Advanced Trick for Running Facebook Ads

The need to run ads on Facebook is pretty much universal at this point.

Therefore, you need to optimize and go beyond the basics.

Better targeting. Compelling creatives. Hidden tricks, that work.

If you are already running ads on Facebook but want to exceed your results, I’ve got good news for you. In this post, I'm going to share my crucial trick for fine-tuning ads to maximize ROI.

With that, let’s dive right in!

I noticed that I was starting to receive conversions from my ads after a post had gained some number of social proofs (likes, comments, shares). One day I saw a Facebook post of Bells Machining: firewood processor. It was extremely popular, but the page was brand new. So, I started researching different Facebook ads, their pages, comments and people who commented there.

Weirdly, some popular ads posts (based on a number of comments) were published on pages with a little number of followers. After studying the comments, I have realized that many of the first comments were made not by the Americans, but mainly by people from countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria, etc. After that, I understood completely this scheme and started looking for ways how to use it.

Bells Machining: firewood processor

493K Shares | 42K Comments | 38M Views

Facebook Post

There are several types of advertising campaigns on Facebook. Each of them has its own tasks.

The Facebook algorithm optimizes your ads based on your campaigns’ goals:

Engagement which entails interaction with a post. Facebook targets and adjusts advertising to those people who are more likely to engage with the post (like, comment, share, watch the video). But these people will not follow links to outside Facebook and definitely are less likely to buy.

Website Clicks will be shown to those people who are more likely to go to the website, get acquainted with what is written there, but these people are not always ready to perform the targeted action (registration, subscription, purchase, etc.).

Website Conversions optimization type is the most expensive one. Facebook shows ads to those who are more likely to convert. Facebook pixel has to be installed on the site to notify Facebook algorithm about conversions happened.

A “website conversions” campaign sounds very attractive, but no matter how smart Facebook pixel is and how great your ad is, people are not in a hurry to buy advertising that has 10 likes and no comments below. People are willing to want what everyone else wants. It works like a queue: as soon as several people come to the same place, all passing ones begin to stop and wonder what is there happening.

The takeaway? Ad posts should have plenty of social proof if you want the best possible results. So, here are some steps on how to get people to buy from your Facebook ad:

1. Create A Post On The Page.

Creating a post on a page instead of an ordinary ad gives an option to use a horizontal, square, and even vertical image formats. Also, in the post, you can write the text of any length. There are no restrictions, just ensure that the text in the picture does not exceed 20%. Here is a tool that helps to check the image for suitability: https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay. This post will be used as an advertisement.

2. Collect social proofs (likes, shares, comments).

Create an ads campaign optimized on “Engagement” and targeted countries such as Nigeria and the Philippines. You can try others, but these work best for me.

Firstly, advertising in these countries is incredibly cheap, and secondly, the population of these countries speaks excellent English. I visited user profiles and was shocked by the fact that, for example, in Nigeria, almost all posts of people were written in perfect English with American idioms. For $10 I usually get 1000–1500 post likes. Here are the results of one of the advertising campaigns.

The same campaign but targeted for the US spent $50 and I was not even close to the results shown in the screenshot. Approximately it gave me 300–400 likes.

3. Comments to Posts.

I comment on the post myself and ask my colleagues/friends to do so. Adding photos in comments works very well. This helps others not to be the first commenting on something and helps to set the tone of the conversation. After I have scored the right amount of likes and comments, I stop advertising in the Philippines and Nigeria and launch advertising for the core market with the “Website conversions”.

Remarks? Using this scheme, I launched about 10 different products, and all of them were successful. Some campaigns are better than others some are worse. In any case, we must understand that the advertising campaign will not work well forever. Facebook Pixel looks at your targeting and selects the best from it, those who are more likely to convert.

Over time your cost per conversion will increase. In this case, simply create a new ad and make everything all over again.

Most importantly, never give up if you failed the first campaign. Keep trying and you’ll find your advertising campaigns that reward your previous failures.