HOW I ACHIEVED POSITIVE ROI USING FB ADS MANAGER & HOW YOU CAN TOO

What Exactly I Achieved

It’s enormously easy to create a campaign in ANY advertising platform and get a bunch of impressions and clicks. However, what isn’t so easy, is generating positive ROI. 

Positive ROI is when your returns from advertising are greater than your investment in advertising. In order to actually achieve a positive ROI, there are a bunch of steps that absolutely must be followed. 

In today’s article, we’ll be going over those exact steps so that you can start generating positive ROI for yourself. 

However, first I would like to show you some of my own (very recent) results. 

If you take a look at that data and use an ROI calculator like this one you will be able to see your exact investment gain, ROI %, and Annualised ROI. Of course, this can be manually calculated, but I prefer to leave no room for mistakes, so I use this. 

When you input the numbers into the calculator, for the first campaign, the results are:

• Investment Gain: $1799.87
• ROI: 453.65%
• Annualised ROI: 4,146,538,352,076.54% (which means over a year period you’d be expecting over 4 trillion % ROI, assuming the results were consistent and the audience was large enough to consistently provide these returns, which for this specific campaign is not possible).

When you input the numbers into the calculator, for the second campaign, the results are: 

• Investment Gain: $2840.36
• ROI: 157.92% (notice how this ROI is lower than campaign #1, despite the higher investment gain).
• Annualised ROI: 75,581,176.55%

If you’re running advertisements online, you should be doing this, and if you’re not, then you have no idea where you’re money is going and whether the marketing is working. You need to know exactly how much you’re spending and how much you’re making. 

Mini rant: There have been cases where I wasn’t able to make a positive ROI in a certain period of time, however the problem doesn’t lie in not being able to make positive ROI, because that can always be fixed. 

The problem in the marketing industry today is that so many “agencies” and “professional” marketers run advertisements WITHOUT recording and taking into account $$$ data. 

Maybe they’re scared to fail a client? 

Maybe they just don’t know how to record that data (it took me a while to figure it out!)? 

But I say, you should fail them! And if you don’t know how to record that data, you bloody hell better learn quickly. 

Isn’t it better to go to a client with a negative ROI and say, “Hey, this is how much money you spent on FB ads, this is how much you made, and we now know that in the future, you should focus on A B and C to make more return on your ads” than going with “The ads are working look at how many impressions you got” despite the fact that they’re not seeing any cash in their bank accounts? 

Long story short, record ROI. Even if it’s an awareness campaign and the objective isn’t sales, you should still be recording that data because it can provide highly valuable insights. 

Ok, back to the main story. As you saw earlier, there was a positive ROI, and there was also a very high (and extremely inaccurate) annualised ROI. But this isn’t about showing off - it’s about showing you what I can do first before I tell you how to do it, so you know you’re learning from a reliable resource. Now that you know, let’s learn. 

How To Generate Positive ROI

Research, Research, Research!

You need to be doing market and customer research so you know exactly:

• Who your customers are
• What they want
• Why they want it
• What barriers, uncertainties, fears, and motivations lie in your target customer’s psyche so that you can target these in messaging/content
• What stage of the customer buyer journey they’re in
• What they’re willing to pay
• What content they like looking at
• What message you need to be sending them in order to convert
• & more

The question is, how exactly do you begin research?

You can find out by downloading my Free eBook here. Note that the book also speaks about other topics, but research is one topic that is covered in the book and you will gain actionable steps for research from reading this book. 

?Content Is Key

Your content needs to be strong on two levels: 

1. It must have the right message. 
2. It must be high quality. 

--- THE RIGHT MESSAGE ---

If your audience is receiving a message through content that doesn’t hit their motivating triggers, pain triggers and fear triggers, how can you expect to receive a strong response (purchase) from them?

You need to really sit down and craft a draft piece of content that hits these triggers, and then test this with people you know who may be in your target audience. If you don’t personally know anyone, then create a post with the content and boost it for $10 to see what sort of engagement you get. If there is no engagement, the chances are the messaging is incorrect. 

Also, think about what the purpose of your advertisement is. What action do you want the user to take? You should base your content off of this. For example, if you want the have landing page views, then your content should entice users just enough so that their curiosity spikes and they are inclined to click for more info. On the other hand, if your goal is awareness, then the message should be information around the product or service, or perhaps an announcement of some kind. 

