Are you struggling to get qualified leads for your business at the lowest cost possible on META (Facebook) ads? Well, you’re not alone. There is no secret about the rising cost of Facebook ads. As a result, people either give up on FB ads or hire a performance marketing agency to do the job for them.
Not anymore. In this blog, we’ll share the secret sauce of an agency to optimize Facebook ad campaigns that generate a higher return on investment at a lower cost.
In the first quarter of 2024, as a healthcare digital marketing agency, we drove over 2 crore of business for our clients via Meta (Facebook) ads, with an average ROAS (return on ads spent) of 5.3 times. So we know exactly how it works, and you can reduce costs while increasing your ROAS from 2 to 5 or even more than 10 in just a few settings and analyses.
Let’s start –
Quick Summary:
If you don’t have time to read entire article, here is a quick summary here –
- Wrong selection of audience size, lack of high converting hooks in ad creatives, and poor landing pages are main causes of higher lead costs in Facebook ads.
- Campaigns that have been running for weeks can be optimized by making the following settings: Go to Ads Manager → Select Campaign → Breakdown Manu → Select Age, Gender, Placement → Analyze Poor performing or high spending ad sets → Back to Campaign → Disable ad sets that are overspending and producing poor results.
- For beginners starting out a new campaign, keep less input in form, leverage lookalike audiences, use the retargeting feature, optimize ad placements, and perform A/B testing. You’ll find a winning ad with optimal spending.
Mistakes That Are Leading You to Higher Facebook Lead Costs:
If your Facebook lead costs are skyrocketing, you might be making these mistakes that are driving up your expenses. Check if you’re making one of these mistakes and fix it –
Too Broad or Too Narrow Audience Selection:
The first mistake startups or businesses make is the wrong audience size selection. Do you know how Facebook ads find leads for you? Facebook tracks almost 100 data points of users to track their behavior, interests, and other demographics.
When you set a campaign and set the audience, based on your suggestions, it tests multiple small groups of people with multiple combinations of these data points to find which audience is converting more.
When you select too broad an audience size in your campaign dashboard, this gives the algorithm more free hands to test larger audiences, resulting in more spending and a high lead cost for the business.
In contrast, when you narrow your audience size too narrow, you’re restricting Facebook algorithms to experiment and find the best audience to target for your business. This increases frequency capping, resulting in high costs.
So, what is the ideal size of audience to target in Facebook ads? An audience size ranging from 2-10 million is considered a good starting point for a campaign, according to Meta. But many performance marketers suggest that if there is not enough audience, unlike Meta suggests, a size of 100,000 or more is enough while running ads for healthcare.
Ads Creatives Lack a High Converting Hook:
The second major problem is your creative ads. Every time we optimize ads for our clients, we observe that the ads are not convincing enough to make them click. Your customers can be thousands or even millions, but you’re closing only a few numbers to hundreds.
How do you create a strong hook for Facebook ad campaigns that makes your customers or patients click? We’ll cover it in upcoming guides. For now, just remember that your audience is not interested in your product or service until it solves their problem. Always make value statements bold and big in ad-creatives.
For example: you’re running an ad campaign for your fat loss services. Instead of writing ‘looking for fat loss services,’ write ‘Is your tummy fat growing despite your efforts? Try our Fat loss treatment and see the result from session 1.’
The current service is presented as a solution in the second hook, which also sets the expectation for users to click on advertisements in hope of overcoming tummy fat problems.
Landing is Not Optimized Enough for Conversion:
Even when a Facebook algorithm sends the best leads to your landing pages, it is possible for users to bounce back immediately without finishing registration.
A poorly designed landing page acts as a double-edged sword. It not only disappoints incoming prospects and leads but also confuses the Meta ads algorithm. The algorithm may think that the people it sends to landing pages might not fit your requirements.
As a result, it keeps experimenting, delaying the optimization of ad campaigns. This can lead to higher lead costs and lower conversions.
Here are few key elements of a poor landing page that most businesses and marketers don’t know –
- None or Too Many Call-to-Action (CTA)
- Slow Loading Times
- Not Optimized for Mobile Users
- Too Much Irrelevant Content
- Complex or Confusing Layout
Want to learn more about landing page optimization? Comment, and we’ll share a complete guide for landing page optimization.
How to Optimize FB Ads to Cut 50% of Lead Generation Costs?
Without any nonsense talk. Let’s move straight forward to the step by step actionable guide to optimizing Facebook ad campaigns to reduce the lead generation cost by 50% for a higher return on investment.
As our performance marketing expert, Aditya Bharadwaj, shares in a video, that you need to make few settings on your ads manager dashboard to find that secret sauce –
Step 1: Go to Ads Manager in the Meta dashboard.
Step 2: Select the campaign name you want to optimize.
Step 3: Now click on the Breakdown option.
Step 4: Select the three options ‘Age’, ‘Gender’, and ‘Placement’ in the dropdown.
Step 5: Analyze the data to find your Golden Audience that is most interested in.
Step 6: Go to Campaign again and turn off all the options that are costing more.
This way, you can decrease the average lead cost by up to 50% and double the conversion.
What if You’re Just Starting Out Your Facebook Ads Campaign?
It requires data to implement the step-by-step guide mentioned above. But what if you’re just starting out your campaign? How can you keep meta lead generation costs low? After you set up campaign objectives as ‘Lead Generation’, follow the tips and hacks shared below.
Here is the guide to lowering Facebook lead generation cost for beginners –
Limit the Number of Input Fields in Forms: Keep fewer input fields in the form to reduce friction for users, increasing the likelihood of form completion. At Maximise Media, we aim for simplicity in our forms, typically including just two fields: name and mobile number. Occasionally, we may add an email field. This approach has proven effective for us. However, if we require additional information, we prefer redirecting users to a landing page where we can use multiple stages to gather the necessary details, minimizing friction in the process.
Create Lookalike Audiences: Expand your reach by targeting new users who share similarities with your existing customers, increasing the chances of engagement and conversion. We suggest keeping your lookalike audience in the range of 1% to 3% for the best results. Although you might think this limits the reach, you should remember that the higher the percentage, the less homogeneous (similar) the audience will be.
Leverage Retargeting: Re-engage users who have previously visited your site or interacted with your ads, reminding them of your offering and encouraging them to take action. This works best for campaigns that are for upsale or offer similar products or services. For example, if you have already run the campaign for ‘laser hair removal for face,’ then you can retarget the same audience to promote ‘full body laser hair removal treatment.’
Limit Ad Placements: Focus your ad spend on high-performing placements to maximize ROI and avoid wasting resources on less effective placements. On meta ads, there are more than 15 ad placement options available. The number of ad placement options will even increase further in the future due to the growing number of platforms under Meta, such as WhatsApp, which has been popular recently. Facebook/Instagram stories and reels sections are the best places to test the results of a campaign that uses, say, a vertical 9:16 ratio video ad.
Run A/B Testing for Winning Ads: Continuously optimize your campaigns by testing different elements such as ad copy, images, videos, headlines, and CTAs to identify what resonates best with your audience and improves campaign performance.
Want Us to Review Your Ad Campaign for FREE?
If you’re looking for a review of your Meta (formerly Facebook) Ads campaign, along with insights to optimize and increase your return on ad spend (ROAS), simply comment below.
MaximiseMedia is a leading digital marketing agency in Delhi NCR, specializing in healthcare and e-commerce. We work with over 50 clients each month and have achieved up to a 10X return on ad spend in several campaigns. Our performance marketing services focus primarily on Meta and Google Ads, targeting qualified leads most interested in specific services. For direct assistance, reach out to one of our representatives at +91 9205093242.