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As an SEO expert, you know what it takes to get your content ranked high in search engine results. Depending on how good you are at SEO, sometimes the only results displayed higher than yours are those from PPC campaigns. SEO and PPC are considered to be two very different marketing approaches. But these strategies are more similar than you think. The biggest difference between SEO and PPC is you're paying for your PPC campaigns, as the name implies. Driving organic traffic to your website with SEO is free. While keywords are obviously important to PPC managers, they don't need to focus on search engine optimization as much because they're bidding on those keywords. If they're willing to pay enough, their search engine ads can generate hits and clicks, even if their headlines aren't extremely SEO friendly. Using SEO to drive website traffic is much more competitive. To gain an advantage over your competitors, you can use PPC principles to improve your SEO strategy. After all, your search ranking is useless if it doesn't generate clicks. These are the top 13 marketing tips SEOs can learn from PPC managers. By combining principles from these two strategies, you'll be able to drive more traffic to your website. 1. Write headlines that generate clicksAs I said before, the basic principle behind SEO is getting a high search ranking. This is obviously very important for your traffic. But is that high ranking translating to clicks and traffic? It should. The first page of search engine results generates 75% of all clicks. If you're getting ranked high but not seeing a spike in traffic, there is likely a problem with your headlines. You need to learn how to increase clicks by mastering your headlines. There are common elements in titles that encourage clicks. Even if your headline has SEO friendly keywords, it doesn't mean people will click on it. PPC managers are masters at writing great ad copy. This helps improve their click-through rates and increases their quality scores. But with SEO, you don't need to pay for ads to generate clicks. You just need to make slight adjustments to your SEO headlines that will make them more enticing. For example, add a number to your headline. You may not think this is good for SEO because people probably aren't searching for numbers. But this strategy generates clicks. Headlines containing numbers are 36% more likely to get clicked. Using odd numbers improves CTR by 20% compared to even numbers. 2. Come up with new keywordsDon't be broad with your keyword research. Get specific. Use long-tail keywords to generate more relevant search results. Using long-tail keywords will also make the search results less competitive. For example, let's say your company sells backpacks. If that's the only keyword you're using, it'll be tough to get ranked high and generate clicks. But if you're using long-tail keywords, e.g., “red waterproof hiking backpack,” you're appealing to a very specific audience. Yes, the search volume for those words will definitely be lower. However, you won't be competing with as many websites. Now you'll get ranked higher and increase your chances of getting more clicks. It's also important to use new keywords based on seasons, promotions, or the audiences you're trying to target with specific campaigns. Don't use the same keywords over and over again expecting to get great results, especially if the keywords are highly competitive. 3. Monitor keywords from your competitorsYour keyword research shouldn't be conducted in a vacuum. You need to know what your competition is doing. PPC managers use this strategy to help them see which keywords are the most competitive. It allows them to adjust their bids accordingly. But it's important for you to implement this strategy when you're focusing on search engine optimization as well. Try using tools such as SpyFu to help you with your keyword monitoring: With SpyFu, you can search for specific competitors, and the platform will analyze their websites' content. You'll be able to identify exact keywords they're using. Based on this information, you can make the necessary adjustments. If one of your competitors is always getting ranked higher than you, maybe it's time for you to start using some of their keywords. You can make those keywords even better by turning them into long-tail keywords, which I've already talked about. 4. Track your leads with UTM parametersWhere are your leads coming from? I'm hoping you're not relying solely on organic search traffic to get more visitors to your website. You should be running other campaigns as well. If you see a spike in website traffic, you can't assume it's coming from your improved SEO efforts. But how can you know for sure? By creating custom links with UTM parameters, you'll be able to distinguish your search engine traffic from the traffic generated by other campaigns. For example, you can set up a unique link for each one of your email marketing newsletters. Have a different link for all your social media posts. If you're running ads on other websites or getting affiliate links, those should each have a custom URL as well. Now you'll be able to identify the sources of your traffic. You'll see which headlines, ads, platforms, and promotions are yielding the highest results. PPC managers do this to see if it's worth it to continue paying for specific ads on websites. But you can use it to figure out if your SEO strategy and keywords are working. 