The Secret Behind High Performance Meta Ads

This weeks newsletter delves into the intricacies of high-performance advertising on Meta, and why so many people struggle to scale conversion focused campaigns while maintaining a high return on ad spend. If you'd like this newsletter to hit your inbox each week, you can subscribe here.

This is a (Pre-Black Friday and Pre-Christmas) Meta campaign for one of our clients. I have blocked out their information to maintain their anonymity. The results are simple. They spend €11,379 on Meta advertising and can directly attribute €98,005.11 in sales. That means for every €1 they spent on advertising they had €8.61 on sales.

In a time where the average “good” campaign is a return of 4 or higher, it’s time to turn to deeper tactics to grow and scale your account. This is how we scaled these campaigns and stemmed their campaigns from dipping below 8:1.

The advice we’ve been given all along as marketers is to drive conversion focused campaigns. In other words, hitting the sales option when you’re setting up campaigns. Why? Because it forces Meta to go and seek out your customer that is ready to buy. But there’s a problem with that….

When you tell Facebook to only go after those who are ready to buy, the audience size gets a hell of a lot smaller. When that happens, your costs go up. Here’s a simple way of looking at it. Your target audience might be in any of these three buckets. Ready to buy, not ready to buy or almost ready to buy. When you use a conversion or sales focused campaign on Facebook - they ONLY target those who are ready to buy. That’s great right? Well not really. Because that number is finite within that group and everyone does that and so the costs are really high. What very few advertisers are doing is thinking about the deeper strategy of pulling people from the almost ready to buy or not ready to buy into the ready to buy bucket to make that audience bigger.

So how do you do it? Well the most simple and effective way is to start telling Facebook to get in front of a warm audience first. My favourite way to do this is with a video views campaign using the engagement campaign option. Why? Because Facebook considers this campaign objective to be one of consideration. Or in other words - almost ready to buy. The cost of these campaigns? Typically 5x cheaper than a conversion focused campaign. But how is this going to help you if they’re only almost ready to buy?

The next step is simple - as your video views campaign is running, you can create an audience of people who viewed the video and create a new conversion focused campaign based on that audience. Telling Facebook to now target people who now have a supporting touchpoint from you and to move them into the conversion focus campaign. Essentially you’re manipulating it to scale your conversion focused campaign by creating a larger audience that has now been supported by an additional handful of touchpoints to move them through the funnel in a really cost effective way.

Of course, it goes without saying that your creative, positioning and messaging has to be absolutely crushing it throughout each stage of the funnel for successfully pull this off. But if you’ve had early signals that you could be getting more out of Facebook but just can’t scale and maintain the return on ad spend, this is likely your solution.

Employ a strategy that initially targets a broader audience, particularly those in the 'almost ready to buy' category, using less expensive campaign types like video views or engagement campaigns. These campaigns are often significantly cheaper and help in building a warm audience. Once you've engaged these individuals, you can retarget them with conversion-focused campaigns. This method effectively enlarges your target audience, creating a larger pool of potential customers who have already interacted with your brand, thus making them more likely to convert.

This strategy leverages the power of multiple touchpoints, moving people through the purchase funnel in a cost-effective way, ultimately leading to a higher return on ad spend.

If you need support in 2024 to scale your Meta Campaign, you can get in touch with us directly here.