Our January 2022 Facebook Ads Tests (Part 2)

Antoine Dalmas Facebook Ads Guide

Every month, our expert team of Media Buyers performs a series of Facebook Ads Tests to offer you expert tips on how to optimize your campaigns and strategies.

Facebook Ads: Keep it simple

Always!

Today, we are going to talk about a special client who is none other than a Lead Gen client – but also an e-commerce!

The client in questions sells custom engagement rings, which can be rather expensive, so we tend to avoid selling them directly.

In October 2021, the Account Manager, Louis-Daniel Binette (who has already made an appearance on Social Selling!) meets with the client right before the account’s ‘breaking point.’

The client wanted to use a method that we completely discourage: multiplying campaigns and targeting only one audience per campaign. It’s like using Audience Budget Optimization, but via campaigns instead.

Why? The client absolutely wanted to test very distinct approaches with restrictions on certain audiences. For example: targeting only Android users…a method we’ve tried in the past that resulted in a very expensive failure.

So, we found ourselves in the following situation.

6 campaigns, with an average CPL of $16.22. Let me tell you: this is expensive. November comes around, and our CPL doesn’t get any better.

A CPL of nearly $21 with a total spend of $7000. Even worse! At this point, our client gets in touch with Louis-Daniel (who knew this was going to happen) to rectify the situation. Louis-Daniel immediately cuts these campaigns and ends the month with a total CPL of $32. Never again will he see such results.

In December, he tested out a variety of methods, but ultimately consolidated all of his efforts on the 3 following campaigns:
A retargeting campaign in CBO (which only targeted our best audiences).
A campaign in ABO that received the majority of our budget
An acquisition campaign in CBO to scale the account

Here are our overall results from these campaigns only.

Now….why did we keep running the ABO campaign?

ABO allows you to quickly test audiences and new creatives. This can be a very interesting option when you have a business that only sells one product/service (in our case, custom rings). ABO can also detect successful advertising hooks so that you can add strong ads into your CBO campaign afterwards.

To properly utilize ABOs to your advantage, here’s the structure we recommend: If you only have one “product” to promote, try launching a central campaign (with a large budget), and a smaller campaign to test new approaches that won’t directly compete with the former.

What’s the situation now? Both our CBO and Retargeting campaigns are still generating much better results.

But, even though the ABO campaign is costing us more, the account, on average, is still doing perfectly fine!

Here are the results of our latest test as of January 31st, 2022.

We often discuss how importantUser Generated Content (UGC) is for e-commerce businesses.

But, what about other types of businesses?

Can a Lead Gen try their hand at UGC? What about an infopreneur?

The answer is yes, but before we get into how, here’s a little story.

To set the scene, we’ll be talking about an infopreneur that sells real estate investment training courses. Their typical customer buying journey is the following: the prospect discovers the company → free webinar → first offer → upsell offer and so on.

As you can see, this client’s acquisition strategy (for their free webinar and beyond) heavily relies on lead generation.

Stéphanie Thiffault (our Director of Marketing Strategy) is in charge of the account, and she often works with similar clients and lead generation ads for acquisition campaigns.

At this point, promoting the free webinar had been getting more and more expensive each week. But, Stephanie knows that UGC is an advertising format that works very well for many of our other agency clients, so she decided to recommend this strategy to this client.

Together, they developed a simple video script for the client to shoot the UGC video themself.

The script is as follows:
Interpellate the prospect
Introduce the main topic (in this case, the free webinar)
Storytelling segment
Address how prospects can solve their “pain points”
Excite the prospect
Call to action

The month before the shooting of this infamous video, here’s how the lead generation campaign was doing.

A CTR of 0.73%, a CPM of $27.81, over $3000 in spend, and a CPL of almost $10. But then came the video! (Click on the video to view it on Facebook now).

One minute of uncut footage shot in a car with no subtitles, and yet...

In the first 7 days, this ad completely outperformed the other ad it was competing with. Its CTR was stratospheric, and the difference in CPL between the two ads was $8.80. Now that it’s been about a month since this ad has been rolling, here are our thoughts.

Not only was Stephanie able to significantly decrease the account's CPL, but she was also able to increase her spend by almost $2,000. And, the CTR never dipped below 2%, which is remarkable for this client in particular. This campaign’s results were so inspiring, the client decided to shoot another UGC video, but this time with taglines and subtitles.

And as you already know, it's important to repurpose and adapt your best-performing ads. It’s an advertiser’s most trustworthy secret weapon!

So, why did these UGC videos work so well?

They don’t look like ads.

Instead, they look more like videos that one would simply find while scrolling through their Facebook Feed of someone voicing their opinion about a subject on camera. Nothing more.

Want further proof? Here’s another test we did for our Facebook Ads Squad Lead Gen campaign.

As our results were plummeting, we decided to launch an ad unlike any others we’ve launched before for this campaign.

We created it by simply creating a Note on an iPhone and screenshotting it, which we then uploaded into our Ads Manager. It doesn’t look like an ad at all, nor anything else you can find on the platform in terms of content.

Long story short: Our advice to you is to find a way to be more ‘organic’ and creative in how you advertise your product or service. UGC videos are not exclusive to e-commerce businesses alone. You just need to be willing to get your feet wet to get the results you desire!