by Do you need to accelerate your sales or leads? Have you considered using Facebook ads to meet your objectives?
In this article, you'll learn how to create Facebook ad campaigns that can greatly increase your chances of success.
#1: Create Hot and Super-Hot Facebook Website Custom Audiences
With the advertising goal of generating fast results for your business, whether that's leads or sales, you want to target hot or super-hot audiences in your campaigns.
There are four audience types when it comes to Facebook advertising: cold, warm, hot, and super-hot. Cold audiences include people who don't know your business yet. These are full of potential customers and you create them via saved audiences and lookalike audiences. Next, you have warm audiences. These are people who have previously engaged with your business such as page engagement custom audiences and video custom audiences.
You then have hot audiences. These are the hottest audiences of potential customers and contain people who visited your website but haven't converted into leads or customers.
Finally, you have super-hot audiences. These contain people who are existing customers to whom you run existing customer retention campaigns to drive immediate sales and increase your lifetime customer value based on their repeat purchases.
The first step in creating a campaign that targets the hottest audiences and delivers the fastest results is to create the audiences in your Audiences dashboard. First, you'll create the hot audiences and then the super-hot.
Note: This article assumes you’ve already completed these tasks:
- Installed the Facebook pixel. Check out this article for step-by-step instructions.
Create Hot Audiences Based on Overall Website Traffic
To create your hot audiences, navigate to your Audiences dashboard, click on Create Audience, and select Custom Audience from the drop-down menu.
When the Create a Custom Audience window opens, click on Website.
In the website custom audience creation window that opens, leave the default All Website Visitors selected in the criteria section. Next to that setting, change the audience duration to 180 days.
With these settings, this website custom audience will group everyone who has visited your website in the last 180 days, which will give you the largest audience size.
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Pro Tip: If you have a large number of website visitors per month—for instance, more than 10K people—you can shorten the audience duration from 180 days to 90 days, 60 days, or even 30 days to see which delivers the best results. To create these audiences, simply repeat the above steps and change the audience duration as appropriate. You end up with multiple website custom audiences, one for each of the different audience durations.
If you have more than 500 people visiting your website per day, you can run a Reach objective website remarketing campaign. Click here for a complete walkthrough of how to run this campaign type.
Create Super-Hot Audiences Based on Website Visitors Who Have Purchased From You
Now you'll move on to creating super-hot audiences. Repeat the first steps above to get to the website custom audience creation window.
Once you have it open, change the engagement condition from All Website Traffic to Purchase. Change the audience duration to 180 days because you want to include as many existing customers as possible in this audience.
This audience will group everyone who has triggered the purchase event on your website and is your existing customer. This campaign aims to encourage a repeat purchase to increase your immediate revenue.
Super-hot audiences often generate the highest return on ad spend (ROAS), regularly double-digits. You've already built enough trust with these people that they've previously purchased from your business.
Once you've created your hot and super-hot audiences, you're ready to move on to creating the campaigns, starting with the hot audience campaign.
#2: Create a Facebook Ad Campaign That Retargets Hot Audiences to Drive Immediate Sales or Leads
The first step in creating any campaign type, including website remarketing, is to select your campaign objective.
Click on Create in your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard to set up a new campaign. This will open up either the Quick Creation workflow or the Guided Creation workflow, depending on which one you've used previously. If you see the Guided Creation workflow open, change it to open the Quick Creation workflow, because this is what we'll be using throughout this example campaign creation.
In the Quick Creation workflow, choose your objective. In this case, you're targeting hot audiences of 180 days and trying to generate new sales so select the Conversions objective to optimize for purchases. If you're a service business and want to generate leads, you'd optimize for the Lead event action.
Next, name your ad set and your ad. Leave Split Test and Campaign Budget Optimization turned off.
Now move on to the ad set level, where you're going to choose the conversion event, budget, audience, placements, and optimization and delivery settings.
First up, in the Conversion section, select the Purchase or Lead event, depending on your goal.
Now move to the Budget section and enter your daily budget. Your budget dictates your audience reach; however, there's a point of diminishing returns. If you set too high a budget for your audience size, you'll see higher CPMs and no gain in results.
This type of website remarketing campaign has the smallest size of all of the audience temperatures and uses the Conversions objective that further narrows your audience. Thus, you want to set a more conservative budget.
A rule of thumb we use at the agency is to set a budget of at least $5 per day per 1K people matched in your source audience. So if your 180-day website custom audience of all website traffic has 8K people matched, you'd set a starting budget of $5 x 8 = $40 per day.
