Advertising is key for any business that wants to increase website traffic. Learn about how Facebook advertising can bring traffic to your website and more.
When Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow Harvard students conceived Facebook, they could not have known how big it would be. They also could not have known that it would become the number one online advertising platform globally. But today, Facebook generates the most significant traffic and is the best platform for online ads.
According to Statista, Facebook is the most extensive social network worldwide, with roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2021. In 2012, the number of active users surpassed one billion, making the platform the first-ever social network ever to make the billion mark. So, it’s not surprising that social media platforms like Facebook are crucial to marketing and selling your brand in today’s world.
In 2020, and since 2021 started, it has become more apparent that brands that desire to reach their target market and stay relevant must get on social platforms. To abandon social media marketing is to leave your target audience and customers in the hands of your competitors. Having an email list is not enough anymore in a world where people spend more time on social media than they do away from it.
In the same way, having an active website is not enough to get you the conversation rates you’re looking for. You must advertise your brand for people to come to your site and see what you’re selling. Thus, in this article, we shine our light on Facebook advertising and how it can bring traffic to your website.
What Does Facebook Advertising Mean?
Facebook ads are messages or advertisements that business owners pay for. These messages are written in the voice of the business with a message to promote their brand. In addition, they focus on a particular audience and entice potential customers. These ads have specific goals or advertising objectives.
For instance, a company may create an ad campaign targeted at custom audiences and increasing website traffic. The advert could also be to help increase referral traffic. During the campaign, the business can use images and texts to communicate its message. Facebook allows for video marketing, text, images, and infographics, as long as it does not contain harmful content.
The ads will appear in specific places on Facebook called “placement.” For example, video ads may appear in between news feeds on a mobile app. On a desktop, the advert can be on the right column of Facebook. In addition, adverts on mobile apps can appear outside of Facebook through the “audience network.”
How Much Does Facebook Ads Campaigns Cost?
Social media ads on Facebook cost as much as you’re willing to pay. It means that the power is in your hands to decide how much you want to pay based on your marketing budget and campaign. Facebook uses an ads auction system where you indicate how much you’re willing to pay for your ad to get to your ideal customers. The bids are based on the cost per click on your ad or the cost per impression.
What Are Facebook Ads Good For?
If you use Facebook or any other social platform, then the never-ending ads might have grated on your nerves at some point. If you’ve paid them any attention, then you must also have wondered if they are effective. Facebook ads are as important and influential as email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), organic social media, and flawless web design.
Highly targeted ads go a long way in attracting potential customers and getting them to visit your website. But it goes beyond that. Below are some of the benefits of Facebook advertisements.
Robust Analytics
If your ultimate goal is to know who is interacting with your brand and is interested in your services, Facebook ads are the way to go. This is because it gives you a customized report about the performance of your ads. You don’t have to make assumptions. With a Facebook analyzer or analytic tools, you can quickly determine your conversion rates and other social metrics.
Micro-Target Ideal Audience
Facebook shows your ads to users who will find your ads relevant. The social platform gives you three audience selection tools to make this happen. Thus, when you make a sponsored Facebook post, it will go before core audiences, custom audiences, or lookalike audiences. Furthermore, you can define your audience based on:
- Location
- Connections
- Demographic
- Behavior
- Interests
Reach More People Than With Organic Post
In the simplest form, organic content is an unsponsored post. It is a traffic source with traffic potentials but won’t do much for you. This is because the only people who see organic posts are your friends or people you’re in the same Facebook community with. So, to reach more people and increase your traffic potential for your website, you need a paid ad.
Ads go beyond your friends and community to every active user of the social platform. Simply put, if you get 100 video views with an organic post, social advertising can get you 1,000 or tens of thousands. What’s more, it targets people who will only be interested in what you’re “selling.”
Remarket to People You Already Interacted With
There are people with whom you’ve interacted once, and they visit your website but never go beyond the landing page. They are known as cold audiences. By including Facebook in your advertising strategy, you bring your business back into the focus of these people. The more they see your brand, the more inclined they are to click the action button that takes them to your site. Consequently, they can go from being a potential customer to an actual customer.
