Why Your Facebook Ads Don't Perform Like AdWords (And Why They Never Will)

You are an AdWords savant.

Revenue's through the roof.

Peeps search. Click. Browse. Buy. Repeat.

Like a literal printing press.

So you look around, searching for the next golden opportunity to deploy some of this capital that's burning a hole in your pocket like a poor man's Warren Buffett. (Which is to say, still pretty well off.)

You fire up some Facebook ad campaigns. Employ the same strategies that have already made you a small fortune.

And then… nothing.

No one's clicking. Or browsing. Or buying. That small stack of chips just got smaller, and you're starting to get antsy.

Here's why this happens commonly, and how to avoid it in the future.

Why Your AdWords Tactics Suck on Facebook

Google (ABC, XYZ, or whatever they're calling themselves these days) pulled in a $75 billion in revenue in 2015.

Not bad.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of that revenue came directly from AdWords; as much as 68% of their revenue in 2014.

(What? You mean self-driving cars aren't profitable yet?!)

That single business unit is largely responsible with funding all that other crazy stuff they're up to. And with a virtual monopoly, it's a giant moat around their business that's the envy of every competitor.

For years, search (both organic and paid) has been listed as the best performing digital channel for new customer acquisition.

There's a reason.

Intent. People type in the exact words they're looking for. Many of which, tend to focus on evaluating their options or choosing the right solution. That means these visitors are commonly already in the 'bottom of the funnel', and have made up their mind to act soon (if not now).

In other words, people use search when they want to buy something.

Now contrast that with social. Where years ago, it drove less than one percent of sales in one study.

But if you look at how people use it, that's also unsurprising.

People don't go to Facebook to shop. They go there to get away. To browse, laugh, communicate, and most importantly of all – procrastinate.

(Why do you think this article took me twice as long as usual to write?)

People most certainly don't go to Facebook because you're running a one-day sale on power tools.

In other words, while search is based on intent, social is serendipitous. People find stuff almost by accident, because they weren't necessarily planning on finding that stuff in the first place.

This becomes a problem, when you try to shove a round peg in a square hole. When you try to use the same direct-response, intent-based advertising that kills on AdWords on Facebook, you're met with… crickets.

Here's what you should have been doing instead.

How to Structure Facebook Advertising Campaigns Instead

If peeps are in the 'bottom of the funnel' when they're searching for a specific term, you can go straight for the hard sale.

No funny business. No lead nurturing foreplay required.

BUT…

If they're not looking for your widget in the first place, you've got some work to do. There's no need awareness, so they have no idea who you are. Because of that, they probably don't need your stupid thing.

And even if the timing was somehow, miraculously, fairy-book-style perfect and they did need your thing; they probably have no idea who you are. Which means they don't trust you. Which means they ain't giving you their credit card.

These peeps are gonna need some good old fashioned lead nurturing. You're gonna need to wine-and-dine 'em. Until they're ready to… go.

That means your social (and especially, Facebook) campaigns need to align with these various critical steps, including:

• Awareness: Use content promotion to get on potential prospect's radar and get an understanding for what they're interested in.
  
• Lead Generation: Target this small, aware group of people with ready-made offers designed to get their permission to continually follow-up.
  
• Conversions: Now that you've already done the hard work of grabbing their attention, building interest, trust, (and hopefully, some urgency), a simple sales offer should get them to convert.
  

Here's how this works in practice.

1. Content Promotion

Even the best executed inbound marketing starts with interruption.

It's even right there in Permission Marketing – the OG that predated the HubSpot stuff by a decade.

The bad news is that on Facebook, you're not just competing with your competitors. You're competing for attention with people's friends and family.

Good f-ing luck.

The best way (well, easiest anyway) to compete is through content.

You need something that pique's their interests. Their hobbies. Or their fears and desires.

The New York Times does it with food that looks mouthwateringly delicious.

Quizony does it with a cheesy quiz, a BuzzFeed-esque question headline, an emoji, and… OK – an attractive female in cowboy hat.

Both examples use a carefully selected piece of content, textbook copywriting headlines, and evocative imagery that fits in exactly with what people's friends and family are also sharing on Facebook (namely, people and food.)

So it does just enough to fit in, and yet just enough to stand out.

You'll also notice that both of these are perfectly executed 'wordless ad' examples too. These ain't no low-budget operations we're talking about.

Targeting at this point is fairly broad, because you don't have any specific information to latch on to yet (like you will in the next two examples). So you can test different audiences by interests, who've liked other related media publications; refining by demographics (like location, age range, or gender) as you go.

2. Lead Generation

Sending a lead gen ad to cold people doesn't always work out well (for reasons discussed).

But sending them to people already primed increases your odds.

That means your next step is to target the people you've just interacted with (albeit, passively), retargeting your most recent website visits over the past X days (30-60 sounds like a good place to start).

By now you should know what they're interested in. A topic, a pain point, a problem. And they should hopefully remember who you are.

Time for the lead magnet.

