About the Author Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Facebook Ads Strategy for User Acquisition... 8

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2 Contents About the Author... 4 Chapter 1: Introduction... 5 Chapter 2: Facebook Ads Strategy for User Acquisition... 8 Chapter 3: Campaign Structure and Optimization Chapter 4: Ad Targeting Chapter 5: International Targeting Case Study

3 About The Author. 3

4 About the Author Aaron Zakowski is the Founder and CEO of Zammo Digital and a recognized leader in the Facebook advertising industry. Aaron helps leading startups accelerate user acquisition and achieve scale through Facebook Ads. He has managed over $1million in Facebook ads generating over 180,000 leads and signups for clients such as ebay, InVision, Cuisinart, Webydo, Treehouse and many more. You can read his best marketing ideas on his blog at Managing Facebook Ads At Some Of The World s Smartest Companies 4

5 Chapter 1 Chapter 01. Introduction 5

6 Introduction If you re reading this book then you re probably responsible for marketing at a startup company that s interested in accelerating your growth of qualified user signups for you product. In this short book, I m going to run you through the ins and outs of how we create and manage Facebook ads for our client. The strategies and techniques in this book come from our experience running facebook ads for over six years and generating over 100,000 leads and signups for our clients. I ll do my best to include all the strategic and technical details below, but if you have any questions then please send me an at aaron@zammodigital.com or hit me up on Are Facebook Ads Right For You? Before you get started with setting up your first FB ads, it s important to make sure you have a clear strategy and realistic goals that promotes your business ultimate objectives. Remember to focus on real KPIs such as leads and sales and not vanity metrics such as Likes and clicks to website. Product First. Marketing Second. I strongly advise that you make sure that your product and sales funnel are fine-tuned and optimized before you start any serious paid user acquisition campaign. If your product can t retain active users and your website can t move new users down your sales funnel, then you need to fix those problems before you invest significantly in user acquisition. Recommended: Check out this video on the balance between user retention and user growth. 6

7 If you re looking to launch your startup on a shoestring budget (i.e. under $500), then this article is a must read: OK, so assuming that people love your product and your sales funnel rocks, let s start marketing... Facebook Ads vs. Google AdWords I often get asked by people if I think they should be advertising on Facebook or Google. The best way to answer that question is to consider if your ideal customer is searching for your product. If people are searching for your product (or a solution to a problem you can solve), then Google is probably a great option for you. However, if people aren t searching for your product (or they don t even know it exists), then Facebook is the best platform to get your ads in front of people who would be likely to use your product if only they knew about it. Another thing to keep in mind is that Facebook ads need to constantly be managed and updated. Unlike AdWords, even the most successful Facebook campaigns have a limited lifespan before the delivery frequency gets too high and results start to decrease. That s when it s time to come up with a new audience, ad creative or both. 7

8 Chapter 2 Chapter 1 Chapter 02. Facebook Ads Strategy for User Acquisition 8

9 Facebook Ads Strategy for User Acquisition Getting Started With Your First Ads For the purposes of this exercise, we re going to make a few assumptions Assumption #1 You have an effective sales funnel and a great product. If you don t have these elements in place, then go get them fixed before you start spending too much money on advertising. Assumption #2 Your site offers a Free Trial of your product and your initial goal is to get more qualified users signed up for free trials. Facebook isn t very good at driving direct sales, but it s probably the best platform out there for generating awareness, interest and fresh leads/signups. Facebook isn t very good at driving direct sales, but it s probably the best platform out there for generating awareness, interest and fresh leads/signups. NOTE: If your company provides services or is focused on ecommerce, then most of the strategies presented in this book will be helpful to you as well. But there are some additional things you ll need to keep in mind that are outside the scope of this book. Send me an is you need help. 9

10 Planning and Strategy Before you dive in and start creating ads, take a few minutes (or more) to make sure that your goals and objectives are clear. Ask yourself these questions: 1. What is my primary goal? (probably to get more free trial signups) 2. What are my secondary goals? ( newsletter subscribers, ebook downloads, etc) 3. How much is your target cost per goal completion (both primary and secondary)? 4. What is your initial daily and monthly budget? 5. How much of your budget will you allocate to different objectives (user acquisition, retargeting, user activation and upgrades and content promotion) When determining your target cost per signup, there are a lot of factors to consider that will be unique to your business. But overall, you need to figure out what the long term value (LTV) of a customer is and what percentage of your Facebook leads will convert to paid customers. Notice that we re specifically interested in the conversion rate of leads from Facebook. That s because conversion rates (as well as quality of leads) from different traffic sources can be different and as a result, the amount you should pay for a lead might also vary across traffic channels. Pixels, Pixels, Pixels Before you activate your first campaigns, it s crucial that you get the Facebook pixel up on all pages of your site. (In fact, I recommend that you get the pixel on your site long before you start your Facebook ads. I ll explain why below.): 10

