How to Test Your Funnel with Facebook Ad Campaigns and Other Options
You may not realize it, but you have a sales funnel. It’s the invisible wormhole that draws your readers to become fans, to subscribers, and then to paying customers in each step of the way as they go in further. And despite its imaginary shape, it can be measured and tested to target your audience and in turn bring in a surge of ka-chings.
Because a ton of followers doesn’t always translate to sales. With a customized funnel, you know what wins and lose. You design a hook. You bull’s-eye their likes. You takeover sales. You control your destiny.
Let these strategic stylists retell how.
There is virtually an endless number of things you can shift around and test, the important thing is that you do test different combinations so that you develop a better idea of what works for you. - K. Joll
The first thing you will come to is a choice for what kind of ad results you would like. As we are talking about getting people into your website funnel, we would generally select “increase conversions on your website”, the conversion being the successful sign-up of prospects into your funnel.
Target the same ad using different settings on audience targeting (you will need to create separate ad sets for this). Alternatively, you could use a custom audience and test different versions of your ad on that audience.
Remember that Facebook ads tend to become stale after a few weeks so it’s important to regularly change them around.
Again, you could split test every single element on your landing pages if you wanted to, from changing button colours to swapping out different calls to action. We’re trying to keep it simple for developing your funnel so we suggest you start with split testing one thing – your headlines.
What we would suggest, especially if this is all new to you is that you test only A vs B to begin with. Keep it simple – you can always add C, D and E later, the important thing is to get started and not get too tied up in complexities.
The key is to look at your best and your worst posts. In both instances, keep an eye out for differences in post type, topic, colors, sentiment, message and graphic style. - B. Carter
Your funnel should be stable, but not inflexible. If your company cares more about email marketing than its number of followers, adjust your tactics accordingly.
Set a key metric for each tactic in each part of your funnel to quickly diagnose where the funnel is anemic. With your key metrics in place, look at each tactic in each funnel section and set any industry benchmark standards.
If you’re tracking awareness, I suggest looking at impressions instead of reach. Tools like AdWords don’t give reach data and Facebook’s reach data is inaccurate.
Start exporting your Insights data to an Excel spreadsheet so you can consistently track and compare the right metrics and get a better idea of how your tactics are working long-term.
You’re probably using Google Analytics on your website, but if you’re not using the Google URL Builder or event tracking, you’re missing out on a lot of useful data.
Event tracking gives you information about button or link clicks, which is especially useful if customers have to go offsite to buy your product.
Ads burn out fast, so it’s important to create and test ads weekly. If you have the budget for it, you can create, test and optimize new ads three times a week or more.
If you’re using AdWords, create new ads until the point of diminishing returns. Check actual search phrases to see if you need more negative keywords. If your AdWords manager is slacking, get an AdWords Audit.
Reduce the number of steps in your funnel.
Get a platform like LeadPages or Clickfunnels that empowers you to easily test 2 or 3 opt-in pages. Create 2 or 3 sales pages, too. Combine that with your ad testing and you will cut your cost per lead or sale by 50-80%.
Test when you feel like it. This is often a workflow problem and just by creating a testing schedule you can improve your ad testing dramatically. - B. Geddes
One of the most common is to create lots of ads. Turn on ‘optimize for CTR’ or ‘optimize for conversions’ and let Google pick the winners. The problem with this method is that losers are rarely deleted.
Each ad group should be driving users to a single type of conversion type.
First, make a list of everything you need to know about your ads so that you can test and determine your winners. Next, for each ad, you will want to label them appropriately.
The labels should make it easy to segment your ads so you can analyze all brand ads, or only brand ads that have an end goal of an e-commerce checkout.
By using AdWords labels, pivot tables, and a testing schedule ad testing can be simple even for massive accounts.
When you use a pivot table to analyze ads, it is best to use very consistent lines within the ads so you can easily analyze them at scale. For this type of ad creation, I’d recommend using a tool such as the Mass Ad Creator.
A cool headline or picture is not enough. Instead, you need to focus on testing your targeting. You can do this through Interest Targeting. - AJ Amyx
The more passionate people are about what you are advertising, the lower your click through rates are.
Paid Advertising gives you the ability to control and scale. With Organic marketing you have to rely on things going viral, and usually only one in ten works.
