Priya Florence Shah
Are you a small business just beginning to explore the world of Facebook marketing?
If you have been having trouble trying to get a decent Return-On-Investment (ROI) on Facebook, you’re not the only one. New research states that 59% of small businesses struggle to prove Facebook ROI.
This is not exactly surprising, considering that it’s not exactly the easiest thing in the world to measure ROI on Facebook.
In this article, I outline a step-by-step path to how small businesses can boost their Facebook ad ROI.
1. Define your conversion goals
Before you create an ad or a promotion on Facebook, be very clear about the goals you want to achieve. Do you want to boost engagement on your posts, get traffic to your website or get leads to call you immediately? Depending on your conversion goals, you need to work on an appropriate creative for your ad.
For instance, if you’re a resort that wants to get leads to call immediately and make a booking, include a phone number in the ad. The way you’ll know whether your ad is working is if you start receiving calls.
On the other hand, if you want to get traffic to your website, include a button or link that takes them to your website for more information. And if all you want to achieve is to ramp up the likes and shares on your blog post, those kind of numbers are pretty easy to measure.
2. Create an irresistible offer
Want to boost the response to your Facebook ad? You must have an irresistible offer to go with it. Some of the offers you can create are:
- Discounts
- Freebies
- Contests
- Giveaways
A resort or hotel could offer a free night to their Facebook fans, a restaurant could offer a discount on the bill.
You could hold a Facebook contest for any number of things. Let your imagination run wild and come up with a creative and really enticing contest idea. And if your creativity runs dry, check out these awesome Facebook contest ideas.
3. Use a beautiful image
It’s a well-established fact that images boost engagement on Facebook. The more attractive your image is, the better the response to it. If you’re a restaurant, capitalize on the draw of “food porn.” Take professional, high-quality images of your best dishes and post them on Facebook.
If you’re a hotel or resort, do the same for your property. If you’re a retail shop, take high-quality images of your most attractive products and use them in your creatives. The most visually appealing images have good lighting and attractive, contrasting colours. Make sure that your images stand out in your Facebook feed and see your engagement and ROI climb.
4. Include a very clear Call To Action (CTA)
A call to action (CTA) is an instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response. You can increase your Facebook ROI with a clear and definitive CTA. You can easily add a CTA button to your Facebook page.
When you run a Facebook ad, always tell your audience what it is you want them to do after viewing your ad. If you post your ad without a clear CTA, how will your target audience know what step they should take next – whether it’s liking your post, clicking on your link or calling the number in the ad?
Include a way to call you, visit your website or just ask them to ‘like’ your ad, if that’s your goal. Not including a CTA in your ads is akin to flushing money down the drain.
5. Check your relevance score
According to Facebook:
The more relevant an advert is to its audience, the better it’s likely to perform. Advert relevance score makes it easier for you to understand how your advert resonates with your audience.
How does Facebook assign your ad a relevance score? Here’s how:
After your advert is served more than 500 times, it receives a daily relevance score from 1–10, ten meaning that we estimate your advert to be highly relevant and one meaning that we estimate it not to be very relevant.
Your advert’s relevance score is based on positive and negative feedback that they expect from the people seeing it, based on how the advert is performing.
When you create an ad, make sure it has a high relevance score. If a score begins to dip, it may be an indicator that the ad’s creative or audience needs to be refreshed. Check out Facebook’s own tips to improve your advert relevance score.
6. Use split-testing to select the best ad
The simplest way to split test your ads is to upload multiple images while creating your ad. Facebook will rotate each of these images and tell you which of them is converting best. Then you can delete the non-performing ads and continue testing the images that work best.
For more information on using split-testing on Facebook, check out this excellent post from Social Media Examiner.
7. Measure the response of your ad
To know how your Facebook ads are converting you need to know how to measure your ad’s response. With some metrics, this is quite straightforward. For example:
- Ads for Page Likes = higher Fan numbers,
- Ads with phone numbers = more phone calls,
- Promoted posts = more post and page likes.
Ads with links or CTA buttons that lead to your website should translate into more website traffic, but this is a little more complicated to measure and involves adding a Facebook conversion pixel to your website.
If your website runs on WordPress, this is something you can easily do with the Facebook conversion pixel plugin. Jon Loomer has some excellent instructions on implementing the conversion pixel.
You can also use Google Analytics to measure your Facebook traffic and conversions. If you want to go deeper, you can even combine the power of Google Analytics and Facebook to measure your fan traffic.
According to Jon Loomer, there is a long list of actions that you can monitor on Facebook. The key is deciding which metrics are important and which you can safely ignore.
So how important is Facebook to your social media strategy? Did you find these 7 steps useful in boosting your Facebook ROI? Do leave your feedback in the comments below.
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