Posted on May 25th, 2023

Did you know that on Facebook, you can collect e-mail? That's right. You can collect leads. It's straightforward. You can run ad campaigns with a lead collection button. It can be Find Out More, Sign Up, or another language. Regardless, if you're running this type of campaign, it must be highly targeted. It's important that your targeting is spot-on. I put this part of Facebook ad marketing at this point in the list of marketing methods because it takes quite a bit of work. You should be quite familiar with Facebook before you even try this. You should know your way around Facebook’s ad system before you engage in paid lead generation because it can get quite expensive. If your ad doesn’t get many clicks or it's super finely targeted, you don't really have that many people to work with, and this can drive up your costs. You must know how to optimize your ad campaigns on Facebook for this to make sense.

You can optimize on many levels. There are three levels you can optimize:

Level 1

You can tweak the freebie you're giving away. This is the free stuff that you are giving away, so people are motivated to enter their e-mail address into your form.

Maybe you are giving away free membership access. Perhaps you are giving away a booklet or a book, a report, a set of templates, or a set of graphics. Possibly even giving away software or a mobile app. Whatever the case,templates, or maybe you are giving out freebies, need to be optimized.

What I mean by that is that the freebie that you give must motivate the most people in your target audience to sign up for your mailing list. This is not easy.

You cannot assume that just because you think your booklet is awesome or is the next best thing since sliced bread, people will automatically agree with you. It doesn't work that way.

You may have to switch from one freebie to the next until you get a high enough sign-up rate to tell you that the freebie that you have selected is the right one.

Level 2

Level 2 optimization focuses on optimizing your ad copy. As I’ve mentioned above, lead generation campaigns on Facebook can and do get very expensive. It seems like you’re doing all this for a handful of emails. Therefore, it's really important to make sure that you run a fully optimized campaign to get the most results.

How do you do this? Well, you optimize your ad copy on an elemental level. Still, I want you to get a heads up this early on regarding the amount of optimization that you would have to do. It is quite intensive. You can’t leave things at their surface level. That’s just not going to work.

Level 3

Level 3 involves optimizing based on conversions. When people click on your Learn More or Sign Up buttons, they’re shown a form. 

You’re going to have to keep tweaking that form to say what it needs to say to convert as much of your traffic into list members as possible. This takes quite a bit of time and attention to detail. Again, you have to run these experiments while minimizing your costs. Once you find something that works, optimize it to increase its level of conversion.

Once you have picked a winner that cannot be optimized any further in terms of conversion rate improvements, that’s when you scale up. That’s when you pour in the dollars to reach as many people as possible to boost your mailing list sign-ups.

Facebook Pixel Retargeting Campaign

Facebook enables you to put their tracking pixel on your website. It will then track where people go on your site. 

Run ads on Facebook for retargeting

The ads that you're going to run for Facebook Pixel Retargeting are going to be a bit different from the normal boosted posts or picture links that you run on Facebook. Instead, these are going to try to achieve two things. You can remind people about what they did.

Maybe they wanted to buy something, but they changed their mind at the last minute. Perhaps they were reading some sort of conversion article and were about to enter their e-mail address, but they didn’t. Whatever the case, maybe you’re reminding them to come back to what they were doing before.

The other thing that you can do with your Facebook Pixel Retargeting campaign is to pull people deeper into your website. Usually, a website is composed of two parts. The first layer is the content layer, meaning you're trying to get people to know about the problem, like your solution, and eventually trust the solution enough so they can buy it.

The other part, of course, is pretty straightforward. It’s all about buying. But there’s a complication. A lot of people would go through the content layers, but they never made it through to the actual buying part. They never make it to your conversion page. This is where retargeting ads that pull people deeper into your website make a lot of sense.

For whatever reason somebody reading an article on your site decides to close the window and get out of your site, you can run ads that tell them about another piece of content that is related to what they were reading before. This pushes them further down the conversion funnel.

Alternatively, you can run an ad that promotes your conversion page. Basically, what you're saying to the prospect is that you’ve figured out what my website is about and have a clear understanding of what I have to offer.

Maximizing your results from Facebook Pixel Retargeting

I suggest that if you want to maximize the results you get from retargeting, promote your squeeze page. That's right. Promote the page that recruits people to your mailing list.

Usually, there's some sort of freebie. There’s usually some sort of book or booklet that you're giving away, so people can enter their email address.

Whatever the case may be, push the squeeze page. Don't dump them on your sales page unless, as I have mentioned above, they actually reached your shopping cart or conversion page and changed their minds at the last minute.

That's pretty much the only situation where you should retarget by showing an ad that goes directly to the conversion page. Other than that, convert them into signing up for your mailing list.

It's your mailing list, with its many chances at gaining attention, building trust, and gaining credibility, that will actually do the heavy lifting as far as converting that prospect into an actual sale.

Optimizing Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

Follow the steps below so you don’t overthink things and make bad decisions when optimizing your Facebook ads.

Reverse engineer your competitors and come up with a standard model

If you have a personal account, find your competitors and like their pages. Before you know it, you will start seeing ads either from your competitors themselves or from businesses that are very similar to your competitors. Pay close attention to these ads.

Reverse engineer them to find the standard model for these ads. In other words, go through as many of these ads as possible and get a clear understanding of what kind of pictures, headlines, and text they use. Also, if they are mostly promoting posts, pay attention to that.

Whatever the case may be, look at what they're doing and see common patterns. Focus on the most commonly used strategies because this gives you the industry standard model.

Don’t get sidetracked by ads that seem so different, so new, or so innovative, because if they are so different from the industry standard model, they're outliers. There's a high chance that those ads do not convert.

Come up with your own version and test with a low budget

Test with a low budget. You don't want to burn through a tremendous amount of cash during the testing process. There will be a time and a place for you to get crazy with the budget, but now is not the time.

Create variations and test

Now that you have come up with your own version of the standard model, create variations of it and then run low-budget tests. Do not do this randomly.

Do not do this based on your feelings or impulses; instead, you have to follow certain rules on how to create variations; otherwise, you wouldn’t know which part of the ad accounts for its greater success.

I’ve seen this happen many times. In fact, I’ve committed this mistake before. I would take an ad and test it. I would notice that it wasn't getting that many clicks, so I changed half of the ad.

Maybe I would change the picture and then the headline, or I would change the heading and the description. Whatever the case, maybe I would change half of the ad, and sure enough, it would improve, but when I try to improve things again by changing the other half of the ad, it falls apart.

You want to establish a way of effectively tracking which changes account for which improvements. By using this method, you can optimize parts that work to reach peak convertibility and then work on the other elements of the ad that could use some improvement.

However, you have to do this in a systematic way. I've described this in the section below.

Pick the winner and make further variations

Now that you have made variations of the original and run a test, there will be at least one winner: the one that gets the most clicks and conversions. Make variations of it, and you run the test again.

Keep testing until you find the ad that delivers the best return on investment

The end of this process is straightforward. You keep making variations, and you keep testing on the cheap until you find an ad that delivers the best ROI. In other words, it delivers the most conversions while costing very little money. I know it sounds like a fantasy at this point, but it is doable with testing.

Scale up

Increase your ad budget for your winning ad to pump a massive amount of traffic to it. You should only do this when you are dead sure that you have a winning ad on your hands.

In other words, you have tested it rigorously and optimized it to the point that it cannot improve its conversion rate any further; that's when it's ready to go big time.