The Facebook Ads Manager gives you the ability to have a conversion pixel with your advertising efforts so you know what’s working and what’s not. You can track almost everything. From your lead cost to your cost per sale. At the end of the day, that’s what business is all about.
Create a boring Facebook Ad and test it against a lot of different targets. The goal is to just measure the response. Some will get leads and sales and some will not.
If you want to be a successful business owner, stop being a seminar junkie and spending tens of thousands of dollars, trying to find a magic bullet. Get honest and do the work!
Test like crazy and be patient. Many times you won’t know until you do it. Know your budget, numbers and goals. Sometimes what you expect and what you want are different.
Here’s the gist of it…you can use Facebook Advertising to VALIDATE your business concept. Understand the truth…sometimes the Ads are NOT bad, your marketing message is. The solution is to learn to NAIL DOWN your USP, copy, etc.
Generally go for places early in the funnel. You’re on a knifes edge, a little push to the left and they bounce, a little to the right and they fall in.
Amazon, and many other people who test, believe that you can “break” from your website design and make it not like the other parts of your site. Just keep the funnel, simple giving people the option to either purchase or not. Eliminate links to your blog or documentation. Keep the design focused and clean.
Instead of creating multiple funnels that run from point A to point B, then stop, smart book marketers create marketing circles. - K. Thackston
Marketing circles are a beautiful, wonderful, amazingly-simple-to-set-up entity that can provide never-ending exposure to your target customers.
Circles work because each link provides another touch point. With everything you add to your marketing circle, ask yourself, “Where else can I send them? What else can I provide for them?” If you create an element within your circle that does not point your readers someplace else, you’ve just killed the flow: you’ve thrown up a giant stop sign.
Ask your customers what prompted them to come to you in the first place. - P. Chaney
If 50 percent came through word of mouth, half of your sales and marketing effort should be invested in stimulating recommendations.
Not only does this “flip-the-funnel” approach create an army of enthusiastic brand advocates, it relieves the company of expenses associated with full-time employees and improves profit margins in the offing.
The message is simple but smart: flip the funnel and make customer retention your new acquisition strategy. Focus your sales and marketing investment on delivering remarkable experiences that are worth recommending.
Wanna generate revenue with your Facebook ads? Stop measuring success by how much traffic you get. - D. Palizay
Depending on how deep a customer is in your funnel, you need to nurture and engage them to expand your relationship.
By splitting up your products, you can segment your ads and corresponding marketing messages, resulting in personalized offers that leads to more conversions and lifelong customers.
By using Facebook’s Website Custom Audiences (WCA), you can retarget users in your advertising funnel who have yet to convert.
The core CAC equation seamlessly breaks down into three elements: the cost per site visitor, divided by the percentage of conversions into leads, divided by the percentage of conversions into buyers.
Sometimes it takes testing several different target audiences or several different images before you find the one that performs best. - A. Vahl
Many businesses just run one or two ads and they don’t get the results they were looking for and so they assume Facebook Ads don’t work for them. Even different ad types can yield different results – website conversion vs. an unpublished post for example.
So do your testing and keep changing things up until you find what works best for you.
On AdWords, you need to figure out what keywords work best. On Facebook, you target potential clients based on users’ profiles. - E. Ernoult
Never sell to cold leads.
To optimize a Facebook ad campaign, especially with split testing, you need to have a large audience to target. As a rule of thumb, a minimum of 100,000 users is required. The bigger the better.
When split testing an ad campaign, never rely on the results of the first step of your funnel, or even the second step. Test the entire sales funnel.
First of all, you need to use Facebook Power Editor, not the regular ad manager. The main reason is that only Power Editor will allow you to track more than one conversion pixel.
Install the Facebook conversion pixels on your website, and set up Google Analytics with both goal tracking (to track the number of conversions) and ecommerce integration (to track the revenue generated).
I recommend AdEspresso for valuable reporting insights. It’s an affordable tool that makes split testing Facebook ads easy and efficient.
Test Gender. (?) Age is another factor to test. Keep in mind there may be cultural differences regarding foreign languages from one country to another.
Never send your advertising traffic to your home page. Create landing pages and optimize them.
Do a little research. Click on the Facebook ads from other players in your field. You’ll be amazed at how many send ad traffic to their home page.
How do you test your funnel? Let us know in the comments section below.
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