These can come in all different shapes and sizes. For many (especially B2B) this will still be a content-based offer. But escalating your offer to a free tool – like WordStream's AdWords Grader – might be the best way to reach “unicorn status” with chart-topping 10%+ conversions.

Marketo splits the difference with a 'free template' that busy, stressed out social media coordinators can use for their Social Editorial Calendar.

Obviously they've done this a few times, with a concise headline and description, relevant hero image, and proper CTA-use.

Marketo also does a great job keeping their headline short and to the point. AdEspresso researched over 37,259 Facebook ads and found that the ideal length is only 5 words!

LinkedIn's Facebook ad (aaaaaaaaannnddd the world just collapsed on itself) is a perfect example of using proprietary research and data to your advantage. The benefit is that other competitor's can't (usually) come out with this same offer, giving you something truly unique and interesting to attract new leads.

AdEspresso & HubSpot teamed up for a similar approach, literally creating a 'Facebook ad formula' offer that distills something difficult (like creating successful Facebook ads) down to a copy & paste-approach for overworked marketers.

In addition to the standard Facebook CTA option, they also include a second one in the image itself to grab attention (with the logos cleverly placed underneath to boost credibility of this claim).

Ad testing becomes critical at this stage. As does analytics, like keeping an eye on which variables move the Cost per Conversion needle. (Adjusting accordingly as you go.)

3. Lead Conversions

It all comes down to this.

You've gotten their attention. You've warmed them up, while receiving detailed information about what they're interested in, dealing with, and trying to solve.

Now you just gotta close.

But not the used car salesman way. All the work you've done so far should make this step relatively straightforward, because you're targeting people who've just signed up for your lead magnet in the last section.

Instead, it's more like:

• Want this?


• Here's what you're gonna get.


• Here's what it's gonna cost.


• If interested, buy here.

Exhibit A: Pact Coffee

Want awesome coffee, conveniently? Looks delicious and fresh. Sign up here.

With some larger sales, converting directly from a Facebook ad is a tall order (no matter how many eBooks someone downloaded). A good technique to try is 'product splintering' (via Digital Marketer), where you create a simplified, low-touch version of whatever it is you're trying to sell.

For example, HubSpot needs to put a little more oomph in their message because they're trying to advertise moderately expensive Sales CRM software. But they still keep things simple, focusing the ad message on their primary value proposition and pushing people towards the free version offering initially.

Pro tip: Another advanced method you could use for eComm is Facebook's Dynamic Product Ads, which will dynamically show visitors the product they just looked at on your website.

The Honest Company (which is somehow affiliated with Jessica Alba) used this method successfully to increase ad Click Through Rate 34% while also reducing Cost Per Purchase by 38% at the same time. So, that's promising.

(Also, including this last bit was a convenient excuse for me to Google: Jessica Alba. “Honey – it was research, I swear!”)

Conclusion

In 2010, GM made headlines by adopting the schoolchildren approach of 'taking their ball and going home', ceremoniously pulling their $10 million ad account off Facebook because it “didn't work”.

… Only to slink back later in 2013.

Facebook advertising options continue to evolve rapidly, with new ad formats coming almost monthly and unprecedented demographic targeting that other networks simply can't match.

It'll never convert like AdWords.

But that's ok. Because it can still work.

If you adjust and alter your approach to generate awareness, entice leads with interesting offers, and then focus on converting them to paid customers.

There'll always be some kinks to work out, as it's requires a completely different mindset.

But if you're reading this, you're smart. You'll figure it out.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad's blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.

Announcing the Updated Kissmetrics Funnel Report

The Kissmetrics Funnel Report is our most popular report, and for good reason.

Seeing where potential customers drop off and segmenting traffic to find the most valuable marketing channels are game changers for businesses.

And today we're announcing new features in our Funnel Report that will make it even more powerful.

Let's start with the new design.

1. More Flexible Design

Previously in the Funnel Report you'd create steps horizontally, like this:

Now, to be consistent with the design of our People Search, we've changed the layout so you'll create steps vertically, like this:

This new design flow allows for greater flexibility of some new features we've added (more on that later).

The visualization has also been updated. Instead of seeing something like this:

You'll see this:

Finally, many of our customers have four or more steps in their funnel. In our previous Funnel Report, there was no way to easily see a funnel with five or more steps.

Now it's as easy as scrolling side-to-side to view additional steps:

2. Drag and Drop

Did you accidentally create your steps in the wrong order? With the drag and drop feature, you don't have to go back, delete steps, and then re-create them. You just drag and drop the steps into the correct order.

3. And/Or Conditions

Let's say you're a marketer for a SaaS company. You have two ways for visitors to get in touch with your sales team. They can request a demo or sign up. You want to know which one is more effective at driving people to start paying for the product.

Now you'll be able to see people who have done both events or one or the other. So, in our case, we'll create a funnel report that looks for people who have visited the site and then signed up or requested a demo.

We'll create our first step, Visited site, and fill in the second event, Signed up. Then we'll add a condition by clicking on the button that the red arrow is pointing to:

Click on that button and we'll get to choose and/or conditions.