11 There are two primary functions of the pixel: 1. Retargeting Your pixel goes on every page of your site and allows you to display ads at people who have visited your site but didn t sign up. With the single pixel, you can customize your targeting at people who visited a single page or and combination of pages on your site. 2. Conversion Tracking Your conversion pixel will help Facebook to know when someone actually converts on your site so that you can optimize your campaigns based on the metrics that matter most to you. You should set up unique conversion events for each goal on your site (i.e. free trial signups, purchases, etc). Facebook s conversion pixels gathers data from all users who are signed in to Facebook even if they came to your site from a different traffic channels. This is important because it helps Facebook s algorithm to learn more about the people who convert on your site so that it can optimize your ads better when you turn your campaign on (we ll learn more about this when we talk about Lookalike audiences). The reason I urge you to get your pixel up on your site long before you launch your first Facebook ads is so that Facebook can start learning in advance about the types of people who convert on your site. This way, when you do decide to get started with ads, Facebook s algorithms will have enough data to start optimizing for you right from the start. 11

12 Chapter 3 Chapter 1 Chapter 03. Campaign Structure and Optimization 12

13 Campaign Structure User acquisition is generally going to be the meat and potatoes of your Facebook ads strategy. At least 80% of your budget should be allocated to this objective. The main reason Facebook is such an important marketing channel for most Startups is that it lets you go out and find the people who should be using your awesome product but who simply don t know that it exists. [If large numbers of people are searching for your product online (or at least for solutions to a problem that your product can help them solve), then maybe Google AdWords can be a great options for you as well. In order to make this book as helpful as possible, the rest of this book is going to walk you through how to create the most effective Facebook campaigns to turbo charge your user acquisition. Building Your Campaigns OK, so now that you ve laid the groundwork for a smart Facebook strategy, it time to start creating the campaigns. The first thing you need to know is that Facebook advertising is organized in a hierarchy of Campaigns, Ad Sets and Ads. A campaign can have many ad sets and an ad set can have many ads. It s very similar to how Google Adwords works. Most of the targeting and optimization will take place in the ad set level. 13

14 I usually, recommend that the companies I consult with start by creating three campaigns for user acquisition. 1. Lookalike Audience Based on Your Conversion Pixel 2. Interest Targeting 3. Retargeting All three of these campaigns are going to have the same objective, getting new users to convert and sign up for a free account on your site. Keep reading and I ll walk you through all the details of how to set them up in Facebook s Power Editor. In order to keep things simple, we re going to focus on building campaigns that only target the United States, but I ve included a section at the end of this book with tips to broadening to more countries For all campaigns, you ll want to set your objective as Website Conversion (and buying type is always Auction ) 14

15 That s actually everything you need to know about setting up campaigns. Pretty simple. Now comes the really fun stuff... 15

16 Ad Sets Within each campaign that we created, you ll now need to create at least one Ad Set and tell Facebook which conversion goal (pixel) your ad set should be optimized for. The ad set level is where you re going to set parameters such as budget, targeting, placements, bidding, etc. Let s learn a bit more about each of these elements... 16

17 Budget Budgets are set at the ad set level. You ll usually want to use daily budgets (rather than lifetime budgets). Some reps I ve spoken with at Facebook have recommended to use Lifetime budgets, but our experience is that daily budgets give us a lot more control (and success). Therefore, my recommendation is that as you are getting started, you always want to use a daily budget. Start small with your daily budget. At the beginning, it s important to test and figure out what works best with a smaller budget. Once you have an ad set that works, then it s time to start turning up the budget. Don t increase the budget too quickly because you ll want to find the sweet spot where you can increase your volume of leads without negatively impacting the quality and cost of your new user signups. Bidding Use ocpm to get the best results. Do it! Trust us. Set your optimization to Optimize for Website Conversions and pricing to Get the most website conversion at the lowest price 17

