Facebook ads are the best. They allow you to handpick your ad audience’s age, gender, location, job, marital status, income, and nearly any other demographic you can think of. It’s a marketer’s dream.

But the problem with Facebook ads is there’s no guideline to what’s “normal.” No one ever tells you how much you should be paying for a like or a click or what’s the average CPC for Facebook ads, because it’s different for every business and industry.

How much you’re willing to pay for a website visitor depends on so many factors.

Do you want them to buy something from you?

Subscribe to your email list?

How much are those actions worth?

For someone just starting out, it can be confusing. That’s why I’ve decided to give you an inside look at my Facebook ad performance.

We’ll analyze the elements of each ad, and I’ll explain what worked and what didn’t so you can improve your own Facebook ad performance–getting exponentially more clicks as a result.

Some Background Info

Before we start, it might be helpful to have a little background. I’ve been in this space for a long time, but I didn’t launch this site until the end of 2015.

Right now, my main goal isn’t to sell a product or a service on my website, nor is it to attract new clients (though if someone finds me through this site, great!).

My main goal right now is to establish a readership. I want to grow this blog into a useful resource for those dabbling in marketing, social media and the like, who need a little help along the way.

I explain this because when setting up Facebook ads, your objective is so important. So all of the ads below are geared toward driving traffic to my website.

You’ll also note that I spent just $5 on each of these ads, because I don’t want to blow through money without understanding what’s working. Some would say it’s not a big enough budget to get an accurate picture, but I completely disagree, and hopefully these results will show you why.

Finally, in each of these cases I’m showing you the best performing ad of the ad set. What that means is there may have been other images or variations in copy used in the ad set, but the one you’re seeing performed the best.

With that in mind…

Let’s Dive In!

 

Ad Number 1

Landing Page: How To Get Your Share of Instagram’s 300 Million Monthly Users 

Audience: US adults with an interest in small business, marketing, social media.

Objective: Post engagement

Spend: $5.00

Results: 8 clicks at $0.63 per click

Analysis: Terrible!

I’ve worked with enough clients to know that $0.63 per website click is way high, especially for a post that got a ton of organic engagement.

I made a mistake when setting up my objective for this ad. I chose ‘post engagements’ instead of ‘website clicks.’ This means Facebook optimized the audience for any kind of post engagement, which can include likes, detail expands and more, not just website clicks.

Also, check out the copy I used for this ad: “If you’re not using Instagram to promote your business or blog, you’re missing out on a ton of free traffic!”

Yeah, people probably don’t want to miss out on traffic, but my ad copy doesn’t give them a specific payoff for reading the post.

I should have expressed a clearer benefit, like “This process will help your brand score 50% more traffic from Instagram!”

Finally, the image isn’t great, and I didn’t do any other variations with this ad set. Big mistake!

It’s always a good idea to test a few different images and tweak the copy slightly, because people respond differently to different text and visuals.

 

Ad number 2

Landing Page: 4 Sh*tty Things Marketers Need to Stop Doing Right Now

Audience:  US adults with job titles in marketing, digital marketing, etc.

Objective: Website clicks

Spend: $5.00

Results: 12 clicks at $0.42 per click

Analysis: Not great.

$0.42 per click is better, but still not good. Also, I expected that people in marketing would find this post more engaging than they did. I guess that’s why you have to rely on the numbers, and not your own emotion when deciding what to promote!

I got the objective right for this ad, choosing ‘website clicks’ instead of ‘post engagements.’

Still, the ad copy could use some work. Like the last ad, it has a warning (don’t make these mistakes) but doesn’t promise a payoff (for example, how to correct the mistakes).

This was the most unique image out of the ad set, and it performed the best. Sometimes an unusual, eye-catching visual can work in your favor.

 

Ad number 3

Landing Page: 9 Tricks to Instantly Tighten and Polish Your Writing

Audience: Lookalike audience of my current page fans

Objective: Post engagement

Spend: $5.00

Results: 19 clicks at $0.26 per click

Analysis: Better.

For this ad, I decided to try out the lookalike audience feature. With lookalike audiences, Facebook will create a custom audience that exhibits characteristics similar to those of an existing audience. You could create a lookalike audience of your page fans, your email list, your customers list, etc.

In this ad I gave a specific benefit: take your prose from sloppy to slick in a few seconds flat. Makes it sound easy to improve your writing, right? That paid off in the form of more website clicks.

 

Ad number 4

Landing Page: 9 Tricks to Instantly Tighten and Polish Your Writing (same as ad number 3)

Audience: People with a job in blogging or who displayed an interest in blogging, content marketing, Blogger, WordPress, Medium, etc.

Objective: Post engagement

Spend: $5.00

Results: 28 clicks at $0.18 per click

Analysis: Good.

Since I had better results with ad number 3, I decided to repeat the ad on a different audience. I left all of the images and copy the same, and only changed the audience to people who expressed an interest in blogging-related keywords.

The result with this audience was better than the lookalike audience, probably because bloggers are particularly invested in good writing.

Notice that it was a different image that performed best with this audience. I’m guessing the majority of people who express an interest in blogging on Facebook are also female, which could be why this image resonated well.

 

Ad number 5

Landing Page: How to Find Content Your Audience Will Be Dying to Share

Audience: US adults aged 20-45 with job titles in social media and content marketing

Objective: Post engagement

Spend: $5.00

Results: 30 website clicks at $0.19 per click

Analysis: Good!

This ad performed the best out of them all, resulting in 30 website clicks. That’s more than a 300% improvement from ad number 1, which got just 8 clicks!

I see in retrospect a few key elements that made for a strong ad:

• It addresses a specific pain point. Going to post to Facebook, but having nothing interesting to say.
• It promises a specific benefit. I’m going to show you a free tool that will solve this problem.
• It’s conversational.

It’s also interesting to note that the copy in this ad is the longest of them all. I’ve been seeing more of that lately, with copy in sponsored posts running so long you have to click ‘read more.’

The photo isn’t that strong, so I may spend some time finding a few more compelling options and run this ad again.

I know I can probably get my CPC below $0.10 in future ads by using this same process of optimization.

 

Takeaway

The biggest takeaway from this little analysis is how truly important it is for your ad to promise a specific payoff to the reader for clicking.

I think it’s clear from the results that even with a small budget, this detail can make a big difference–a 300% difference from the worst performing ad to the best. And just imagine this at scale, on a budget of $1,000 or $10,000.

For my next set of ads, I plan to experiment with the ‘conversions’ objective to drive more subscribers to my email list.

So what do you think, is 30 clicks for $5 a good result? What do your Facebook ad results look like?

 

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