5. Optimize keywords for mobile searchesWhen it comes to your keyword research, you need to keep different devices in mind. That's because more than half of all website traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. In this day and age, you need to keep an eye on the most important mobile trends of the year. Mobile devices changed the way people search. What do I mean by this? The same person using their smartphone to search for something will enter different terms than they would if they searched using their desktop or laptop computers. In fact, 79% of all Google keywords rank differently in mobile searches. And 47% of the top 20 positions are ranked differently on mobile devices compared to desktops. You need to identify these differences and adjust your keywords accordingly to accommodate the needs of mobile users. 6. Retarget your prospectsLet's say someone visits your website because of your SEO efforts. That's great. But now what? You need to understand how people search, navigate, and convert. Just because someone lands on your homepage through organic search traffic doesn't mean they'll convert. Maybe they're just browsing or scanning a blog post. After that, they'll leave your website. That's why you need to learn how to increase conversions with retargeting strategies. Retargeting campaigns can get these visitors back to your website in the future. You can take the lead from PPC managers and run ads on other websites. When the user lands on your site in the first place, you can use cookies to track their browsing behavior. Now they'll see your ad when they visit another website. Change up your ads so they don't keep seeing the same ones over and over again. 7. Run A/B tests on your landing pagesYou need to make sure your clicks are driving conversions. If you can create landing pages that have high conversion results, you'll be able to make more money whenever you increase your site traffic with SEO. Right now, you might be satisfied with your conversion rates. But how can you be sure the pages are optimized for the highest conversions? You can't know for sure unless you test and measure the results. Use A/B testing to change different elements on your landing pages to see whether you can improve those conversion rates. Test things such as CTA placement, images, CTA wording, sizes, value proposition, and color schemes. You can basically test every element on each landing page to come up with the best design to drive conversions. SEO focuses on site ranking and traffic. PPC managers focus on clicks. But both SEOs and PPC managers ultimately need to prioritize conversions. 8. Target people based on their locationsPPC marketers use geotargeting campaigns to limit their search results to prospective customers within a specific area. Google AdWords lets you set this up: When it comes to your SEO strategy, you can still target people based on their locations, even if you don't want to pay for ads. Just create specific landing pages for different areas. For example, let's say your business has locations all over the country. Each location should have its own local website. This will increase the website traffic for people within those areas whenever they search for something relevant to what you're offering. You can even create custom landing pages based on these locations. For example, the needs of consumers in Boston will differ from those of consumers in Dallas when it comes to buying clothing in December. 9. Showcase your competitive advantageIn a list of search results, your website will appear next to the websites of your competitors. Even if you're paying for ads, other sites will pay for ads that will show up on the page too. How can you stand apart from your competition? Write SEO-friendly headlines and meta descriptions that show your value proposition. Just look at these ads that come up when you use Google to search for plumbers in Seattle: What's going to make users pick one business over the others? The top advertisement offers free estimates, which is very enticing, especially for plumbing services. Another company has financing options available to help its customers pay off expensive services. Take a look at the ad in the middle. To stand out from the crowd, they tell you that all their employees are background checked and drug tested. Honestly, I thought this was odd to mention, but it definitely helps them stand out from the other ads on this page. 10. Consider the timing of your adsIf you're going to take your SEO campaigns to the next level and start running PPC ads, you need to know when to run them. For example, B2B brands would want to run their ads during normal business hours. That's when their target audiences will be searching for their products and services. You don't expect a prospective B2B client to be searching for a service at 2 AM on a Saturday night. However, if you're a global B2C ecommerce shop, you'll probably want to run your ads at all times. 11. Include a CTAWhen it comes to your SEO efforts, obviously you want to be descriptive in your headlines and meta descriptions to target specific audiences. But you need to come up with a way to be informative while still encouraging an action. Ultimately, you want people to click on your website. PPC marketers understand this, so they craft ads with keywords that include CTAs. Just look at the differences in conversion rates based on CTAs: As you can see, including the word buy in your headline won't lead to conversions. Even if you think certain words are SEO-friendly, you need to recognize the impact those keywords will have on your clicks. 