How to generate leads or sales fast, with Facebook ads.
Do you want to generate leads or sales for your business fast?
Are you running ads targeted at your website traffic?
In this article, you’ll discover exactly how to create a campaign that laser-targets the hottest temperatures of the audience to generate leads or sales fast.
Facebook audience temperatures you need to be targeting to get fast results
If your advertising goal is to generate results, particularly sales fast for your business, you need to be targeting the Hot or Super-Hot segment of your audience in your campaigns.
There are 4 audience types when it comes to Facebook advertising – Cold, Warm, Hot and Super-Hot.
Cold audiences include people that have yet become familiar with your business or brand. This audience is full of potential future-customers that you create via Saved audiences and Lookalike audiences.
Next, let’s discuss Warm audiences; this audience segment contains people that have previously engaged with your business, such as Page Engagement custom audiences and Video custom audiences.
You then have Hot audiences; these are the hottest audience temperature of potential customers and contain people that have previously visited your website but are yet to convert into leads or customers.
Finally, you have Super-Hot audiences. This group of people are existing customers to whom you run existing customer retention campaigns in order to drive immediate sales and increase your lifetime customer value based on their repeat purchase.
How to create hot and super-hot audiences to target with ads
The first step to creating a campaign that can get sales fast and targets the hottest audiences is to create the audiences in your Audiences dashboard.
First, we need to create the Hot audiences and then the Super-Hot. Navigate to the Audiences dashboard, select Create Audience and from the dropdown list click on Custom Audience.
When the Custom audience menu opens, click on Website. The website custom audience creation window will open. From the criteria section, make sure to leave the default “All website visitors” selected.
Next to that, you need to change the audience duration to 180 days. This website custom audience is comprised of everyone who has visited your website in the last 180 days and will give you the largest audience size.
IMAGE: WCA – All Traffic.png
CAPTION: Change the audience duration to 180 days and name your audience.
TIP: If you are lucky enough to have a large number of website visitors per month, let’s say over 10k people, it’s a good idea to shorten the audience duration from 180 days and then carry out tests for each of the following durations: 90 days, 60 days and even 30 days, which will allow you to see which metric delivers the best results.
To create those audiences, simply repeat the above step but remember to change the audience duration to the appropriate one. This results in you having multiple website custom audiences, one for each of the different audience durations.
If you have an audience of over 500 people visiting your website per day, then you can run a Reach objective website remarketing campaign. Click here for a full breakdown of how to run this campaign type successfully.
Now, let’s move on to creating Super-Hot audiences. Repeat the first steps of getting to the website custom audience creation window, and once you have this open, change the engagement condition from “All website traffic” to Purchases.
Change the audience duration to 180 days as we want to include as many existing customers as possible in this audience.
This audience groups everyone that has previously visited your site and triggered the purchase event on your website and are existing customers of yours. The aim here is to create a campaign which encourages a repeat purchase to get sales fast and increase your immediate revenue.
Often, you’ll find that these campaigns will generate the highest Return-On-Ad-Spend (ROAS), regularly double digits. This is usually due to the reason that there is trust already established with that person because they have previously purchased from your business.
With your audiences created we’ll now move on to creating the campaigns, first looking at the Hot audience campaign.
How to create a campaign that targets Hot audiences to drive immediate sales or leads
The first step to creating any campaign type, including website remarketing, is to choose the appropriate campaign objective.
Click on “Create” in your Ads Manager dashboard. This will open up either the “Quick Creation” workflow or the “Guided Creation” workflow depending on which you’ve used previously. If you see the Guided Creation workflow open change it to open the Quick Creation workflow, as this is what we’ll be using throughout this example of campaign creation.
In the Quick Creation workflow, choose your objective. In this example, since we are targeting Hot audiences of 180 days and trying to generate new sales, make sure to choose the Conversion objective as this allows us to optimise for purchases and increase the likelihood of getting sales fast. However, if your business is service-based and your aim is to generate leads, you’d optimise for the Lead event action.
Next, name your Ad Set and your ad. Leave split test and campaign budget optimisation turned off.
Now, we’ve gone ahead and chosen our objectives for our campaign and can move on to the Ad Set level, where we are going choose the optimisation, budget, audience, placements and optimisation and delivery settings.
First up, in the conversion event section, select Purchases or the
Lead event from the dropdown list depending on your end goal.
Now, let’s move to the budget section where you need to enter your daily budget. It’s important to understand that your budget dictates your audience reach, however, there is a point of diminishing returns. If you set your budget too high for your audience size, you’ll see higher CPMs and no improvement in results.
For this type of website remarketing campaign makes up the smallest size of all the audience temperatures and uses the Conversion objective which will further narrow your audience, you want to set a more conservative budget.
A rule of thumb we use here at the agency is to set a budget of a minimum of $5 per day per 1000 people matched in your source audience. For example, say your 180 day website custom audience of all website traffic has 8k people matched, you’d set a starting budget of 5*8 = $40 per day.
Next, we can begin to cover how to set your targeting in the audience section. As we’ve already gone ahead and previously created the audience, all you need to do now is search for it in the custom audience field. Then leave the rest of the audience section open, meaning open age and gender and no detailed targeting. The only other part of the audience section that should be completed is the location targeting.
