Quick reminder: The more people Facebook knows it can show your ad to, the wider your overall reach and the more you’re able to target users who are rarely targeted.
While making the content so good people want to share it, you can use specific copy to nudge them in that direction.
In my experience, I’ve found that testing different campaign objectives works best.
As an example, the text on one of my long-standing control ads reads:
My rule is that someone viewing my ad should have a specific person in mind that they’d share the content with, even before they read the article.
5 Facebook traffic ad strategies to get more visitors at lower costs
Here are five best practices for driving traffic at a very affordable cost while making sure that the people visiting your site are of high quality.
In the past, I’ve even created content not because I knew it would do well in search, but because the few people who would read it are my ideal readers.
1. Make the content good (really good)
I’ve found that lookalike audiences, which significantly increase the amount of people I target, work the best.
And if played right, it presents a chance to acquire customers at a cost far below what your competitors are paying.
I’ve also hired people on Fiverr to compare and contrast my content to other top-performing articles in the space.
Years ago, ads using Facebook’s traffic objective were so cheap that site owners could make money just by driving traffic to pages with display advertising. It’s a strategy known as Facebook ad arbitrage. But as ad costs have risen, it’s also a strategy that’s essentially extinct.
The end goal is to create content that readers find valuable and share or like, as this is what causes positive engagement on your ad (which Facebook really likes).
So, say our DTC organic baby clothing brand from the previous example has found that women in their third trimester have the highest lifetime term value. In this case, this company might create a blog post titled “A Checklist For Preparing For Your Baby In Your Third Trimester.”
To get the lowest possible cost per click on your Facebook ads, priority number one is making your content so good that it encourages positive engagement (aim for a like or a share).
2. Nudge people to share
Shares drive down your overall cost per landing page view, and likes let Facebook know that your ad is of high quality and they can show it to more people.
Plus, if this company did want to run a conversion campaign retargeting users who viewed their checklist, they’ve expanded their audience size (which allows for cheaper retargeting ads).
For example, if I’m driving traffic to a page on money-making apps, I’ll use the lookalike audience from one of the reviews from a product mentioned, such as Capital One Shopping (a very popular rewards app mentioned in the apps article that gets high-intent search traffic).
3. Create content with mass appeal
Once they drive some traffic to that page via their own social channels and through outreach, they can create a lookalike audience from visitors of that page, driving traffic to their guide on “How To Create A Minimalist Eco-Friendly Wardrobe For You Newborn,” as this is their ideal customer.
Utilizing the lesser-known “traffic” objective is a chance to play a different game than the majority of other advertisers.
This ideal customer may not have been reached if they were just using the “conversion” objective.
4. Test different campaign objectives
The big question is this: How do you bring in high-quality traffic —i.e. traffic that will eventually convert— while maintaining large audience sizes?
On the other hand, there are more people who are likely to click a link and read a piece of content that interests them than people who will convert quickly. And naturally, because fewer advertisers are targeting these users, reaching them is more affordable.
As the number of advertisers on Facebook increases, it’s only natural that when deploying the same strategies as everyone else — e.g., using only the conversion objective — costs will increase.
5. Create content solely for lookalike audiences
A question I like to ask myself about the content to which I’m sending cold traffic is: Would a subreddit moderator find this valuable? As any site owner who has submitted their content to Reddit knows, it’s a tough crowd. So a good litmus test for whether your content would get the positive engagement needed to have super-cheap costs is whether it’s good enough for Reddit.
For those with a smaller niche audience, this can require some outside-the-box thinking (which we’ll cover below).
Because positive engagement decreases your ad costs, you want a large percentage of the people viewing your ad and content to like or share it. That means it’s best to create ads and content that appeal to as many people as possible.
Because having a large audience is important for driving costs down, it’s important to constantly test new audiences.
One of my favorite ways to get lookalike audiences is from other pieces of content on my site, which is at the end-stage of a buying cycle.
For example, we know that conversions are the most popular objective on Facebook. We also know that people who are known to convert—specifically, people who would buy a product or service from a new brand as the direct result of an ad—are some of the most highly-targeted users on Facebook.
I start my campaigns using Facebook’s traffic objective and having it optimize for landing page views. Earlier, I also mentioned that for the cheapest possible clicks you need large audiences.
As I mentioned in the intro, the strategy I’ve used to grow my personal finance website The Ways To Wealth has been to both increase top-of-funnel awareness and monetize traffic via affiliate offers.
From my testing, larger audience sizes have resulted in the lowest cost per click. In fact, my minimum audience size is a 1% lookalike audience, which reaches over 2 million people.
Final thoughts on Facebook traffic ads
R.J. Weiss is the founder and editor of The Ways To Wealth, a Certified Financial Planner™. He’s spent the last 10+ years writing online about personal finance and has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, MSN Money, and other publications.
Of course, every marketer thinks they have the absolute best content. So this is where it’s useful to have a third-party perspective on the quality of your content.
As such, the cost of advertising to those users is higher on average.
About the author
And this is what Facebook traffic ads are ideal for.
