Building an Audience and Growing Traffic Through Facebook Ads

Facebook has become an increasingly important player in the world of digital marketing. In fact, 93 percent of marketers regularly use the platform. There are many tools already in place to help marketers run effective campaigns, and the platform also tracks various metrics that help measure success.

It’s a great way to attract users to your website, but as any Facebook marketing company can tell you, creating sustainable traffic isn’t always simple. If you want reliable traffic on your site, you’ll need to keep that in mind throughout your marketing campaign.

Soft and Hard Conversions

The end goal of any marketing campaign is securing purchases, but there are other important things marketers can target. Increasing the size of your email list may not generate immediate profits, but it will improve your network and the chance of long-term conversion. Your retargeting pool, which is the group of people who have visited your site without making a purchase, is also valuable.

Hard and soft conversions are achieved in different ways, so you should know what you’re trying to accomplish with each ad. Campaigns centered on blog posts and long-form content are more likely to lead to soft conversions, while promotional offers are clearly aimed at hard conversions. Each one can be effective individually, but you should use both in tandem to promote sustainable traffic.

Following Up On Soft Conversions

Creating soft conversions is an important piece of the sales cycle, but finding ways to keep audiences interested can be tricky. At this point, your priority should be giving them an easy way to access your product.

Whether you’re sending promotional offers or simply information, a drip marketing campaign is highly effective in this situation. These efforts have been shown to lead to much higher click-through rates.

For the segment of users that haven’t joined your email list, you’ll have to be more creative in order to reach a hard conversion. Users in the retargeting pool are 10 times more likely to click through your ads, which means you should be focusing on making your brand as visible as possible.

There are many effective methods of running retargeting campaigns, and using multiple channels to reach the same segment further increases the rate of conversion. Platforms like Google Adwords and Amazon can help you reach people who have demonstrated interest in your product but haven’t yet subscribed to your email list or made a purchase.

A/B Testing

A/B testing, or split testing, is an effective strategy for nearly every Facebook campaign. This practice involves comparing results from two different ads in order to identify your best ideas and continually optimize your content for maximal traffic and conversions.

Facebook offers a wide range of tools for A/B testing your ads, although things can get complicated once you start running more than a few ads at the same time. Fortunately, there are a number of third-party programs that facilitate the split testing process and streamline a variety of important tasks.

AdEspresso, for example, allows you to import campaigns and monitor test results for any marketing metric. If you’re focused on building your audience, you should probably be looking at traffic and click-through rates rather than conversions or order values.

Managing Ads

Facebook’s settings for ad management often go overlooked, but the platform actually gives you thorough customization options for virtually every aspect of each campaign. Tweaking these settings can lead to substantially better performance and differentiate you from the competition.

While Facebook recommends paying for ads based on conversions, for example, you might be more interested in paying for clicks when running campaigns to grow your audience. You can always switch back to the default if this doesn’t help you achieve the results you’re looking for, so consider running a small-scale test campaign before making any drastic changes.

Facebook also allows marketers to schedule their ads at specific times of the day, and better timing can make the same ad lead to far more clicks and conversions. Keep in mind that you can only set an ad schedule if you’re using a lifetime rather than a daily budget.

If your audience is most active at the beginning and end of the workday, for example, you should prioritize those times rather than displaying ads overnight. Again, the best way to ensure consistent improvement is to test timing and other variables as frequently as possible.

With so many customization options available, there’s no simple way to fully optimize your approach to Facebook marketing and the intricacies of ads management. Instead, don’t be afraid to try new things and learn from both successes and failures. The best marketers make gradual changes as they learn more about their audience’s preferences.

At first, Facebook ads can seem overwhelming to less experienced digital advertisers. However, they offer a wide range of tools that can help marketers across all industries reach the right users and bring in reliable, long-term traffic. With an effective strategy and some adaptability, the best marketers can achieve an incredible return on investment and sustain high levels of traffic over a long period of time.