The reason we don’t narrow the audience with demographic or interest data is that, by definition, the website custom audiences have already been narrowed to the hottest audience temperature by previously visiting your website.
Now, let’s move quickly onto the Placements section, where you need to leave automatic placements selected. As you are optimising for the highest value event action – purchases or leads -Facebook doesn’t favour low cost, poor quality audiences typically found on the Audience Network.
Due to the number of clients we’ve worked with here at the agency, we’ve found that letting Facebook figure out the optimal placement distribution to deliver better results is preferable to manually selecting your placements and will work in your favour to get sales fast.
Last but not least, at the bottom of the ad set, you need to choose your conversion window. In this example, you want to use the default optimisation settings of 7 days after clicking or 1 day after viewing. This works in your favour by giving Facebook the most data possible in order to effectively optimise for your chosen event action, purchases or leads.
With the ad set complete, the final step to creating this campaign is to create the ad that you want to be shown to your website custom audience.
Make your way to the ad level of your draft campaign and at the top, ensure your Facebook page and Instagram business profile are selected in the Identity section.
Scroll down the ad level settings and make sure Create New Ad is selected. No matter what you hear or read, there is no one single ad format to use for this campaign type that is guaranteed to deliver amazing results. We’ve seen great success with a single image, video, carousel and of course collection ad formats.
The easiest and quickest ad type to create is the single image or single video format, which allows you to start implementing this campaign as quickly as possible in order to obtain sales fast.
I’d recommend starting with a single image or video ad. As I mentioned previously, there is no one set ad format that you want to use over another, there is however a set ad copy type that we’ve found to be the most effective with this type of remarketing campaign: the testimonial/review ad. This ad copy makes up one part of the RTM Method for website remarketing.
Here, you want to position the customer testimonial in the first section of your ad copy and then follow that with an offer such as free shipping or a price incentive that your customers won’t be able to resist, such as a discount.
Finally, in the ad copy, you need to make sure you include a clear call to action that encourages people to click on your ad which then directs them to the product or service page on your website that you are advertising.
The reason testimonial ad types are so effective at producing sales fast when used with this type of campaign is that the one thing that everyone, who has visited your website but not converted into a customer, has in common: you yet to build enough trust with that person for them to have the confidence to buy from you.
Testimonial ads build the social proof required to establish greater levels of trust and confidence in your business, mostly because the testimonials used are coming from an unbiased source. This increases the likelihood people will click through from your ad to your site and convert into a paying customer.
As the audience is smaller in size, even with a conservative budget, you want to create multiple versions, two or three to start with, of your ad. It’s good practice to linear test them one at a time, making sure to only alter one variable at a time in order to accurately attribute the change in results to the appropriate variable, allowing you to start gathering data on each one.
In each ad variation you can use a different customer testimonial and creative, changing the image or video, but ensuring you keep the same product positioning, offer and call to action in your ad copy.
Continuing to update this campaign with fresh ads is key to seeing consistent and sustainable results for this campaign type.
Once you have created the two or three different testimonial ads in your campaign, make sure your Facebook pixel is enabled on all ads, turn on one of your ads leaving the other two turned off and then set your campaign into the review.
How to create a campaign that targets Super-Hot audiences to drive repeat sales from your existing customers.
To create the campaign that targets your Super-Hot audience of existing customers (pixeled purchasers) follow the exact same steps previously outlined which created the campaign targeting your Hot audiences but making sure to include the following small changes outlined below.
If you have already created the Hot audience campaign, you can simply use the duplicate tool to create a copy of that campaign.
The first change is to your budget. As this audience will be even smaller than your Hot audience size, you need to make sure you remember to set an even smaller budget, so as not to waste your ad spend and reduce the rate at which you reach ad fatigue. I’m talking $10 per day if your audience size is less than 1000 people.
The second change you need to make to get sales fast is to your audience. Here, you want to search and select your Super-Hot audience that you previously created earlier in the article, in the custom audience field. As with the Hot audience campaign, you don’t need to narrow your audience any more with demographic or detailed targeting.
The third change that you want to make is to the ads you’re serving to this audience segment. As they are existing customers, you don’t need to use testimonials in your ad copy since you’ve already established a relationship with them based on trust.
It could increase your conversion rate even further and get your sales fast if you include a discount or special offer when targeting these audiences. You wouldn’t even need to add in any additional social proof that that comes with the mention of a testimonial, because they are existing customers who already have confidence in your business or brand.
Conclusion
There you have it, how to create two campaigns that will generate immediate new leads or sales for your business.
For new customer acquisition use the Hot audience campaign, targeting people that have previously visited your website. Engage them and build social proof using testimonial ads along with an offer to drive people back to your website and convert to a customer.
For getting more value from your existing customers and to generate easy sales, target Super-Hot audiences with new offers to encourage a repeat purchase.
What do you think?
How do you generate sales with Facebook ads?
Let us know below!
About Charlie Lawrance
Charlie is an advertising strategist, writer, speaker, and agency owner. He’s the Founder and CEO of Gecko Squared, a Facebook and Instagram advertising agency that specialises in working with high growth clients from around the world including eCommerce, software and professional service businesses. He’s been planning and buying digital media for over 9 years since he started his first business aged just 18. Stay in touch by liking his Facebook Page (Charlie Lawrance).