Today, we’re going to be looking at Facebook advertising, and why a lot of people who try it don’t get any results with it.
It’s quite simply because there are many things you need to do with your Facebook Ads, and if you don’t do them, they won’t work. There’s a lot of ingredients you need to have, and if they’re missing, it’s going to fall apart.
Let’s go through is the six ingredients you need to have on a Facebook Ad in order to get the results you want, and if you are missing any single one of these, it’s not going to work. I liken this to Christmas lights – you know, the old-style ones that my dad would have got out of the loft every Christmas. They would have been in a brown box, and he’d have got them out the box, untangled them, put them on the floor, plugged them in and then started swearing and complaining (in a sort of a South Welsh accent as you would do) that the bulbs weren’t working.
Of course, it wasn’t just a simple matter of “oh, this bulb is out, take it out and put a fresh one in” and then the lights work. The problem was you didn’t know which one of them was out because it was what’s called a “series circuit”, so if one of them is out, they’re all out.
It’s the same with your Facebook Ads. If one thing is wrong, it doesn’t matter how great you’ve got all of the others – they’re not going to work. So, I’ve got an acronym for this that I like to use and it reflects the way my dad would react in this situation – ACT MAD! This covers the six ingredients you require for the Facebook Ad in order for it to effectively work for you:
• A – Ad type.If your ad type is wrong, it doesn’t matter how good everything else – it’s not going to work
• C – Creative. That’s the image or the video, which has a single purpose as I’ll explain later. If that’s wrong, no one’s even going to see what the rest of your ad is for and your offer just isn’t going anywhere
• T – Targeting. that’s the one everybody focuses on whenever I see people talking about Facebook Ads in in groups on LinkedIn or Facebook, but targeting is just one of the six ingredients of successful Facebook advertising. It’s important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the be all and end all
• M – Messaging and offer. If you get the messaging or the offer wrong, or it’s aimed at the wrong person, it will fail
• A – Attention. You need to be grabbing people’s attention, otherwise they’re not even going to read your ad and they’re not going to see what you’re offering
• D – Destination. This is the one everybody gets wrong! Where are you sending people with the ad? And if it’s the home page of your website, why are you even bothering?
So, let’s go through these in a bit more detail:
A – Ad type
You may have heard the phrase “horses for courses”, and it’s pretty much the same with Facebook – what exactly are you trying to achieve?
You’ve got different types of ads, so for example you could have a Brand Awareness or a Reach ad, and that’s to get your message out in front of as many people as possible. But if you’re trying to get sales of a product, or if you’re trying to get leads and enquiries through to your business, and want people to contact you people and send in their information so that you can contact them and make a sale with them, Brand Awareness and Reach ads are not going to do that.
With Reach, you’re effectively saying to Facebook “I want this ad to be in front of as many people as possible”. Facebook will go “okay, I’m gonna put this out in front of as many people as possible and that’s all you’re gonna get out of it”. It’s great if you’re launching a brand new product or service and you just want to get eyeballs, but if you’re trying to get a conversion, leads, people’s data and conversations with people, then reach is not going to do it.
Then you’ve got the other types of ads, like an Engagement or Traffic ad, which is when you want loads of people to click through to your website. But again, all Facebook is doing is saying “I’m going to put your ad in front of people who are likely to click on it”, and that’s what will happen – you’ll get loads of clicks but you’ll get no leads, no sales and no conversions because all you’ve asked for is traffic.
Video Views ads have a really good purpose, but once again, they’re not for conversions or leads – they’re to get people to watch a video. Messages and Lead Generation ads are a little bit more towards what you’re looking for, but they’re still not the ones that are really going to get you the business.
Then you’ve got your Conversion and Catalogue Sales ads, and those are the ones that are really going to do it. If you want somebody to go through to a contact form and fill in the form and send a message, use a Conversion Ad – that’s what it’s for! If you have an e-commerce website and if you’re trying to sell products via your website, then you want a Catalog Sales ads – that’s what that’s for!