--- High Quality ---

Your content needs to be powerful. Generally, I will get someone else to create my content if I’m using it for a purchase based campaign, because professional video creators and designers are much better than I am at the two skills and can create a far better end result than I ever could. Don’t skip out on this, if you can afford it, it DEFINITELY makes a difference in the end ROI results - I’ve personally seen this with my own eyes. 

TESTING

Test, test, test. Rather than creating a $2000 campaign and going with your ads, make sure that your ads hit the right triggers first in your target audience. I already mentioned this briefly, however, it’s so important, so I want to speak about it a little longer. 

Have a piece of content that you think will kill it in your ad campaign? Great. Go out and test it before spending $1000 on a campaign. If you have no one to test it on for free, spend a smaller amount on the creative to test the response of users. Then, based on the results, improve the content, and use the revamped content for your actual campaign. Now, you’re using something that you know already works, before you even start campaign. 

This concept of testing can really be used across a larger range of areas when making advertisements, from content to target audience, to messaging, to colour preferences, typography preferences and more. However, unless you have a lot of $$$ to spend, it might be better to keep the testing simple to start with.  

The Customer Buyer Journey

Everyone knows about the customer buyer journey. In case you don’t, here is a quick definition from Hubspot: the buyer's journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service. 

There are many models of the customer buyer journey, but from my perspective, there’s four parts: 

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Why is this relevant when it comes to ROI? 

Well, it’s essential to utilise the customer buyer journey in your advertisement strategy. If your target audience have never heard of you and you hit them with a “Buy Now” ad, do you think they will purchase? 

They might, if it’s an impulse buy. But in this situation, it’d be better to start with a video view awareness advertisement and then later re-target interested users with more direct advertisements. Notice the key word I used - interested users. They go from awareness and then to interest. You’re bringing them along a journey. 

This concept is absolutely essential when creating an advertisement campaign. You can’t (in most cases) just create a campaign and hope to be successful. You need to bring users along a journey with your brand. Remember, it takes users an average of 6 to 8 interactions before they even think about buying your product. 

In that case, doesn’t it make sense to guide them from awareness, to interest, to desire and finally action, increasing those interactions at each stage of the journey? You need to mould your strategy to follow this model, because it works, every single time. 

Vigorous Data Analysis

Believe it or not, the campaigns I’ve achieved positive ROI from, even when all the above was perfect, had vigorous amounts of data analysis involved. 

You see, if you simply start a campaign and then ignore it until it ends, you’re in trouble (most of the time). It’s quite likely that if you do this, the campaign just won’t make positive ROI. You’ll probably make some money, but you likely won’t make more than what you spend. Why is this?

Well, it’s mainly because there will be some ads that make a positive return and some that don’t. In the same way, if you’re targeting various audiences, there will be some which are more successful than others. It’s important to check these statistics regularly (daily) so you can make decisions around what to sack and what to keep. Also, this gives you the opportunity to make better decisions in the future around what ad content, messaging and audiences work best, among other things. 

However, for this to work, you need to be able to view purchase data, among other data types. This means you need pixels (or other codes) set up correctly to track this data, which leads to my final golden nugget. 

Getting Your Data Right From The Start

There are two essential parts to getting your data right so that your analysis can be conducted during the campaigns running time, which include: 

1. Correct data integrations in place
2. Correct viewing of data on specific platform

Correct Data Integrations In Place

It is essential to track purchases, period. If your marketing campaign aims at generating leads (such as booking phone consultations), then it is essential to attach a value to that conversion and track it. You need to not only track these conversions but also ensure the marketing channel you are using to advertise (i.e. facebook) is tracking them correctly when users purchase from ads. 

On top of this, you would need to look into click-attribution purchases vs view-attribution purchases and view results for each, which is possible in certain marketing channels, such as Facebook. 

Finally, it would be of benefit to use UTM parameters to track conversions from specific ads, audiences etc (on top of this other detailed data such as bounce rates would be visible as well as Google Analytics Goals that are set up). 

Since this post is about how to generate positive ROI, we won’t go over how to track this data here (it would deviate too far from the topic of interest), but instead only mention that it’s essential to have these in place. If you have absolutely no idea how to do these things, look into pixels, custom pixel events, tracking codes, and UTM parameters. 

Conclusion

To conclude, using the above golden nuggets are absolutely essential in generating positive ROI from a campaign. If you’re stuck and really need help, feel free to contact me here.