18 Don t worry about your CPM cost. Your goal is to get the most signup conversions as the lowest price not to get the lowest CPM cost. This pricing configuration will almost for sure get you the best results. However, in order to get the best results from ocpm bidding, Facebook recommends that you use an audience of at least 500K people. If you have a smaller audience, and ocpm isn t working well for you, then you can test regular CPM bidding. I realize that I m asking you to put a lot of trust in Facebook s algorithms by letting them create Lookalike audiences that you don t control and then letting them control your pricing without you giving them a maximum CPC or CPM. It was a difficult choice for us at first also. But at this point, I ve seen it work so well so many times, that I ve become a believer. Placements Placement is also determined at the Ad Set level. The placement section is where you tell Facebook which types of devices you want your ads to display on. Your choices are: Mobile Newsfeed Audience Network (inside mobile apps) Desktop Newsfeed Desktop Right Column InstaGram 18

19 We ve found success using the following three placements for different Startups that we ve worked with: Mobile News Feed, Desktop Newsfeed and Desktop Right Column From our experience, different placements will work differently for different companies and different offers. Test them all to see what works best for you. Our recommended best practice is that you create a unique ad set for each placement option. So in our Lookalike campaign, you would create the following three ad sets: 1. Lookalike_Newfeed 2. Lookalike_RightColumn 3. Lookalike_Mobile Keep all your targeting and other parameters the same between these different ad set so that you can confidently attribute any differences in performance between the ad sets to the different placements. The only other thing that you want to adjust between the different placement ad sets, is the copy that you include in ads. Each different placement permits you a different amount of text space so you ll want to edit them appropriately so your text doesn t get cut off. But keep the ad creatives as similar as possible. 19

20 Chapter 4 Chapter 1 Chapter 04. Ad Targeting 20

21 Ad Targeting When your objective is to acquire new user signups for your free trial offer, then there are two primary targeting options that most SaaS startups want to use. 1. Lookalike Audience based on Conversion Pixel 2. Interest Targeting 3. Retargeting We have found that over and over again, that these are the most effective targeting option for generating more quality conversion on your site. Let s break these down and understand them better Lookalike Audiences Based on Conversion Pixels If you have the Facebook conversion pixel placed in your signup process (if you don t, then please go put it in now), then facebook is tracking data from every person who converts through your free trial signup process. It doesn t matter if the person came from a Facebook ad or a different traffic source. As long as they are signed in to Facebook (and most people are always signed in), then Facebook knows who they are. Using that knowledge, Facebook can create a Lookalike audience of people have have the most similar characteristics to the people who have already signed up for your site and hit your conversion pixel. This is why we strongly recommend that you get your conversion pixels set up on your site long before you want to activate your first Facebook ad campaigns. The more data Facebook has collected from your conversion pixel when you get started, the more accurate their algorithms can be in creating an effective lookalike. 21

22 We strongly recommend that you get your conversion pixels set up on your site long before you want to activate your first Facebook ad campaigns. This type of lookalike audience is usually the most effective way to achieve increased volume of high quality and cost effective signup conversions. It usually constitutes over 70% of our total ad spend for the campaigns that we manage for SaaS clients. You can also test Lookalike audiences based on the following audiences: Upload of your customer or users lists People who hit your purchase conversion pixel, Website visitors (aka your retargeting audience) These audiences are worth testing, but our experience has been that they don t work quite as well a Lookalike based on your free trial signup conversion pixel. Retargeting In general, retargeting ads are one of the highest converting campaigns that most companies can run. People who have already expressed interest in your product by recently visiting your site are more likely to convert in the near future. Until recently facebook made you work through a third party company like AdRoll or Criteo to run retargeting. Fortunately, now you can easily manage all your retargeting on Facebook via the Power Editor. By placing your pixel across all the pages of your website, you can target ads at anybody who has visited your site in the past (the cookie is good for a maximum of 180 days, but you can set it for shorter periods as well). Even if you are still running retargeting through a third party service, I highly recommend that you get the native Facebook retargeting pixel on your site ASAP. The main reason you want that pixel placed is so that you can easily exclude people who have already signed up from your other user acquisition campaigns or to create Lookalike audiences based on people who have visited your site.. 22

