How to Stop Paying So Much for Facebook Ad Website Traffic

I was doing a review of someone’s Facebook ads- I won’t tell you who so they aren’t embarrassed- and I discovered a mistake that really surprised me!

I’ve never taught this particular distinction because it never would have occurred to me to do this particular mistake… probably because Ad Manager has ingrained this into me by way of its work flow… but here it is:

If you want website traffic from Facebook ads, one of the WORST ways to do that is to promote a Facebook page post that has a link in it. <– click to tweet

Know what I mean? You have a Facebook post with a link in it, and you think, “Oh I need to promote this post so they’ll go to my website!”

Well that works horribly.

Why?

Because when you promote a Facebook post, Facebook shows it to people who are most likely to engage with it. Engagement means like, comment, and share. Not website click. <– click to tweet

Website clicks are a whole nother thing! They aren’t showing your post to people who are likely to do that.

When you look at an ad that’s promoting a post, you might see $0.50 per engagement and think that’s good. But if you expand the ad, you may see that most of those interactions are likes, or even photo views. Oh my gosh, I’m paying for photo views? Yep, indirectly.

Here’s an example- in this post I really did want engagement, but you can see that if my goal had been to get website clicks, those are some expensive clicks! That $0.31 per engagement looks good until you realize you paid for 14 people to click on the image and only 2 people clicked the link.

If you want Facebook to show your ad to people who’ll click to go to your website, don’t BOOST or promote a post. <– click to tweet

If you’ve only created ads by clicking BOOST on a post, you won’t even know where to go to create the right kind of ad.

You need to go to Ad Manager. This is the main Facebook ad creation interface.

When you create an ad in the Ad Manager, you immediately have to choose one out of ten different ad objectives.

Facebook uses those objectives to determine who to show your ad to.

• If you want website traffic,  select “Send people to your website.”
• If you want leads or sales, install conversion tracking and select “Increase conversions on your website.”

Choosing the right ad objective is one major difference between success and failure with Facebook ads.

Then you create your ad.

Now, the newsfeed part is going to look a lot like the Facebook post you might have promoted, but it will get you website clicks for $0.10-$0.50, whereas the website clicks from boosted posts are going to be $1.00 – $5.00.

MAJOR price difference.

So, get 10 times the number of website clicks by going to the Ad Manager and choosing the right ad objective.

Do it!