Scale is the hardest part of running paid traffic.
(RELATED: Crafting a Digital Advertising Plan)
It can be (semi) easy to find your target market and run a successful campaign on Facebook to generate 50, 100, or even 500 leads.
But what about 5,000 – 50,000 leads from one single campaign?
You can only target the same group of people for so long before you start to notice fatigue.
So, how do you breathe life into your campaigns for VOLUME?
Facebook makes it drop-dead simple.
I’m going to show you how we’re using a tool to profitably scale our Facebook ad campaigns…. Using Facebook’s own data (all while playing by the rules :)).
But before I show you how to use the tool you need to know this…
It’s all about TARGETING.
No matter how captivating your image or copy – if you’re not putting your ads in front of the right audience your campaign will FAIL.
(To learn more about how to craft the right message and offer for your audience, click here).
We’ll show you how to use this tool to find your target audience on Facebook but, more importantly…
…we’ll show you how to SCALE your Facebook campaigns by locating and advertising to audiences similar to those that have already converted.
What does that mean? If you’ve already had success with one of your ad sets, this tool will give us data to help find where ELSE your target market is hanging out on Facebook (so that you can get in front of them there, too)!
Last year, Facebook released “Audience Insights,” an intelligence tool that allows you to uncover demographic and behavioral data on audiences before you ever target them with ads.
Audience Insights allows you to do research on your custom audiences including…
- Email lists
- Website visitors
- Customer phone lists
It also gives you interest targeting data including…
- FB pages of competitors
- influencers in your niche
- … and even a combination of both.
Audience Insights allows you to leverage Facebook’s data to discover other pages that your target market is most likely to “Like”… these are pages that you wouldn’t have thought to target before.
This allows you to find other people similar to those that…
- Converted on your web pages
- “Liked” your fan page
It will allow you to do something very important in media buying — SCALE…
In this blog post, I’ll show you exactly how we’re using Audience Insights to scale our Facebook campaigns.
Don’t worry, it’s easy.
(Watch this quick YouTube video for more info about the different Facebook Targeting options. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.)
How to Use Facebook Audience Insights
You’ll find Audience Insights on the left hand side of Ads Manager:
The first step for using Audience Insights is to input your custom audience or group of interests.
If you’re running an ad campaign to your custom audience and want to scale that ad, you’ll enter that.
Running the ad to a group of interests? Enter that list of interests.
The first arrow below is where you’d input your custom audience; the second is where you’d input your list of pages.
In this example, I’m going to use a campaign that we ran to promote our Ultimate Social Media Swipe File lead magnet.
We found a list of interests (with a potential audience size of ~500,000 people) that was converting really well after 5-7 days.
We wanted to scale to find MORE people most like this interest group so that we could generate more leads and sales, quickly.
So, we plugged those interests into the “interests” box in audience insights (along with the countries where we were running traffic)…
As you can see, this pulls demographic information on this particular audience including…
- age
- gender
- relationship status
- education level
This demographic information is interesting, but nothing like what you’ll find under the “Page Likes” tab…
The first section, “Top Categories” displays a wealth of new interests you can use to scale your campaigns including…
- Websites they “Like”
- Magazines they’re reading
- Software they’re using
- Public figures (actors, politicians) they follow
- … and a whole lot more
… this is KEY when finding other people that are most like your audience that is already converting.
Even better, when you scroll down the page, you’ll find a list of Facebook pages that are MOST LIKELY to be “liked” by your audience.
This is a gold mine.
Facebook is giving you a list of new interests to target that are MOST like the ones already converting…
So, what did we do from here? We created three new ad sets using the same copy and images that we used for the successful Ultimate Social Swipe File campaign that I mentioned above.
We took this list of pages that are MOST LIKELY to be liked by those people, and we started to create ad sets combining these interests to create audience sizes of 500,000 – 1,000,000 each.
For example, Mashable Social Media – Amy Porterfield – Mari Smith.
See what we’re doing here? We’re simply using Facebook’s data to scale campaigns by finding MORE people that are most like those that are already converting.
(NOTE: Want the Ultimate Facebook Ad Template Library? Copy & paste these 7 proven Facebook ad campaigns to create low-cost, high-converting ads on demand. Get them here.)
One More Trick To Scaling: Lookalike Audiences
If you’re using a conversion pixel to optimize for and/or track leads, this method will work even better.
Even if you just have a website custom audience pixel installed on your thank you page (most effective when designating for leads, since they happen more often then sales down your funnel and will have collected the most data), you can create Lookalike Audiences.
You can even create lookalike audiences based off of your customer list, email list, etc.
The trick here is to create the lookalike audience in the country where your market is most likely to live, for example, we created a Lookalike Audience based off of people who hit our Ultimate Social Media Swipe File conversion pixel (they opted in).
We wanted to find more people like those who had opted in so that we could scale.
Here’s exactly how this looked…
This audience came out to be over 2 million people. From our testing, we’ve found that audiences around 500,000 – 1,000,000 perform the best (especially for scale). So, we need to decrease the size of this audience.
We also need to add in a layer of targeting in order to make this audience more relevant. Yes, they may be like the audience of people who have opted in based off of 3-5 data points on their Facebook profile, but that doesn’t mean they’re interested in social media.
To overcome these two objections we simply pair this lookalike audience with a big, broad interest when we go to set up our targeting for this new ad set.
It looked something like this…
…and allowed us to target a new group of 500,000 people that are similar to those who already converted BUT also have interest in social media.
The “big” interest of Social Media Marketing which had 13 million + people allowed us to ensure we were running a targeted ad set.
This “lookalike” ad set is still outperforming all other ad sets in that campaign.
Even cooler? Input your lookalike audiences into audience insights for even more data…
With audience insights, Facebook is handing you a database of information for you to create the most targeted campaigns possible for SCALE.
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