23 Advanced Retargeting Tip #1 You can also test creating retargeting ad sets with tiered time frames. For example, you can have one ad set for people who visited in the past 7 days. And additional ad sets for people who visited 7-14 days ago, days ago, 1-2 months ago and more than 2 months ago. Test these different time frames and learn how you can spend your ad budget most effectively. You can set up these tiers using excluded audiences. Advanced Retargeting Tip #2 Try segmenting your retargeting audiences based on how much interest hey showed in your site. For example, create a segment of people who visited your pricing page or other key pages on your site. Exclusion Audiences This is an important tip that you should be incorporating into all of your ad sets. If you goal is to get people to sign up for a free trial, then you need to be excluding people who have already signed up from your audience (otherwise, you re just wasting money). Yes, I know it sounds obvious, but most people never think about this step. So how do you exclude these people from your audience? I m glad you asked. Keep reading There are two methods that I usually use to exclude people who are already signed up. 1. Create a custom audience with uploaded s of all your current and past customers. Exclude this audience from all ad sets. 2. Create a specific retargeting custom audience for people who visit a specific URL that can only be reached after someone completes the signup process. Exclude this audience from all campaigns. The two audiences above should be pretty effective at removing most past signups and customers from your ongoing campaigns. 23

24 In addition, I usually exclude my entire retargeting audience (i.e. everybody who has visited the site in the past 180 days) from all my lookalike and other targeting campaigns. This way, all retargeting audiences are isolated into the retargeting campaigns and ad sets. In general with Facebook ads, you ll want to avoid having multiple ad sets targeting the same audiences (otherwise, you ll end up bidding against yourself in the ad auction). Other Audiences to Target As I mentioned previously, the above audiences usually have the best results for generating more signups. Nevertheless, you should definitely test the following targeting ideas as well: Custom Audience Facebook allows you to target people based on specific lists that you upload to Facebook. A few suggestions for list segments you may want to upload and target include: Newsletter subscriber Event attendees Current customers (you can use this as an excluded audience and to create a lookalike audience.) Facebook Fans People who are fans of your Facebook page but who haven t signed up for your product yet are usually a very primed target who already know about your value. Lookalike Audiences Lookalike audiences are quite possibly your most effective audience for targeting new customers. Facebook helps you to create Lookalike audiences of people who have similar characteristics to users that you upload as a custom audience. Effective audiences to build Lookalikes based on are: 24

25 Lookalike based on your conversion pixels (We already discussed this big winner above) Lookalike based on existing paid users s Lookalike based on existing free users s Lookalike based on website visitors (all visitors or a smaller segment) Lookalike based on your Facebook Fans Lookalike based on newsletter subscribers Interest and Demographic Targeting Target people who have already shown interest in the following topics and pages: Your competitors and/or other companies in your industry Job titles Professional interests (graphic design, law, medicine, etc) Professional organizations or journals Hobbies and lifestyle preferences (parents, pet owners, home owners, etc) 25

26 Chapter 5 Chapter 05. International Targeting 26

27 International Targeting Up until now, we ve been explaining how to set up your campaigns to target audiences in the United States. Now, I want to share some tips for scaling your ads to more international countries. When you create your Lookalike Audiences, Facebook will only let you target one country in a Lookalike audience. That means that you will need to create a unique Lookalike audience for each country that you want to target. The size of the audiences that are created will vary based on the population size of the country. For some countries, your Lookalike audiences will only be a few thousand people while for other countries you ll be able to target a few million people. As we mentioned in the bidding section above, Facebook s optimized pricing and bidding works best if you have at least 500K people in an ad set. When dealing with lots of Lookalike audiences that each only have a few thousand (or even a few ten thousand) people, we recommend combining the Lookalike audiences for all these countries in a single International ad set. 27

28 Any Questions? I hope the information provided in this book will give you the confidence and direction to set up an effective Facebook campaign for your Startup. Remember, start small and continue to test. And if you need help, feel free to get in touch with me at aaron@zammodigital.com or on Additional Reading 7 Proven Ways to Grow SaaS Users with Facebook Ads [Case Study] How We Reduced InVision s Cost Per Signup with Facebook Ads by 44% 9 Secrets the Pros Use to Create Great Facebook Ad Designs 5 Facebook Ad Metrics Every SaaS Company Needs to Follow 28

29 Case Study How We Reduced InVision s Cost Per Signup with Facebook Ads by 44% 29