Facebook Ads: Drop Your Cost per Conversion by 50%

While everything seems to be falling apart in the world of Facebook ads, there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that dump millions of dollars into the platform and get a hefty return. You’re probably wondering “how is this possible? If I’m barely able to scrape by with a 1.75 ROAS, surely everyone else is feeling the same.” Not true—if you’re barely scraping by right now, chances are you’re probably not fully optimizing your advertising efforts and have a high CPA to begin with. Today, I’ll be showing you how you can significantly drop your customer acquisition cost by implementing these five new strategies.

Niche Down Your Audience

There’s a famous saying out there, “If you advertise to everyone, you advertise to no one.” That’s especially true with most small businesses advertising on Facebook right now. They’re trying to get as many customers as possible by running their ads to everyone. This is completely the opposite of the way you should be approaching things. You have to first focus on finding your niche, developing copy that strikes the buyer’s nerve, and having creative that truly resonates with the buyer. Your niche is the proving ground of your product and brand messaging. Think of it like an incubator for an egg: you want to make sure the timing is right before letting it hatch. Same thing here: you want to ensure that you’re able to scale within your niche before expanding to larger audiences. We have a way more in depth blog on laser targeting your ideal customer to help you drill down to your ideal customer. So once you feel you’re no longer struggling with messaging and creative, you can start expanding out to larger audiences. For example, if you have a store that’s selling leggings, you’d probably want to start off by targeting competitors like Lululemon, Athleta, and Fabletics. After you’ve locked down your messaging, you can begin moving toward broader audiences like fashion, women’s clothing, or even engaged shoppers. Messaging and copy are always the most important; targeting will follow good copy/creative.

Squeezing Conversion Rate Out of a Sales or Product Page

While a good offer is bound to naturally increase conversion rate and decrease CPA, it’s just as important to go through the iterative process of testing your landing or product page to see how customers interact. Utilizing software like Hotjar or Lucky Orange here will help you to understand user behavior and know where you should start optimizing your page. Alongside that, you should also test the headlines, copy, page layout, and specific offer benefits to see what actually helps drive more sales. Highlighting product benefits in their copy is one of the best ways to increase CVR and drop CPA. Testing out different varieties of offer wording also could help significantly here, like specific % discounts, buy more save more, buy 1 get 1 free, and all this for $X. Lastly, a commonly overlooked thing by most store owners that can drastically improve their conversion rate is decreasing the friction between a customer clicking an ad and purchasing the product. Most conversions for them look like this:

Facebook Ad > Collections Page > Product Page > Cart Page > Checkout Page > Purchase

When it should look like:

Facebook Ad > Sales Page > Checkout Page > Purchase

Here, you’ve literally cut out 2 separate steps where a customer could drop off. Streamlining your checkout process makes it a no-brainer for people to buy. I know for a fact that as soon as Amazon implemented the “One Click Checkout,” they experienced a boom in conversion rate.

Testing Better Creative

If CPA is struggling, the next best thing you can start doing is testing better creative. While testing “better creative” is easier said than done, you’d be surprised at how many different varieties of creative people don’t test. For example, first test through these different creative types before implementing anything new:

Single Static Image
Normal & UGC Videos
Carousel
GIFs

Then you can start implementing different styles, types, and combinations of the two to find better ads. Now what determines a winning ad? I would look at the unique click-through rate as well as engagement to discover how well your creative resonates with people. Since creative is the first thing people see when coming across your ad, these two metrics are a good barometer on how well your creative is performing. Mainly because it shows how well that creative captures attention. Additionally, I would highly recommend testing with already proven audiences. This gives you a better understanding of performance by keeping one less variable out of the equation.

Testing More Direct Response Style Copy

If your CPA is still high after niching down, increasing conversion rate, and optimizing creative, one of the last things we can do is continuing to test better copy. In my last point, I said that creative is the first thing that people will see when viewing an ad. What I didn’t say was that the headline and body text are the next things people will look at. So, here you have the opportunity to optimize the headline and copy to be more direct-response and essentially pre-sell a customer on the product. Direct-response copy isn’t anything new—in fact, it’s been around for almost a hundred years. You structure your copy in a very strategic way to not only hook the person into reading it, but also convince them into taking action. First, you need to optimize headlines to resonate more with your customers. Then, we would work on the hook, the first line someone sees in your ad copy and what hooks them into reading. You want this to contain a bold claim on how your product can change their life while also directly targeting that specific customer. Then, you would want to include the offer. This is where you talk about what the product can specifically do for them, how it works, and why they should buy it. Finally, you want to include the CTA, making it a no-brainer for the person to buy your product. That should be the structure of your copy from top to bottom, but ideally in more of a long form. If you want to see some examples of how direct-response copy works, I recommend looking at David Ogilvy’s old advertisements.

You can also use the same methodology of testing new copy with already proven creative to lengthen the creative’s lifecycle. How do we do this? Simply use the same compelling creative and switch out the messaging. Since we know it’s already proven, we can continually run new pockets of traffic from winning audiences to it and persuade from different angles.

Set Up a New Offer

Setting up a new offer is your last resort. This is when all else has failed, and you can’t break through to your audience through messaging, creative, and even niched down targeting. Here, your angle would be using a product/offer that you already have and releasing it as a “new” product in order to use the angle of new to your advantage. You can then market the new product with decent success in the short term while you figure out the long term angles for the new offer. That’s the most viable solution. The least viable solution is literally starting from scratch; setting up a brand-new offer based on customer feedback and going through all the testing iterations, manufacturing, advertising, etc that a new product must undergo. While that’s the least ideal scenario, sometimes creating a new product from scratch is the only way to go. We’ve personally only experienced that less than a handful of times, but it has happened. You can also learn how to set up a no-brainer offer from our old blog post. Plus it doesn’t have to be just offers, if you work with an ecommerce email agency like ASPEKT, they can also help reduce your cost per conversion by improving your customer retention and LTV.

In Summary

Running a store isn’t easy, but marketing a store while running it is near impossible. So while some of the above may sound like the hardest things in the world, I think that properly optimizing everything will help you significantly drop your store’s cost per customer acquisition and scale the store. Start off by finding the right niche and targeting it with specific messaging and creative. Then, start working on your store’s conversion rate and improving that. Afterwards optimizing copy and creative are the next biggest tasks as creative and copy are always evolving with time. Lastly, you can always start over with a new offer if all else fails. Not the most optimistic last step, but sometimes it’s the necessary one.