12. Pre-qualify your leadsIt seems PPC campaigns are usually better than SEO efforts at pre-qualifying leads. That's because each click from a PPC campaign is costly. If that click doesn't generate money, it's a waste of valuable marketing dollars. Even if your SEO efforts lead to a high search ranking, it's not helpful if your leads aren't qualified. While these clicks aren't necessarily costing you money as they would if they were PPC ads, you should still approach this the same way as you would a PPC campaign. For example, headlines and keywords run by B2B brands will differ from those run by B2C brands. Let's take a look at the search results for “escape rooms for big groups:” Right away, there are certain keywords in these headlines and meta descriptions that pre-qualify leads. One of the results advertises corporate events. If you're planning a birthday party or a similar event, you probably won't be clicking that link. But if you're a manager looking to schedule a team building event, that option would definitely appeal to you. Another way to pre-qualify leads is to use pricing. If people aren't willing to spend $30 per person at a minimum, they won't click that link in the middle of the page. What qualifies as a large group? Well, the business at the bottom of the page says its escape rooms are for groups larger than 12 people. If you were planning an event for eight people, you'd look elsewhere. Now that the leads have been pre-qualified, they'll be more likely to convert when they visit the websites. 13. Create custom landing pagesThis tip is related to the topic of traffic sources. For example, let's say a PPC advertisement is placed on the sidebar of another website. This ad is promoting a specific product. The landing page for this ad should be specific to the product or service being promoted. You wouldn't want to take that user to your homepage because it would lower your conversion rates. Use this strategy for your SEO efforts as well. You'll want to set up different landing pages based on what your prospective customers are shopping for, such as men's or women's clothing for your ecommerce shop. ConclusionIn theory, high search rankings should result in more website traffic. But if you're not getting the traffic you're expecting based on your ranking, it's time for you to re-analyze your SEO efforts. While they may be optimized for search engines, that's useless if Internet users aren't navigating to your website. It's in your best interest to take advice from marketers who specialize in generating clicks. You can learn a lot from PPC campaigns. Even if you don't want to pay for ads, you can apply the same principles to your SEO efforts to increase your website traffic. How do you apply PPC concepts to your SEO strategy?
How many visitors do you think NeilPatel.com generates each month? Maybe a million… maybe 2 million? I bet you're going to guess 1,866,913. If that's what you guessed, you are wrong. This blog actually generated 2,530,346 visitors. 1,866,913 is the number that came from search engines. So, what's the secret to my ever-growing Google traffic? Sure, I have optimized my on-page SEO, I've built links, written tons of blog post… I've done all of the stuff that most of my competition has done. But doing the same stuff as your competition isn't enough. My secret sauce is that I optimize for user signals. Last week, I broke down some of the user signals Google looks at, as well as providing benchmarks to aim for if you don't want to be penalized by Google. If you aren't familiar with user signals, check the article I linked to above. So, how do you optimize for user signals? Well, I know everyone has different types of websites, so I thought I would share the process I use to optimize NeilPatel.com. Are you showing people what they want?Google Analytics is an amazing tool. I'm so addicted to it that I log in at least 3 or 4 times a day. Heck, I even log in on weekends. But here's the thing, it only tells you half the story. It gives you numbers, but it doesn't help you visualize what people are doing and what they aren't. For example, here is what my main blog page looked like according to Crazy Egg: What's wrong with the image? Everyone is going to the blog to learn more about marketing. Above the fold, I have a box that showcases an SEO Analyzer. But there is one big issue: it's barely clicked compared to the drop-down that lets you filter the blog content. The SEO Analyzer had 128 clicks versus 359 clicks to the content filtering option. Because you didn't care for it as much, I removed it from the main blog page. And now when you head to the blog page you can see the filtering options above the fold. I am looking to see what you click on and what you don't. Simple as that. If I keep showing you something you aren't clicking on, I am wasting the opportunity to present you with something you do want to see. Which means I either need to adjust it or delete it. Now, let me show you my current homepage: What's wrong? Go ahead, take a guess… Well, looking at the image you'll notice there are tons of hot spots in the footer. That's where the navigation is. With there being all of the clicks on the navigation, I should consider adding a navigation menu bar in the header. Are you getting the hang of how to make your website more user-friendly? Well, let's try another one. Here's an element in the sidebar of my blog posts: That element only has 1 click. That's terrible considering that the blog post generated 10,016 visits. And to top it off, that click came from a repeat visitor. My goal is to convert more first-time visitors into leads, which makes up the majority of my visitors, but they are the lowest percentage of my leads. So, what did I do? I deleted that element and you no longer see it in my sidebar. Are you optimizing for mobile?Let's face it, more people are visiting your site using mobile devices than laptops or traditional computers. If that's not the case, it is just a matter of time. So, have you optimized your site for mobile? And no, I'm not just talking about having a responsive design because everyone is doing that these days. If you look at the image above, you'll notice that I removed the image of myself and a few other elements. This helps make the loading experience faster and it helps focus people's attention on the most important elements. Similar to the desktop version, my mobile homepage has a 24% conversion rate. When my mobile version included a picture of me above the fold, my conversion rate dropped to 17%… hence there is no picture of me. How often do people visit your website? To