“My team spent a ton of budget on Facebook Ads last year. We got some fairly inexpensive traffic to our event page, but hardly any ticket sales.”
Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone. Even the most battle-tested teams have a hard time getting their event in front of the right audience on Facebook.
Improving your ROI (return on investment) and selling more tickets on Facebook takes skill. You need a combination of high-quality ads, wise budget spending, and knowing how to leverage the platform’s granular and highly accurate audience targeting.
Here are three tips to help you get the most out of your next Facebook ads.
1. Use A/B testing
Creating the Facebook ad itself –what it will say, how it will look – takes time and planning. But if you’re not using A/B testing to continually optimise your campaign, you’re wasting a golden opportunity to engage more people.
Successful A/B testing uses trackable, controlled differences to determine which element of an ad is making the difference on your click-through rate (CTR). The smaller the piece you’re testing, the better.
For example, you could test two versions of the same ad where every element is identical except the CTA. Sounds simple, but little things can have a huge impact. In fact, colour changes or word choices in your CTA can really boost your CTR!
Note: While you should vary ads within an individual Ad Set to test what performs best, try to keep the group of ads you have consistent across Ad Sets. This allows you to accurately measure the effect of changes you make and experiments you run.
2. Improve your relevance score
Facebook only wants to show its users content that’s relevant to them – including ads. And how they determine whether your ad is interesting and relevant to your audience is through something called the relevance score.
When you run an ad to a given audience, Facebook quickly analyses how well the audience is responding to your ad. Are they clicking on it, liking it, sharing or commenting on it? Then, using these responses as an indicator of how relevant the ad is to your audience, Facebook gives it a score out of 10 (with 1 being the lowest).
The higher the relevance score, the less expensive your ad will be. Why? Because Facebook only wants to show its users the most relevant content, so it rewards good (relevant) advertisers and punishes bad (irrelevant) ones by charging them more.
Note: To land a higher score and better target attendees, create ads that are highly relevant through A/B testing, and use Facebook’s targeting parameters to accurately define your audience.
3. Retarget with Custom Audiences
Often your target audience will come to your event website, but they won’t convert on their first visit. Retargeting these people gives you a second (or third) opportunity to bring them back to your event page or website. In fact, 80% of people are more likely to convert through retargeting than through a normal campaign.
To retarget on Facebook, you need to use a Customer Audience. To create one, select audiences in your Ads Manager, then “Create Audience,” followed by “Custom Audience.” In the menu that appears, select Website traffic and then set the criteria for your audience (e.g. including or excluding people who visited certain URLs on your site).
To target your Custom Audience with ads, set up your Campaign with the goal “increase website conversions” and at the Ad Set stage, choose the Custom Audience you created that you want to target. Now you’re ready to retarget people who have shown interest in your event but haven’t acted yet.
Note: Custom Audiences and retargeting help you reach people who are already interested in your event. That means they’re more likely to click on your ad, which makes it cheaper!
Want more tips about getting your event in front of your ideal audience on Facebook and converting them into ticket buyers? Download How to Master Facebook Advertising and Sell More Tickets.