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GET THE DETAILSNext, set your targeting in the Audience section. As you've previously created the audience, all you have to do is search for it in the Custom Audiences field. Then leave the rest of the Audience section open, meaning open age and gender and no detailed targeting. The only other part of the Audience section you should complete is location targeting.
The reason for not narrowing the audience with demographic or interest data is because, by definition, the website custom audiences have already been narrowed to the hottest audience temperature by including people who have previously visited your website.
In the Placements section, leave Automatic Placements selected. Because you're optimizing for the highest-value event action—purchases or leads—Facebook doesn't favor low-cost, poor-quality audiences typically found on the Audience Network. We've found that letting Facebook figure out the optimal placement distribution to deliver better results is preferable to manually selecting your placements.
Last but not least, at the bottom of the ad set, choose your conversion window. In this case, you want to use the default optimization setting of 7 Days After Clicking or 1 Day After Viewing. This will give Facebook the most data to optimize for your chosen event action—purchases or leads.
With the ad set complete, the final step in setting up this campaign is to create the ad that will be shown to your website custom audience.
Navigate to the ad level of your draft campaign. At the top, ensure your Facebook page and Instagram business profile are selected in the Identity section.
Then scroll down the ad level settings and make sure Create New Ad is selected. There is no specific ad format that you need to use for this campaign type to deliver amazing results. We've seen great success with single image, video, carousel, and collection ad formats.
The single image or single video ad format is the easiest and quickest to create so you can start implementing this campaign right away for the fastest results.
I recommend starting with a single image or video. As I mentioned previously, there's no particular ad format that you want to use but there's a specific ad copy type that I've found most effective with this type of remarketing campaign: the testimonial/review ad.
With this type of ad, you want to position the customer testimonial in the first section of your ad copy and follow it with an offer (such as free shipping) or a price incentive (such as a discount). Finally, include a clear call to action (CTA) that encourages people to click on your ad, which then directs them to the product or service web page that you're advertising.
In the example below, you can see the three parts of a testimonial ad: the testimonial itself, followed by an offer, and finally a CTA.
The reason that testimonial ads are so effective with this type of campaign is that the one thing everyone in your audience (people who visited your website but haven't converted into customers) has in common is that you haven't built enough trust for them to have the confidence to buy from you.
Testimonial ads build the social proof required to establish greater levels of trust and confidence in your business so people will buy because of your ad once they visit your website.
Because the audience is smaller, even with a conservative budget, you want to create multiple versions—two or three to start with—of your ad and linear test them one at a time as you start gathering data on each one. In each ad variation, use a different customer testimonial and creative such as the image or video but keep the same product positioning, offer, and CTA in your ad copy.
When you have small audience sizes, creating multiple ad variations will help combat ad fatigue. Continuing to update this campaign with fresh ads is key to seeing consistent and sustainable results.
Once you've created two or three different testimonial ads in your campaign, make sure your Facebook pixel is enabled on all ads, turn on one of your ads while leaving the other two turned off, and then set your campaign into review.
#3: Create a Facebook Campaign That Retargets Super-Hot Audiences to Drive Repeat Sales From Existing Customers
To create the campaign that targets your super-hot audience of existing customers (pixeled purchasers), follow the same steps outlined above to create the campaign targeting your hot audiences, and make the following small changes described below.
If you've already created the hot audience campaign, you can simply use the Duplicate tool to create a draft copy of that campaign.
The first change is to your budget. This super-hot audience will be even smaller than your hot audience so you want to set a smaller budget. I'm talking $10 per day if your audience size is fewer than 1K people.
The second change is to your audience. In the Custom Audiences field, search and select the super-hot audience you created earlier. As with the hot audience campaign, you don't need to further narrow your audience with demographic or detailed targeting.
The third change is to the ads themselves. As this audience is comprised of existing customers, you don't need to use testimonials in your ad copy. You can position a discount or special offer to these audiences with no additional social proof because you've already created that trust and confidence with them.
Conclusion
There you have it—how to create two campaigns that will generate immediate new leads or sales for your business.
For new customer acquisition, use the hot audience campaign targeting people who have previously visited your website. Engage them and build social proof using testimonial ads along with an offer to drive people back to your website and convert them to customers.
To get more value from your existing customers and generate easy sales, target super-hot audiences with new offers to encourage a repeat purchase.
What do you think? Will you try these Facebook campaigns to generate quick sales for your business? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
More articles on Facebook ads:
- Learn how to retarget ads to engaged Instagram and Facebook fans.
- Discover how to optimize your ad budget between Facebook and Instagram.
- Find out how to retarget on Facebook and Instagram with dynamic product ads.
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