be a successful ecommerce shop, you need to rely on website traffic that leads to conversions. That said, the same people probably aren't navigating to your website every day. Even your most loyal customers don't have a reason to visit your site on a daily basis. You can't blame them for this. How often do you buy something online? According to a recent study about online shopping in the US, 40% of consumers buy products or services from the Internet multiple times per month, and 20% of consumers buy on a weekly basis. While these numbers are encouraging, you can't rely on your ecommerce website alone to generate sales based on those statistics. You need to use other platforms to sell your products. It makes sense to take advantage of networks consumers are using on a daily basis. You can increase your ecommerce revenue by leveraging social commerce. Instagram has 500 million daily active users, and 80% of all Instagram accounts follow a business profile. This is great news for you and for your ecommerce brand. Your current and prospective customers are not only active on this platform but also willing to engage with your brand. In fact, 60% of Instagram users find new products through this social platform, and 75% of users take an action after viewing a post. This action could be visiting the brand's website or making a purchase. With all of this in mind, it's clear your ecommerce company needs to use this platform to your advantage. I'll show you how to boost ecommerce sales with Instagram shoppable posts. Make sure your business is eligible to use shoppable postsBefore you do anything, you want to make sure your shoppable posts are not violating any of the Instagram rules and regulations. If you violate any policies, it could mean big trouble for your account. Your profile could be suspended or even terminated, which would obviously crush your Instagram marketing strategy. Even if they aren't always enforced, violations are more common than you might think. In fact, more than 90% of celebrity endorsements on social media violate FTC policies. But we'll discuss social influencers in greater detail later in this post. The shoppable posts feature on Instagram is not available on every account. You need to meet certain requirements to be eligible. For starters, you must be located in one of the following countries:
An Instagram business account is also a requirement. You can't sell anything that violates the Facebook community standards, since Facebook owns Instagram. This should go without saying, but you can't sell anything illegal either. But that's not the only restriction. Here is a list of products that are strictly prohibited from being sold through Instagram:
If you are not selling any of these products, you're eligible for shoppable posts on Instagram. Even if your ecommerce brand sells something prohibited on your website, you can still use shoppable posts for your other products that are allowed on this platform. Once your eligibility is determined, you can proceed. Set up a Facebook catalogUsing Facebook Business Manager, you'll create a catalog of products to sell via Instagram. This will be a file that shows all the items you want to sell. Set this up using the Facebook page connected to your Instagram business profile. Navigate to the “catalogs” option from the menu. From here, you can control all the settings related to your products catalog. You'll even be able to set up multiple new catalogs. Those of you with employees or team members helping you with this process can grant access and assign roles to those people from here as well. When you add products to your Facebook catalog, it will sync with Instagram and allow you to share shoppable posts. You'll be able to use this for posts on your Instagram profile as well as any advertisements you're running on the platform. Add filters to each product to help you manage them the same way you would on your ecommerce site. These filters would include basic parameters such as:
While manually adding information about each product in your catalogs will work just fine, it's not your only option. Using BigCommerce and Shopify to create a catalogIf you are using BigCommerce or Shopify to sell your products, you can integrate those existing shops with your Instagram shoppable posts. It won't cost you any extra money to do this. You can refer to this detailed guide for setting this up through BigCommerce. This is a faster way to create your product catalogs instead of manually adding each product, assuming you're already using one of these platforms. Even if you haven't been using these networks, you may want to consider using Shopify to help you sell more products. Once your shop is set up, you can continue with the integration process through Facebook Business Manager. Whether you're using BigCommerce or Shopify, Instagram needs to review your account before you can proceed. Once your business meets the eligibility requirements and gets approved, you'll gain access to the shoppable posts feature on Instagram. Tag your productsAll you need to do now is upload photos to your Instagram business profile the same way you normally would. Use professional photos of people wearing or using your products available in your catalog. Before finalizing the upload, you'll notice a difference in your posting options. You'll now have access to a new feature that other accounts don't have. Just tag your products the same way you would tag a person in a picture: Then search for the names of the products you want to tag. Again, this will look very similar to how you would search for a person's Instagram name. Look through your Facebook catalog connected to your Instagram account, which you previously set up. Find the product or products in the image you're uploading. You can tag up to five products in one picture. If you're uploading a carousel post containing multiple photos, you can tag