If you get the wrong ad type, you’re wasting your time and money. In what was supposedly a marketing experts’ Facebook group, I once saw a guy positing screenshots of his Facebook Ads campaign and he was telling people “I’m getting loads and loads of links and clicks through to my website but nobody’s buying, nobody’s actually giving me their details, so what’s wrong?” People were looking at this ad and they were saying “maybe your creative needs to change, maybe your image needs to change, maybe your text on your ad needs to change, maybe the targeting needs to change, maybe if you targeted a different people that would work?” Nobody picked up on the most obvious thing about it – he’d used a Traffic ad optimised for link clicks, so that was all he got. Even if you go into expert groups on Facebook and ask this kind of thing, you’re going to get people who are going to give you absolutely duff information, because quite frankly they’re making up as they go along.
Your ad type determines your result, so make sure you select the right one.
C – Creative
Your creative is the type of image or video you are using.
People say they want images that are reflective of their brand and their industry, and they often want an image of themselves, their team, their logo or their office building, insisting it has to be “on brand”.
But your Facebook Ad image is not “your brand”. Its sole purpose is to stop people scrolling, so if it doesn’t stop people scrolling and prompt them to click on the ad, there is absolutely no point in it being there.
We had this with a client about two years ago for whom we were getting a huge return on investment for their Facebook Ads them because they were they were selling directly to the public and directly to trades, so people were clicking on the ad, going through to the website and purchasing products.
After the initial excitement of this ridiculous return on investment died down, they came to us and they said “these ads are doing really well but the images we’re using on our ads, they’re not really in keeping with our with our brand and they don’t look like they belong to us. One of our competitors is doing ads as well and we really like the images they’re using because they’re quite professional, they’re quite slick and they look like they belong in that brand. Can we have images similar to what they’re using?”
We could have said “sure, we’ll swap the images”, because that’s what the client asked and for the client’s always right, isn’t it?
Well, no, to be honest with you! What we said was “look, we can swap these images to be more in keeping with your brand, we can pick images that are more like the ones that your competitors are using, but to be perfectly honest with you, if we do that you’re not going to get the return on investment you’re getting now, and if your competitors saw the kind of returns that you were getting, they would want to use the images you’re using, not the images they’re using, because your images are performing better than theirs”. Once that had been explained, they understood and agreed with us.
So, when you’re choosing your image for your Facebook Ad, ask yourself “is this a scroll-stopping image?” If I was scrolling through Facebook on my phone, perhaps sat on the toilet as that’s where a lot of people look at Facebook, would this image make me stop scrolling? If not, it’s not the right image – simple as that!
T – Targeting
Targeting is the most obvious thing people talk about. They know about targeting the right people and making sure you put your ad in front of the right people to get the right results, but what people don’t often talk about is excluding the wrong people.
I’ll give you an instance – it’s no secret that I like Lego, and I saw an ad on Facebook a while back for a Brixel bus. Brixel is an American version of Lego that’s really small, but really cool. I have a Brixel model already, so you might think that would be a well targeted ads for me.
The problem was that it was for an Arsenal FC bus. Now, that was targeted at me presumably because I’m into football and I follow Lego, or something similar to that. They’d have targeted on that, but what they should have done was excluded people who follow Liverpool FC like me, because they’re not going to get me to buy an Arsenal FC product. In fact, it’s more likely to get me to hide the ad. They hadn’t gone through and eliminated all the people who wouldn’t want to see it, like fans of Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United, Chelsea and so on.
It’s very simple to exclude people. If you’ve ever played the game called Guess Who, where you ask questions about people’s physical appearance and eliminate them one by one until you only have one left, that’s kind of what you’re doing. For example, we’ve run ads for a company that trains people to become mortgage brokers. So if you’re in banking, insurance or financial advice, mortgage brokerage is the sort of service you could add on to your existing suite of services.
However, if you’re already a mortgage broker, it’s no use to you. You’re not going to train to be a mortgage broker if you’re a mortgage broker already. So people who are mortgage brokers are one of the groups you should exclude on your targeting.
There are lots of different things you can exclude people on; for example, you can exclude people based on geography, so if they’re outside your catchment area, you can exclude them on that. If you’re doing property and you’re looking at high-end homes, you can exclude postcodes that are in a sort of an area that is, shall we say, not as exclusive as the one that you’re looking for. You could exclude people who don’t speak the language – which is perhaps more of an issue in a country where there are mixed languages like Canada. I’ve been served ads before in different languages and it drives me crazy – why is somebody showing me an ad in a different language in the UK?
