.st0{fill:#FFFFFF;}

How to Spend Less on Facebook Ads and Get Better Results

Don’t you love getting a better bang for your buck?

If you’re spending money on Facebook Ads for your online business, every dollar counts.

The better you are at decreasing your cost per action (CPA) (i.e. the average price you pay Facebook for your conversion goal—lead, purchase, add to cart, etc.), the quicker you’ll make money from Facebook ads.

But when you’re new to Facebook ads, or to conversion optimization, it’s normal to feel as ill-equipped to decrease your CPA as a deep-sea tube worm performing brain surgery.

Check out this cool ‘re-dip strategy’ to discover how you can launch a Facebook ad campaign and then use it to help you decrease your cost per lead by strategically increasing the conversion rate of the landing page where you send the Facebook ad traffic.

We used it to increase the conversions (and therefore, decrease our cost per lead) of a landing page by 47.74%…

Control Variation – Conversion Rate: 14.14%

Test Variation – Conversion Rate: 20.89%

Test Results from Thrive Optimize

Start With Data…and Luck

Step 0: What You Should Already Have

The ‘re-dip strategy’ requires you to create a Facebook ad campaign to get more leads using paid traffic. Even though I won’t be covering these in this post, they are crucial to your success:

Note: If you already have a landing page getting traffic without running any Facebook ad traffic to it, you should publish a clone of the page to use for the Facebook ad traffic, as it will give you better data. 

Step 1: Create Your Ads & Publish Them

Create 18 ad combinations from 3 images, 3 headlines and 2 ad texts for the ad campaign. I use AdEspresso to do this quickly, but you can also do it manually using Facebook’s Ad Manager or their Power Editor.

3 images, 3 headlines, and 2 ad texts to create 18 total ads.

This many ads gives you variety, but not so much you have to wait months to find the winning ad variations. Try to publish ads highlighting different value propositions of your offer.

Step 2: Find the Winners

This is part data and part luck because a large uncontrollable in your ads’ success/failure is the Facebook algorithm.

Facebook wants to make sure their users have a good experience, so when you click publish on your ads, they aren’t going to just blast them out. Facebook slowly drips your new ad variations to see which ones perform well and then shows those ads more than the ads not performing as well.

For example, one thing the algorithm takes into account is the level of engagement your ads get through “likes” and comments. An ad with lots of comments and discussion will get preference over one with none.

Once your campaign is launched, you need to periodically check in and pause underperforming ads.

These are the stages you should go through to find the winning 2-4 ad variations (you can find all of this data in the tool you’re using to publish your ads, e.g. the Facebook ads manager):

  • Stage 1 (Days 3-5) Impressions – Is Facebook showing the ad to your audience? After 3-5 days you’ll see which ads the Facebook Algorithm is giving preference to. Pause the variations getting noticeably fewer impressions.
  • Stage 2 (Week 1-2): Click Through Rate (CTR) – Is your ad appealing enough for your audience to even click it? After about a week, you’ll start to see some variation in the CTR of your different ads. Pause the variations getting noticeably fewer clicks.
  • Stage 3 (Week 2-6): Conversion Rates and Cost per Lead – Which ad is performing the best to get you email addresses? This stage takes the longest to get data for, but your goal is to trim down your ad campaign to the 2-4 ads with the lowest cost per lead and highest conversion rates.

‘Re-dipping’ Your Facebook Ads to Build Your New Landing Page Test Variation

At this point, you have 2-4 high performing ads sending visitors to your original lead generation landing page from Facebook.

You’ve optimized the ads to make sure you’re getting the best outcome, now it’s time to try to improve the conversion rate of the landing page by ‘re-dipping’ your ad and using it to create a new landing page variation to further decrease your cost per lead.

Creating your original lead generation landing page is hard enough (your control variation), but if you want to start improving conversions, you’ll need to come up with different angles to test against your control to see if these different angles resonate with your audience more (because the conversion rates are better).

These small wins add up to massive wins for you over time.

To have the best chance of getting a win, we recommend testing “bowling balls vs. paperclips.”

This means you want to test landing pages blatantly dissimilar from each other (like the difference in weight between a bowling ball and paperclip) because it takes less time to find if one is getting significantly more sign-ups than the other.

Coming up with winning ‘bowling ball’ angles is hard, which is why I love the ‘re-dip’ strategy: not only is it a quick and easy win to find a new ‘bowling ball’ angle to test (by using one of your high performing Facebook ads from step 2 to ‘re-dip’ for a new landing page variation), but it also increases congruence.

Good congruence will (probably) be better for your conversions.

It’s when someone has the feeling of  “Yup, I’m in the right place. This is what I wanted and expected” after they click your ad and see your landing page.

This is not the experience you want your visitors to have when they see your landing page after clicking your ad.

Choose one of your winning ads and use it as a model for your new lead-generation landing page variation (the re-dip version).

You want to use similar colors, images and copy from the Facebook ad on your new landing page because this will improve the congruent feeling from your ad to the page.

Here are some examples of the re-dip strategy in action:

Facebook Ad

Re-Dipped Landing Page

Facebook Ad

Re-Dipped Landing Page

Click to Enlarge

You Better Test That

You have your new landing page variation. Nice!

Now, because you shouldn’t blindly take advice from some guy on the internet about YOUR business as The Truth…

You’ll want to run a test to see if the ‘re-dip’ variation you built is ACTUALLY going to perform better than your original. You can’t just assume better congruence will lead to better conversions for you because it did for us.

The best way to test which landing page performs better with your Facebook Ad traffic is with an A/B test.

Here’s how to set one up under 1 minute using Thrive Optimize, so you can see if the congruence hypothesis is true for YOU.

Set up your A/B test between the two variations (original version vs. ‘re-dip’ version) and start it. Now leave it running until you have statistically significant results on which page performs better.

With Thrive Optimize you can enable “automatic winner” mode, which will show the winning landing page variation once there are significant results so you don’t have to worry about interpreting the data.

This is huge because you get to keep your original Facebook ad campaign running the entire time the A/B test on your landing pages is happening.

And if your ‘re-dip’ variation wins, Thrive Optimize makes the switch automatically, which means you don’t have to make a new Facebook ad campaign. You get to keep your winning ads running (the ones already pleasing the Facebook algorithm with good social proof through likes, shares, and comments), while also improving your landing page conversion rates at the same time.

Ideally, you get a higher conversion rate on the ‘re-dipped’ landing page, which means you’re getting a better payoff by spending less money for new leads!

And that’s the entire ‘re-dip strategy’! Here it is again in 4 steps:

  1. Use 18 Facebook ads to drive traffic to a lead generation landing page.
  2. Slowly trim the 18 ads down to the best 2 to 4 performers.
  3. Pick one of the ads to use as inspiration for a ‘re-dipped’ landing page variation.
  4. Test the two landing pages against each other to try to increase your conversion rate and decrease your cost per lead.

Sounds difficult… outsource your  Social Media Marketing and let our experts manage it all for you. Contact us now (402) 810-6971  for more information!