up to 20 products per carousel. Don't overwhelm your followers. I'd recommend keeping these shoppable posts as simple as possible. It's the paradox of choice. The more choices you give someone, the less likely they are to pick one. This will hurt your conversion rates. Stick to tagging just one or two products in each post for now, and see how that works out for you. Then you can start experimenting with carousel photos and adding more shoppable products. Know your audienceYou need to make sure you're promoting products on Instagram based on who follows your profile. As part of your market research, you've previously been able to identify your target market. In a perfect world, your Instagram followers will mirror your target audience. However, this may not always be the case. For example, let's say you sell clothing for both men and women on your ecommerce website. That doesn't mean your shoppable posts should be 50/50 for each gender. If 80% of your followers are female, you'll want to post products that appeal to that audience instead. Keep a close eye on your Instagram analytics so you know who is following your account. This is another feature only available to Instagram business accounts. It's important for you to take advantage of as many tools as possible to maximize the efficiency of your shoppable posts. Promoting products that don't appeal to your followers won't generate sales. Tag your locationIn addition to tagging your products for your shoppable posts, you should also tag your location. Well, you don't have to tag your actual location. You just need to tag a location related to what you're selling and your target audience. This is a bit of a loophole you can take advantage of. For example, let's say you're trying to sell new swimwear products on Instagram. But your company headquarters are based in North Dakota, a landlocked state. It probably doesn't make sense to tag that location if you're trying to appeal to consumers who spend lots of time at the beach. But you can tag Miami, FL or San Diego, CA, where a beach season is all year long. Again, you'll want to refer to your Instagram analytics to help you with a location tag as well. Tag a location that speaks to your followers based on where they are located. Here's an example of this strategy put to use by Western Rise: They're selling a button down shirt for men. As you can see from the tag, they set Brooklyn, New York as the location. Anyone who clicks on this location tag will see this post as one of the most recent images. This strategy adds exposure to your brand so your shoppable posts can reach users who don't follow your profile. Use influencers to create social proofLet's continue talking about maximizing the reach of your posts. Your current followers may already be existing customers. But how can you use your shoppable posts to reach consumers who haven't bought anything from your brand before? You need to learn how to use social influencers to increase your product credibility. Let's look at an example. Take a look at this Instagram shoppable post from Herschel: It used social influencer Michele Dee as the model in the photo. Michelle has over 31,000 followers on Instagram. If she supports the brand, it shows people it's legitimate. It's worth noting you can't tag a person in your shoppable posts containing a product. However, you can tag their name in the caption, like Hershel did in the example above. Run a promotionAs I said before, you need to get these shoppable posts in front of as many eyes as possible. Get creative if you want to gain an advantage over your competitors who are also using Instagram to sell their products. You should consider running a profitable giveaway to build hype for the items you're selling. Here's an example of how Lems Shoes used this strategy in a recent promotion. The brand partnered with the Adventure Enthusiasts Instagram page, which relates to my previous point about using influencers to create social proof. This account has more than 186k followers. Anything posted on its profile will be seen by a huge audience. Lems Shoes is giving away a pair of its hiking boots, which is obviously a product that speaks to the people who follow Adventure Enthusiasts. Right away, this promotion is on the right track. But you can't run shoppable posts from someone else's account. That's no problem. Lems Shoes used this other account to build hype while using its own profile to sell the product: By partnering with another account and running a giveaway, the brand encouraged people to view its profile. Once they get there, they'll see the shoppable post. Obviously, not everyone will win the giveaway. But the hope here is the users will still be interested to buy after seeing the promotion. ConclusionYour ecommerce website may be successful, but consumers aren't visiting your site as often as they are using social media. That's why you need to sell your products on Instagram. Just make sure all your product information is accurate. The prices and descriptions should be the same as on your website. Monitor each post's metrics to see whether your shoppable campaigns are successful. Before you start with Instagram shoppable posts, you need to verify your account is eligible for this feature. Then set up your product catalogs through Facebook Business Manager. You can sync these catalogs with your BigCommerce or Shopify accounts to speed up the process. Review your Instagram analytics to make sure your shoppable posts target your followers. Add a location tag based on this information as well. Leverage your relationships with social influencers to increase the credibility of your products. Run promotions as a creative way to drive conversions. If you follow the tips I've outlined in this guide, you'll be able to use shoppable posts on Instagram to increase ecommerce product sales. How is your brand leveraging Instagram to drive sales?