Other benefits of Facebook advertising include:
- It gives you an avenue to meet your specific objective or business goals
- It offers you clicks and conversions within your marketing budget
- With Facebook lead ads, you can easily collect information from people interested in your product and services
- It allows you to add call-to-action buttons that result in an instant reaction to your content
- It helps you encourage customer loyalty
How To Use Facebook Ads Generate Traffic to Your Website?
If you want to increase your audience size and generate quality traffic on your site, Facebook is the place to be. You can also consider the other platform owned by the company, Instagram. But it all depends on the content type you’re aiming for. If all you want to focus on is image and video marketing, Instagram might seem like the best option. However, if you want advert options without limit, then use Facebook.
The next step is figuring out how to reach over 2 billion daily users on the platform. Beyond reaching them, the bigger question is converting them to the relevant traffic your website badly needs. Remember, every brand worth its salt has Facebook as part of its digital marketing strategy. So, how do you stand out and have your ideal audience visiting your site and not your competitor’s? Let’s find out.
Below are ways you can use Facebook ads to bring traffic to your website.
Purchase an Ad With a Reminder Ad That Repeats Time-Sensitive Offers
The first thing you need to do is buy an ad and then get a reminder advert. According to Social Media Examiner, the reminder ad creates urgency by reminding someone what they’ve seen on your website. It also carries any repeat offer you’re making to new customers. The offer hooks a person already engaging with your ad to revisit your website and eventually convert to a customer.
Here’s how the Facebook marketing funnel works: awareness = engagement = website visit. In addition, you should create your Facebook website’s custom audience. By doing the latter, your ads will only go to your targeted audience. Here, you can indicate if you’re targeting new customers or those who have visited your website within a specific period.
Pick the Best Ad Objective for Driving Traffic
When creating your social media strategy, you need to have an objective. The types of ads and ad objectives are two essential factors in driving traffic to your website. For example, with Facebook adverts, there are three objectives to keep in mind. They are namely awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Under each objective, there are sub-objectives. For instance, under awareness, you can indicate if you’re going for brand awareness or reach. Under consideration, some of the options include:
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App installs
- Video views
- Lead generation, etc.
Since the purpose of your advert is driving traffic to your site, “traffic” is the best option for you. It’s noteworthy that the design of the traffic objective will help generate website referral traffic and optimize click-through rate (CTR).
However, you must specify the type of traffic you desire to focus on in the Ad Set for this to happen.
Furthermore, Facebook designed its ad objectives to factor in each user’s preference. When you create an objective to increase traffic to your website, Facebook algorithms prioritize showing your ads to users with a significant history of clicking the link to websites. Thus, ad objectives play a decisive role in driving quality traffic to your site.
Optimize Ad Delivery for Higher Traffic ROI
After setting your ad objective, the next thing is optimizing your ad delivery method. You’ll find this at the bottom of the Ad Set when creating a campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager. You’ll have to choose from one of these four options:
- Landing page views
- Link clicks
- Daily unique reach
- Impressions
Since bringing traffic to your site is the objective, you should opt for “landing page views.” However, to use this option, you need to add a Facebook pixel to your website first. Doing this allows Facebook to show your ads to a target audience likely to view your page. Another reason for going with this option is that many things happen from when a person clicks on an ad to when they arrive at your page.
They may change their mind after clicking or have a network interruption that stops them from completing the action. So, if you’re using “link clicks,” you may have a high bounce rate and be unable to drive meaningful traffic. But with landing page views, you reduce bounce rates and optimize website traffic.
In Facebook words, “If your goal is to get more traffic on a specific page (or specific pages) of your website, we recommend landing page view optimization over link click optimization, since the former can improve traffic quality.” Lastly, with landing page views, you’ll reduce your cost per click, increase your CTC, and spend less money.
Optimize Landing Pages for Higher Quality Traffic
It’s one thing to use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website. It’s another thing for the traffic to interact with your site content. High traffic volume is only helpful if visitors visit other pages, read blog posts, contact you, sign up for your newsletter or email marketing list, purchase a product, etc. Thus, you have to optimize your landing page properly.
To do this, you must create landing page content similar to your ad content. So, there should be a significant similarity between the pictures, videos, and texts in your ad and landing page. The content on the latter should be a continuation of what you have on your social media ads but with a little more information.
What you should remember is that the landing page is not the end goal. It is more like an intermediary between your business goals and Facebook adverts. Thus, your landing page should be able to hook the visitors your ads brought in and get them to visit other pages on your site.
