How to Optimize Your Facebook Ads to Increase Conversions

Advertising on Facebook Ads is a whole different beast, compared to Google Ads. In this post, we’ve put together some of our best tips for increasing conversions on Facebook Ads. While increasing the budget is a more obvious tactic, we’re going to cover some more technical ways to make your current budget go farther. The ultimate goal is always to increase ROI, so the burning question is: how do I keep my same budget, but increase my conversions on Facebook Ads? Let me tell you!

High-Quality Creative

High-quality imagery is the key to success on Facebook Ads. You might be asking, what constitutes “high-quality”? It means professional photography that is relevant to your business, and in-line with your company’s branding. 

The quality of your creative is so important because, unlike Google Ads, Facebook serves ads to people that have not demanded or requested any information about your business.

Facebook serves ads to people within their news feed (for example) because based on the data Facebook has on a user, they deem the person relevant for your ad content. Because the person on the receiving end didn’t actively ask for any information about your business, products, or services, you must entice the user to engage with your ad. Now, how do you do that? High-quality creative. 

Different types of creative

It’s important to have a variation of creative types within your Facebook Ads account. This gives Facebook’s pixel more to work with and creates more engagement with users. 

If a single user sees a Facebook ad for your business multiple times, you want them to see multiple variations of your ad creative, rather than just the same single image ad over and over again. This will ensure the ad doesn’t lose its value and become stale. Some different types of ad creative formats to consider adding to your Facebook Ad campaigns include:

• Static images
• Video
• Carousel
• Static Image to Video Ads

Audience Targeting

Once you have the high-quality creative assets in place, the next step to increasing your conversions on Facebook is ensuring you serve your ads to the right audience. 

Because you serve your ads to an audience that hasn’t demanded any information, it’s important that you serve ads to the most relevant audience. Without this piece, your campaigns will not see very many conversions.

The Facebook Ads interface has layers and layers of targeting options that are much more sophisticated than the options on Google Ads. With Facebook Ads, you can target by:

• Core Audiences
• Custom Audiences
• Lookalike Audiences. 

Let’s talk through an overview of each of these.

Core Audiences

Define an audience based on a specific set of criteria:

• Location
• Age
• Demographic
• Behavior
• Interests
• Connections

Custom Audiences

Facebook’s version of retargeting. This allows you to re-engage with people that are already familiar with your business in multiple ways:

• Contact lists
• Site visitors
• App users

Lookalike Audiences

Reach new people that are similar to people that have previously completed a conversion. This is one of Facebook’s most valuable and successful audience types! In order to enable this type of audience targeting, you need a customer list! 

Landing Pages

The final piece to optimizing your Facebook Ad campaigns for conversions is ensuring the landing pages you send ad traffic are effective. No matter how well a campaign is built, it will not yield a high volume of quality conversions if the landing pages don’t encourage conversions and help push the user further down the funnel. 

Here are a few tried and true tips for building effective Facebook Ad landing pages:

1. Ensure the branding on the page is consistent with the branding of your ad creative.
2. Ensure the messaging on the page is consistent with the messaging in your ads.
   1. Messaging should be minimal, but enough to answer any potential pain points or hesitations the user may have that would stop them from converting
3. Only offer one conversion point (phone call, email, form fill, etc). This gives the user one, and only one, decision to make. If there are multiple ways to convert, they’re less likely to convert at all.
4. Do not offer links back to the website. This gives the users an “out” or another options besides converting. Encouraging the user to convert means giving them one, simple action to complete (and no other options or actions to distract them). 

How Do I Get Started?

Feeling like you want some expert help with your Facebook Ad campaigns? Or feeling like you still aren’t getting the conversion volume you’re looking for from Facebook Ads? Give us a shout! We’d be happy to take a look at what you have, or hear about what you are wanting to build, and start a conversation.