To survive and stay relevant in the modern era, your business needs to have an active presence on social media. When it comes to social networks, Facebook is king. As of June 2018, the platform had more than 1.47 billion daily active users and 2.23 billion monthly active users. Over 60 million businesses have Facebook profiles. Those companies are doing much more than just posting content to their timelines. The vast majority of these businesses are paying for ads. In fact, 93% of marketers take advantage of Facebook advertising on a regular basis. If you're active on Facebook but not running ads, you might fall behind the competition. In a perfect world, you'd be converting your social media followers into customers. That's the reason you're in business, right? But some of you may have struggled with this. If you ran Facebook ads in the past and didn't get the results you were looking for, it could be the reason why you've been avoiding this marketing strategy. Don't worry, you're not alone: 62% of small business owners feel their paid Facebook advertisements aren't reaching their targets. The success of your Facebook campaigns is completely dependent on how you set up your audiences. If you don't want to waste money on ads that don't reach your target audience, you need start focusing on the customer lifetime value (CLV). If you don't know what this is or how to get started, I'll help you out. I've been in your shoes before and wasted valuable marketing dollars on ads that didn't convert. But after taking advantage of customer lifetime value lists, I saw different results. I'll show you how to create Facebook audiences that convert by leveraging lifetime value. Learn how to calculate your CLVBefore we go any further, it's important for you to understand the basic concepts of customer lifetime value and why it matters for your Facebook ads. What is lifetime value? In short, it's a number reflecting the amount of money a customer spends at your business before they leave it. The longer a customer stays with your business over time, the more profitable they become for the business. If you're not using this metric to help you make decisions, it could be an extremely costly mistake. Let me give you an example. Let's say your business sells watches through your ecommerce platform at bargain prices. The average retail price of your products is $30. To drive more traffic to your website and generate leads, you start running PPC campaigns through Google AdWords. This seems like a good strategy since the average cost per click for the retail industry is only $1.35. That's significantly lower than for other industries. However, the average conversion rate for retail ads is an abysmal 3.86%. At that rate, you would need roughly 25 clicks just to get one conversion. At $1.35 per click, this single transaction would cost you $33.75. But the average price of a watch on your website is only $30. This is not a profitable marketing strategy, right? The truth is, you don't know the answer to this question unless you know your CLV metrics. That's why you need to calculate your customer lifetime value before you begin any marketing campaign. Let's continue using the same watches sale example. If the average transaction is $30 and the customer buys four times per year for the next five years, you can expect to make $600 from that customer. That's nearly 18 times the amount of your initial acquisition cost. When it comes to your marketing strategy, it's important to use customer acquisition tactics that won't break the bank and yield a high ROI. Once you're able to determine your CLV, it will be easier for you to launch new campaigns while having a better understanding of how those costs will pay off over time. Plus, if you're able to increase revenue without acquiring new customers, you can ultimately boost your customer lifetime value. I know what some of you are thinking. Sure, this sounds great, but how is this relevant to Facebook advertising? Allow me to explain. Create a custom Facebook audience with CLV/LTVNow that you understand what a customer lifetime value is, why it's important, and how to calculate it, it's time to use this data to improve your Facebook ads. Facebook uses the abbreviation LTV to refer to lifetime value of a customer. As I said earlier, if you ran Facebook ads in the past but weren't satisfied with the results, it's probably because you weren't able to target the right audience. You won't get conversions if the wrong people are exposed to your ads, even if the promotion is great. I'll show you how to generate leads with Facebook ads by targeting an audience that actually converts. Here's a simple step-by-step guide that explains how to set up these ads with your customer lifetime value calculations. Step #1: Prepare your customer dataBefore you can set up your ads and do anything else, you need to prepare a spreadsheet with all your customer data. This may be easier for some of you than others. If you're well organized and have a way to export this data from your POS system to a spreadsheet, it shouldn't be too much work. However, if you don't have a spreadsheet prepared yet, you can download a template directly from Facebook. Take the spreadsheet template, and input your own customer information. This information will be used to help create your custom audience. Basically, Facebook will take that data to match your customers and also find people similar to those customers. Here are some examples of the information that will be included on the spreadsheet:
