the appropriate Custom Conversion that you want to go after.
5. Launch your campaign!
We have been running Facebook Conversion Campaigns for a while and have seen some incredible results. The below are average increases across different campaigns. This data is a mix collected by Facebook Ad Manager and Google Analytics:
The results speak for themselves. We urge you to move away from “clicky” campaigns and move toward “sticky” campaigns in which users spend more meaningful time with your website.
Facebook Conversion Ads are just one step in the journey to getting true ROI from social media. If you are a social media manager having a hard time determining social media ROI, check out our nifty new calculator!