You can exclude people based on age if you’re targeting people for a certain service or product aimed at an age demographic, but a word of warning that you’ve got to be careful with that because you can’t do any sort of discrimination. You can’t, for example, run a job ad and exclude people who are over 40 or over 50, because you think that’s too old. Facebook will not allow you to do that and you can get into a lot of trouble if you do.
It’s also possible to exclude your own customer data, so you could export your customer data, import it into Facebook as a list and then exclude all those people if you don’t want to waste time showing your ads to your existing customers. You can exclude your competitors – after all, why would you want your competitors to see your ads. By doing this, you’re reducing your budget and the risk of people clicking or placing comments on your ads that you don’t want. I’ve seen that happen a few times!
So, exclude people who it’s not relevant to.
M – Messaging and offer
When you set the ad, it’s important that the message that you use is aimed at the person you want it to be, and that it’s the kind of thing that they’re going to want. If not, it will turn off the audience. That doesn’t mean that your offer or product is bad, it just means that the audience for isn’t quite right.
For example, if you’re a carpet cleaner and you’re running ads based on something like having your carpet cleaned for your family this Christmas, and the person who’s seeing the ad lives on their own, it’s not something they’re going to want because it’s pitched in the wrong way. They may still want their carpet cleaned, but you’re talking to them about having it cleaned for your family. Equally, if you’re a carpet cleaner and you’re running an ad at somebody saying they should have their carpet cleaned to get rid of the smell of their pets, and they’re somebody who doesn’t have pets, then it might be the right offer, but it’s the wrong message.
I liken this to fishing. I know absolutely nothing about fishing but I have researched this for a talk I gave on this a while back. If you were carp fishing, for example, you would use boilies as your bait, whereas if you were fishing for salmon you might use imitation eggs instead. It’s the same with the Facebook Ads – you need the right bait with the right fish because that is what is going to get you the results.
This all comes back down to your avatar – the target client or customer who you are trying to reach, so you should go through an exercise where you work out who your target customer is and what basically turns them on and turns them off. What are their goals? What problems do they have in their life? These are the things you can mention in the ad copy, video or landing page.
That will also help you work out who to exclude, and allow you to narrow down the target for your ads.
A – Attention
If you’re not grabbing people’s attention, they are not going to see your ad in the first place.
It might shock you to learn that on a smartphone, when somebody is scrolling through Facebook, you have 1.7 seconds to grab their attention. If you don’t, they are going to keep scrolling and your ad is wasted.
Some ways you can grab attention include using comedy or satire, shock value, moving video, and one of our favourites, breaking the fourth wall. This is where the ad, and its video or image, aren’t quite they seem.
We once ran an ad for a bird feeder that sticks to a window so that you can see the birds feeding right in front of you. We superimposed a greenscreen video of a bird over the top of the ad, so when you’re looking at the ad it looks like the bird has come out of the video on your phone and is on your screen. That got so much engagement, and a hell of a lot of sales as well.
It stopped people scrolling and it grabbed attention, and it really pushed the product. I’ve seen this in the real world too, such as signs that say “If you hit this sign, you will hit this bridge” and pubs with signs saying “Unattended children will be given espresso and a free kitten”. It’s a little different and makes you think, so it really grabs your attention.
D – Destination
And finally, the one everybody forgets – where do you send people after they click on your ad?
Most people will say with a Facebook Ad, it should be home page, because that’s the most important page on their website. No, it’s not! Do NOT send people to the home page on your website. I see this so many times and it’s absolutely infuriating.
If you send them to the home page, they’ve then got to look where they need to go to do what you want them to do, so if you want them to actually fill in an enquiry form, they’ve got to look at your website and go “where’s the enquiry form?” If you want them to download a lead magnet, such as a brochure or eBook, they’ve got to look for the thing because you sent them to the home page.
Imagine you were to walk into a room and there was seven or eight doors in front of you. Which door would you choose? It could be any of them, so if you wanted someone to go through a particular door, the chances are they wouldn’t because there are so many other options. That’s what it’s like being on the homepage of a website – there are loads of places they could go.
How about you send people to a room and there’s only one door in it? If they can’t go anywhere else, which door are they going to pick? Well, they’re going to pick the only door they can – the one that’s right there in front of them.
That’s what you need to do with your Facebook Ad and your destination page, take them somewhere where it is the only thing they can do.
So, ACT MAD – those are the six ingredients for a successful Facebook Ad. To avoid wasting your money, get all six of them right!
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