It even has columns for things such as mobile advertiser ID and Facebook app user ID, which you may or may not have. It's important that you pay close attention to the formatting required by Facebook for this spreadsheet. For example, they want the column for the first names abbreviated as “fn” and the column for city abbreviated as “ct.” The more details about your customers you can include in this spreadsheet, the more accurate your custom audiences will be. Step #2: Add a column for lifetime valueNext, you'll add another column to this spreadsheet for your customer lifetime value data. Make sure you use a broad range of numbers here. This will make your data more accurate as opposed to using your customers with the highest value. Facebook will calculate the difference between a top customer and an average one. Don't use negative numbers to show customers with a poor value. Doing this will mess up the calculations. If your business accepts multiple currencies, make sure it's all converted to just one on this spreadsheet. Facebook won't be able to make the conversion for you if your data includes more than one currency. As you can see from the screenshot above, Facebook also doesn't want you to use commas to separate values in the thousands. You can use a decimal point to show a cents value, but otherwise, you can't include any other punctuation or separators in your lifetime value column. Step #3: Select “audiences” from your Facebook Ads Manager dashboardNow that all your customer information and lifetime value data is organized and formatted, you can continue. Navigate to the “audiences” menu from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. Click on the “create audience” option as opposed to “create lookalike audience.” Truthfully, either would work. But I think it's better to set up a custom audience first before you start experimenting with lookalike audiences. Step #4: Choose the “customer file” option from the list of audience typesAs you can see from the menu above, there are several different ways for you to create a custom audience. Each of these five options has a purpose, depending on your goals. However, for our purposes here today, you'll select “customer file” from the menu. Step #5: Upload your lifetime value customer dataNow you have to decide which type of customer file you'll use to create a custom audience. Those of you with a MailChimp account can directly import customer email addresses as a data source. However, that data won't be as detailed as the spreadsheet you created in previous steps. That's why you'll select the “customer file with lifetime value (LTV)” option. Simply upload the spreadsheet, and Facebook will use the data, including the customer lifetime values, to create a custom audience. Step #6: Run an ad with your new custom audienceOnce your custom audience has been uploaded, all you have to do is run a Facebook ad the same way you normally would. But unlike in your previous campaigns when you manually choose an audience based on age, gender, language, and location, you've got another option this time. Now, you'll select the custom audience you created with the uploaded file. This will ensure your ads will be shown to Facebook users who are relevant to your business and primed to convert. Set your budget and scheduleAs with any marketing campaign, you need to stay within a reasonable budget. This number will be different for everyone. Just because your new ads target a more accurate audience doesn't mean you should dump every last marketing dollar into this campaign. Test the waters first to see how successful you are. Facebook makes it easy for you to stay within your budget and schedule your ads accordingly. This feature will make sure you have weekly caps that won't be exceeded. I recommend starting with smaller amounts until you can be sure your ads are the most efficient for conversions. But we'll talk more about this concept as we continue. Choose your ad formatWhat type of ads are you going to run? You've got lots of options to choose from. It all depends on what fits well with the promotion you're running. Truthfully, I don't have a definitive answer for you here. Some ad formats work better for certain brands compared to others. That's why it's in your best interest to keep your budget low when you're first starting out. I suggest running ads with multiple formats to see which ones have the highest conversion rates. Now that you're targeting a custom audience, these ads will already be better than the ones you ran in the past. But don't stop there. You still need to have great ads if you want your audience to convert. Experiment with split tests to improve your efficiency as well. For example, run two identical ads in the same format, changing only the CTA to see which one generates the most clicks. Which ads had the most success? Make sure to use those ones moving forward when you're ready to increase your budget. ConclusionDon't be discouraged if your past Facebook ads were unsuccessful. The ads you were running may not have been the problem. You were probably just not targeting the right audience. One of the best ways to improve your audience is by integrating your customer lifetime value data. This is one of the most important pieces of information you need to use when it comes to running any type of marketing campaign. Simply follow the step-by-step guide I've outlined above to create a custom audience with your customer lifetime values. Once it's uploaded to Facebook, you can continue running ads the same way you did in the past. Only this time, you'll be much happier with the results. How is your company creating custom audiences on Facebook to drive conversions? |
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June 2019
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