Meta Ads were intimidating to utilize. I had previously utilized a marketing company to drive leads/bookings to our location. Reviewing the outcomes from that marketing company, I was not pleased and attempted to learn how to use Meta Ads myself – more effectively. This is what I learned and how to generate strong outcomes quickly.
Table of Contents
Identify A Goal
The specific goal for my shop was driving bookings through our website. Other goals like exposure and conversation may require other approaches than what I mention below. Ensure your website is configured with the Meta Pixel to accurately track the actions you desire. For us, we indicated a ‘lead’ any time a user landed on the website from the ad and clicked our booking link.
Meta Ads Thrive off Diversity and Volume
Before starting this test, I was familiar with the concept of A/B testing, but was unaware fully how to implement it. When preparing an ad campaign, well before the campaign you should prepare numerous test ads that vary minimally. This could be minor wording tweaks, lighting tweaks, resolution/sizing variations, etc. Once you have all of the variations, launch them all in the same campaign at the same time a few days before you’d like the real campaign to begin. This will provide ample time to identify the most valuable ads and deactivate the rest so budget is focused effectively. For reference, we used about 30 different ads with ~4 days of training time.
Meta Will Provide Suggestions
With so much going on for an inexperienced advertiser, it was nice to see that Meta provides suggestions on how to best utilize your ad content. Do not automatically apply all suggestions however. I noticed some suggestions would lead to odd experiences for viewers. For example, some ads I tested were not meant to be resized/scaled but Meta continued suggesting auto resizing. I ignored that prompt and moved on.
Review Consistently
Once ads are launched and configured, review them daily for the first few days to ensure that performance is on-track. If you have an ad getting views but producing low leads (non-profitable leads), deactivate it early on to allow the other ads to utilize the budget. Once you have a set of 1-4 ads performing consistently, check back weekly until the campaign ends to ensure all ads are still generating profitable lead volumes.
Our Meta Ads Results
Key Performance Outcomes
We ran a new years resolution ad campaign that was in full swing from Jan 4 – Jan 23 but was initiated in late December for training. Due to issues with our booking system and our pricing only being available after users press the booking button (after the lead is generated), we assumed that only about 20% of the folks clicking the booking link followed through. So, the 353 leads that we generated were projected to result in ~70 bookings through January. The total cost for the campaign was ~$1,800. This means that we needed to profit ~$25/booking to break even. This is within our margins and lead to a successful campaign.
Over time leads slowly dropped and we deactivated ads that were under-producing. The image above shows the lead trends over time and when we deactivated ads due to performance.
Additional Outcomes of our Meta Ads
Demographic Interest
Aside from the ad performance metrics, we were able to identify interesting demographic trends. We noticed that younger individuals interested in our health and fitness services were generally males. The older individuals interested in our services tended to be females. This was insightful and may indicate the younger males optimizing muscle gains and older females optimizing bone density.
Marketing Security
As previously mentioned, we had used a marketing company in the past. Their programs produced lower total exposure, fewer leads, and less direct information sharing. All of this while costing nearly 25% more per month. Meta Ads allowed us to have a flexible campaign without being locked into a marketing contract. The 25% savings and greater outcomes likely outweighed the work required to initiate the campaign. Furthermore, future campaigns will likely be configured more efficiently now that I have more experience.
Meta Platform Reach
The final major takeaway is the extent of the Meta platforms’ reach. Facebook and Instagram were certainly the primary benefactors of the ad campaign, but also hitting platforms like Threads and Messenger was and unexpected benefit. Facebook seemed to have a larger reach with fewer leads while Instagram had a smaller reach with more leads. This may be due to our Instagram account having more followers than the Facebook account but we will track this for future campaigns for trends.
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