We'll keep it as or and add the event Requested demo. This will ensure that regardless of whether a person signs up or requests a demo, they'll be included in this funnel.

We'll run the report and get our data:

You can see that Signed up and Requested demo account for a 3% conversion rate.

Want to see the individual numbers for each? No problem, just click on one of the two, and the Funnel Report will show you.

We can see that we're getting a lot more signups than demo requests.

We can take this even further by adding additional steps to our funnel report to see how one condition may affect the funnel. Let's continue using this example to illustrate this important point.

If the next steps after Signed up or Requested demo are activating the product and then upgrading, we can see how each condition affects the funnel. Let's first look at how the funnel performs when people sign up:

And now we'll compare that to demo requests:

Big difference! We can see that while 245 people requested demos and 4 of those activated the product, 0 of them continued along in the funnel to paying for the product. All the success of the funnel is due to signups, not demo requests. As marketers, we now know we should focus more of our attention on driving signups and not demo requests.

Now let's do something similar with a property. We'll look at all the signups and demo requests that came from San Francisco. Here's how:

Click on the arrow sign next to the condition:

And we'll add the property “KM City” with San Francisco:

Visited site and KM City are automatically tracked in Kissmetrics. This means that we track it whenever someone visits your site, and we also look at what city they're coming from.

So this way we're telling Kissmetrics to find all the people who visited our site who came from San Francisco.

We'll then add the second step in our funnel – finding those people who either signed up or requested a demo:

And run the report:

We can see that of the 435 people from San Francisco who visited our site during the selected date range, 9 of them converted to signing up or requesting a demo, giving us a 2.1% conversion rate.

Let's use one more example. Let's say we just ran an ad campaign on 10 different sites. We are linking back to our site, and we tagged the URL with UTMs. We gave the “campaign source” as adsfall2016. Now we'll create a funnel report that looks only at people who came from a UTM with that campaign source.

You can see that the first step we have in this funnel is finding the people who have visited the site and whose campaign source was adsfall2016. We're also using the event Ad campaign hit, which triggers whenever someone comes from a URL with UTMs tagged. Ad campaign hit is automatically tracked in Kissmetrics along with any UTM parameters you have tagged.

We'll add two more steps – viewing a product and purchasing:

So now you can see how people progress through a funnel when they are coming from a campaign.

4. Numerical Values for Properties

We've added the ability to add numerical values to properties in the Funnel Report.

Got all that?

Here's what it gets you:

Say you're an e-commerce marketer and you just launched your fall campaign. You want to see the conversion rate for the people who have visited your site and made a purchase of at least $99.

We'll add the property Order amount to the final step and tell Kissmetrics to find anyone who spent at least $99.

We'll select the “greater than or equal to” option and place 99 in the text box:

We'll run the report and get our data:

This will make finding a specific customer segment even easier.

5. People Who Do Not Have Conditions

With our new Funnel Report, you can find people who have not done an event or do not have a property.

So if you want to find the people who have signed up but have not viewed a product video, you can do that with the Funnel Report. Or, for another example, you can see the people who purchased who did not use a coupon code.

Here's how to do that:

We'll create a funnel report that looks at people who have visited our site, have not viewed our product video, and signed up.

We'll create our first step, Visited site, and then select people who have not done an event. We'll choose Watched product video as the event.

We'll add the final step, Signed up, and make our date range the last 30 days:

Now let's get our data:

We see that a minority of people visiting our site do not view the product video before signing up. If we want to compare funnels by adding an or condition to our second step, we can do that too:

Now let's run the report and click on “Watched product video” to compare the funnels:

This shows us that most of the people who signed up had viewed the product video and that people who viewed the product video have a higher conversion rate (2.3% compared to .2%). If we want to improve our site and signups, we'll want to consider showcasing the product video more prominently as it seems to be an effective conversion driver.

Two Smaller Changes

Finally, we made two minor updates:

1. Design changes to advanced settings

Previously you'd change your advanced settings here:

Now you'll find those settings here:

Click on that gear icon, and you'll see the attribution, formatting, and conversion rate options:

By default, the Funnel Report will display the conversion rate from the previous step. What's changed is that now you have the option to view the conversion rate from the first step. Here's where you'll find the conversion numbers:

You can easily change the setting to see the conversion rate from the first step by clicking on the First step button:

2. Checkbox changed to person icon

In some cases, people enter a funnel in a different order than the steps you have set up. For instance, you may have a funnel like this:

1. Visited site


2. Watched product video


3. Signed up

But what if a customer viewed a product video after signing up? Their steps are:

1. Visited site


2. Signed up


3. Watched product video

By default, the Funnel Report will exclude these people. But you can include them by checking this box:

Now you'll find that feature here:

We are changing the copy to better reflect the feature

Click that icon and you'll be able to compare the funnel with all traffic. Here's how it looks:

Take the New Funnel Report for a Spin

If you're already using Kissmetrics, you can sign in to your account, and the new Funnel Report will be ready for you.

If you're not already using Kissmetrics, this is a great time to get started.