Create Quality Onsite Content
In driving traffic to your site, you must provide your visitors with high-quality content that is informative and educating. For example, suppose you focus so much on your key performance indicators (KPIs), sales language, and pushing your brand. In that case, you may substitute it for quality content that provides value and improves organic traffic. In addition, informative social media posts drive traffic to your site by generating likes, shares, and inbound interest.
You should always keep in mind the ultimate goal of your audience. For instance, if a visitor is researching a product or service, provide helpful concrete information. If they want to covert, guide them to content that is expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. If it helps them, they’ll naturally come to you, thereby increasing the traffic to your site.
The different types of content you can create are informational pages on your website and an About Us page. You can also write blog posts, create category pages, guides, FAQ pages, multimedia website content, etc. The best part about high-quality content is that it can generate organic shares off-site.
Update Your Facebook Business Page
Lastly, you should update your Facebook business page to reflect the current state of your business. While paid content is vital in generating website traffic, there’s a place for organic content. Although organic Facebook posts only have an average reach of 5.2%, paid content drives organic engagement on Facebook.
This happens by clicking on a profile name instead of content in the body of an ad. So, continually update your Facebook business page with enough content to drive traffic to your site. Post engaging banners, sidebar content, timeline posts, and anything else that would interest your visitors. In conclusion, pay as much attention to the business page as you would a sponsored post.
How To Write the Best Facebook Ad
It’s not enough to want to put up an ad to drive traffic to your website; you must create adverts that persuade, excite, and entertain. The ad content should make a connection with your business, be void of excess information, and make the choice to proceed to your site obvious. To help you create the best Facebook ad, we put together some tips.
Use Facebook Targeting to Streamline Your Audience
Every business has an audience, so you must write to yours. For instance, if you have an e-commerce store that sells luxury goods, you can’t write for an audience interested in weight loss products. In addition, your content should feel like you’re addressing one person only and focus on their needs. On Facebook, you can use the targeting tool to identify your audience and write ads that speak to them.
Write Different Facebook Ads for Different People
If you offer different services to different classes of people, you must reflect this in your advert. People are looking to see ads that address their issue and not blanket ads. Thankfully, Facebook helps you target a specific audience, so capitalize on it. For example, if your business caters to both male and female needs, you may want to create different ads for the male products or services, and another for the female.
Ensure to Use Visual
You should incorporate visuals into your Facebook ads. But the visual should be related to your business and not something abstract. For example, you cannot be advertising fitness products and use a house as your visual. Even if you also have a real estate business, using the house invalidates the fitness ad and creates a jarring experience for the person who sees it. If your business does not have any images, you can source several paid and free pictures online.
Use Only One Call-to-Action
Every ad has a clear goal, and in this case, it is to bring traffic to your website. So, ensure that you include a call-to-action. Without one, a person would only view the ad but take no corresponding action as they don’t know what to do next. While a CTA is important, you should not add more than one to avoid confusing the viewer.
Keep It Short
An ad is not blog content, plus it’s not an avenue to divulge all the information on your product or service. Also, those viewing your Facebook ad are most likely scrolling through their timeline, so if it’s too long, they might skip. Thus, keep the content short, but ensure it has value.
It should be informative but enticing enough to make the viewer take action. Try focusing on what a person stands to gain from using your product and how it would help them. Furthermore, be clear and concise, keeping in mind that less is always more.
Use Simple Language
Your Facebook ad is not the place to use industry jargon. First, your audience needs to understand you at a glance, so use simple, clear, and unambiguous language. Second, anyone viewing the ad should be able to get the message without much brainwork. Lastly, they should know the offer, benefits, and steps to take from just viewing the ad.
When Should You Post Ads on Facebook?
To drive the most traffic to your website, it is essential you know the best time to post your ad on Facebook. According to Sprout Social, the best times to post on Facebook are between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. The worst day to post is Saturday. These times are based on U.S Central Time, so keep them in mind when planning your content calendar.
Consult With Triple Digital Today!
When it comes to having an effective digital marketing campaign, you can’t do it alone. You need a marketing agency like Triple Digital to handle all campaigns for the best result. We handle everything from web design to Facebook ad placements. Contact us today to analyze and plan a strategy for your brand.