I know you're probably used to hearing about these HUGE success stories with Facebook advertising.
Today, I want to share a small but mighty success. Because this might be closer to where you're at in your business.
I'm still in my first year of business with the Facebook ads management and training. So, my budget for my own ads is not huge. Yet.
This is the type of campaign that's possible for you within your first 6 months of business.
And, spoiler alert, spending $37 to make $698 is AMAZING! That's an 18x return on my ad investment.
Would you make an investment like that? I bet you would. All day every day.
So, here's how I did it.
The Offer
I had created an e-course called Attract Your Tribe with Facebook Ads. I beta-launched it by emailing my contacts and posting in Facebook groups. The price was $77. I got like 30 people to sign up! Which was amazing!
I knew that I had a good product and the sales page was converting visitors to buyers. So, I felt good to invest some money in ads.
I wanted to make some changes to the course and raise the price. I decided to do one last push with the course at the lower price. And that's where I spent some money on ads.
Key Takeaway: I already knew that the course was good and people would buy BEFORE I invested in FB ads.
The Ad
Here's what the ad itself looked like...
So, I had a very clear offer and time frame. I think that was a big key to success.
I wrote the copy for this ad the same way that I would write a post in a Facebook group or on my personal page. I let people have a little look into my business by explaining about moving to Kajabi. And I think this helped the ad be successful.
Key Takeaway: The offer was clear and time sensitive. The copy was casual and friendly.
Ad Sets
I set up 3 different ad sets. Partly to just test to see what would happen.
I ran the ads from Saturday morning through Monday night. I decided to spend $5/day on each of these 3 audiences.
And this is where I found my biggest success! More on that in a minute. Let me tell you more about these audiences.
The Hottest Peeps Audience
This was the audience who I thought was most likely to buy. I combined several custom audiences from my asset library to create this one ad set. Check out this screen shot.
I think the hottest audience in this list was the "AYT Thinkific LP - 180 days." This audience included everyone who had visited the sales page for my course. They were obviously already interested in the program. Once they found out that the course was about the close and the price was going up, they decided to sign up!
I built this audience WITHOUT doing any ads! I think there were about 100 people in this audience at the time that I ran the ad. I got traffic to this page only by writing personal emails and posting in Facebook groups.
Other audiences I included here were Facebook page engagement, all website visitors, video viewers and my email list.
I purposefully excluded people who had already signed up for the course.
Key Takeaway: You can build a hot audience without spending any money on FB ads!
The Warmish Peeps Audience
This was an audience of people who I'd had some connection with at some point. They had either engaged with my Facebook page or viewed one of my videos sometime in the last year.
I excluded everyone in the "Hottest Peeps" audience from this ad set to be even more targeted and intentional.
Key Takeaway: For testing purposes, it's a good idea to exclude audiences so that you don't have any overlap.
The Lookalike Audience
I shouldn't have run this ad set at all. Haha! I knew I shouldn't have, but I did it anyway. Just for funsies. This is a totally cold audience of people who have never heard of me before.
I'm always telling my students and clients to NEVER run a sales ad to a cold audience. But I did it anyway, just as an experiment.
I thought it was worth a try because I already had totally cold people buying the course. And this lookalike audience was based on the audience who was already visiting the sales page for this course. If any cold audience would buy, this would be the one.
Again, I excluded everyone from the "Hottest Peeps" audience and the "Warmish Peeps" audience. I only wanted the ads in this ad set to go to totally cold audiences.
Key Takeaway: Don't do this! Lol. Learn from my mistake and don't set up an ad set like this when you're doing sales ads.
The Campaign
I set this up as a conversion campaign. This let Facebook know that I was looking for buyers. Not just trying to show this ad to as many people as possible.
Key Takeaway: I set this up as a Conversion campaign. I've seen a lot of people try to do this with a Traffic campaign. Conversion is going to work much better if you want sales. But you MUST have your pixel installed on your website to run a Conversion campaign.
Ok, now let's get to the fun part...
The Results
Here were the results of the entire campaign overall.
I had a total of 9 purchases come through this ad. I paid $4.08 per purchase. I spent $37 (actually $36.76) on these ads.
The column called "Website Purchases Conversion Value" tells me how much revenue I generated because of these ads. Which, as you know was $693.
Note: In order to do an ad campaign like this, you HAVE to have your tracking pixel properly installed! That's how I was able to track the number of purchases and value of the purchases. Without the pixel, I wouldn't have such a clear picture of how much I spent and how much I made. And this campaign would not have been nearly as successful.
Ok, now let's look at the results by ad set.
Unsurprisingly, the Lookalike Audience ad set resulted in 0 purchases. But that's ok. It was a $12.24 experiment.
As I suspected, the Warmish Peeps audience did have someone who was a buyer! But only 1 person. So, I paid $12.25 to get one more student. And I'm ok with that! Paying $12.25 to make $77 is still a 6x return. Which is totally great!
Now, the Hottest Peeps audience. Whooooo-eeeee! 8 purchases. $616 in revenue. And I only spent $12.27. Which means that I spent $1.53 to make $77 inside that ad set!
Overall, the campaign had an 18x return. But the Hottest Peeps ad set had a 50x return!
What I learned for next time
My Hottest Peeps ad set rocked. I will use that audience again for sure!
I'll also use the Warmish Peeps audience because I did get a decent return on that investment.
And I'll definitely skip the Lookalike audience. As I suspected at the beginning, there's really no point in running a sales ad to a totally cold audience.
Overall, this ad campaign made me SO happy! It gave me even more confidence in my ability to do ads for my business. The way I set up my targeting worked perfectly! And now I know even more for next time.
Are you ready for results like these?
Grab your free copy of my Facebook Ads Targeting Goldmine. This free guide dives deeper into the custom audiences and targeting that were a huge part of my success with this Facebook ads campaign!