How to Increase Cold Audience Lead Volume 1800% and Decrease CPL 94% in 10 Days Using Facebook Ads
In most cases, Facebook’s campaign objectives and associated ad set level delivery optimization choices are well suited to your audience’s location in the funnel, with your specific selections then further assisting in reaching the goals you’ve identified. However, there are some instances where selecting the common optimization for a specific objective can actually prevent your campaigns from maximizing their success.
In a recent test for a home improvement client, we made one small adjustment to delivery optimization in an effort to rescue a campaign from poor performance and saw amazing results. We managed to increase their lead volume by 1800%, while lowering cost per lead (CPL) by 94%, and increasing the campaign’s conversion rate (CVR) by a whopping 2662% – all in just ten days. The simple approach we used is suitable for any vertical and can be especially helpful for small to medium size businesses looking for a quick turnaround on lower budget campaigns aimed at cold audience lead generation.
Challenge
Our client, Indow – an energy efficient and acoustic grade window insert company, had a Facebook Ads campaign that was under performing in the first ten days of the new month before we started working with them. The goal with Facebook Ads was to increase their brand awareness and then ultimately convert website visitors through an on-page lead generation form to “Get A Free Estimate”.
Typically, cold audiences are introduced to brands by way of website traffic campaigns while warmer audiences that have not yet converted tend to perform well in remarketing conversion goal campaigns. However, in this account, many awareness campaigns were converting quite well, with healthy engagement and higher CTRs and ad delivery optimization set to drive link clicks or landing page views. Almost all of their campaigns behaved similarly except for one in particular, which led us to re-evaluate its set up.
Solution
Sometimes, awareness campaigns can perform better as conversion goal campaigns, set to optimize ad delivery for conversions rather than traffic. With a simple test applying that very change, we were able to see a remarkably quick improvement in this one concerning campaign. As was expected with this adjustment, our CTR decreased 23% since we were no longer optimizing for clicks, however, the lift in lead volume and CVR more than made up for it, along with the drastic decrease in CPL from $366 to $20 in the ten days following the change.
Results
Impressions and spend were in line with one another before and during the test however, as we expected, CTR decreased since the optimization goal was no longer set to link clicks. When optimized for traffic, Facebook shows your ads to the people in your target audience that are most likely to click the link to your landing page at the lowest cost, whereas a conversion setup delivers ads to people in your target audience that will drive the most website conversions. It’s worthwhile to test both to see which can help your bottom line the most. While there may be a trade off in CTR and engagements, if it brings high quality leads, it’s an exchange that’s definitely worth considering.
Given how quickly the performance improved as a result of this test, we have since begun implementing this alternative optimization tactic to cold audiences in other campaigns and are seeing improvement there as well. While CTR and engagements have decreased, we’ve been able to achieve our goal of acquiring leads in a much shorter time period, thus providing the client’s sales team with additional relevant leads and more customers with solutions to block outside noise from their homes and greatly reduce both drafts and energy bills.
While this strategy worked well for this particular client, we cannot guarantee that it will work for all others, however, we recommend testing this tactic within your own accounts to see if it too will bring success in shifting under-performing campaigns in a positive direction. Give it a try and let us know below how it pans out for you and your cold audience campaigns.