How to: Generate Valuable Website Traffic on Facebook

When it comes to increasing the traffic flowing to your website, Facebook advertising is a great place to start. With the platform's assortment of targeting features and advertising objectives, Facebook provides a user-friendly way to get your potential customers on your domain.

The problem with Traffic Ads

Whether you want to point eyes at your newest product launch, an event registration page, or even just increase the traffic coming to your site to increase your SEO, traffic ads are a simple, effective way to accomplish your goals.

There is one caveat to driving traffic to a website - and that is converting that traffic into a viable business for your brand. We see this all the time with our clients that we run traffic campaigns on Facebook for. They direct traffic to a landing page at a low cost per click - but see no conversions. Even if you are getting clicks at $.01/click, if the traffic going to your website is not converting into a viable business, the clicks are useless.

Why is my traffic not converting?

The traffic could not be converting for a number of reasons. It could be that the page is not as mobile-friendly and displays weird on a smartphone. It could be that there is not a clear journey for users to follow. For example, on a page without a form fill or clear call-to-action, the website visitor can feel lost.

Those are some of the concrete reasons your webpage may be underperforming, but in all reality, social media scrollers need to hear a message more than one time to take some kind of action. In fact, there's a phenomenon known as the marketing rule of seven, that states that an individual may need to hear a message up to seven times in order for them to take action.

Facebook is well aware of this, which is where the idea of reach and impressions come in. In the Facebook and social media world, reach refers to the raw number of unique users who see your post or your page. While reach refers to the raw number of unique users who see your post or page, impressions refer to the number of times your content was displayed.

For example, if you have a reach of 1k and an impression metric of 3k, it's fair to assume that 1,000 people have seen your ad campaign around three times each. That means your audience is probably starting to recognize your name and the look of your brand.

The Retargeting Solution

Now that those 1,000 people have seen your content upwards of 3x each, it's probably time to slightly alter the message they are seeing. Whether that is changing the copy of the ad, the creative, the slides of the carousel, or simply the call-to-action, switching things up can offer a fresh perspective.

Who better to target than those that have already shown initial interest by going through your original traffic funnel? While you may not have gotten lead information or a direct purchase from that original click, there is a way to track and nurture those unidentified users to get your message across. To do this, you will need to install a Facebook pixel.

Facebook Pixel

A Facebook Pixel is simply a tracking code connected to your business manager on the backend of your website. The code can track the IP address of any visitors on your site and then matches them with users' profiles on Facebook. The best part is that the users you are tracking do not necessarily have to come straight from Facebook. A Pixel will track those that come from web searches, Google ads, or even clicks from your latest eBlasts. As long as the user allows cookies and has a Facebook profile, the Pixel can match them.

Installing Your Pixel

To create a Facebook Pixel, you will first need a Business Manager account through Facebook. This is free and relatively user-friendly to set up. Once you have your Business Manager all set up, you can find your Pixel set up in the Events Manager section of your Business Manager account.

To set up your Pixel, start by following these steps:

1. Click 'Connect Data Sources'

2. Click 'Web' as your data source

From there, Facebook will walk you through the instructions to set up your Pixel on your actual website. Facebook offers lots of integrations through common web hosts like Wix and WordPress for easy install and even offers an option to email detailed instructions to your web team, since we are not all versed in code!

Once you have your Pixel installed, you can walk through Events Manager to tell the platform which events are most valuable on your site. Whether it is a form fill, pressing the phone number on your website to prompt a call, you can set up individual events to then retarget in a strategic way.

To learn more about making the most out of your Pixel and Events Manager, check out this helpful article straight from Facebook!

Using Pixels in Advertising

Now that we know the basics behind the Facebook Pixel and Event Manager, you may be wondering how this helps the problem presented: I am getting a lot of clicks to my website but no conversions.

By far the best feature of the Facebook Pixel is that you can use the data you have tracked over time to create a custom audience.

To build a custom audience, you can either visit Audience Manager or you can build within the ad set level your actual campaign. When you reach the audience portion of setting up your ad campaign, click 'Create Now' and there will be a drop-down bar with a couple of options.

The advertiser has a couple of options:

Custom Audience: A custom audience, according to Facebook, is an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. Custom audiences allow the advertiser to use sources like customer lists, website or app traffic, or engagement on Facebook, to create audiences of people who already know your business.

Lookalike Audience: A Lookalike audience basically takes the data stored in your Facebook Pixel and matches that data to create an audience that 'looks like' your existing website traffic. You can choose the size of a Lookalike Audience during the creation process. Smaller audiences are more similar to your Pixel audience. Creating a larger audience increases your potential reach, but reduces the level of similarity between the Lookalike Audience and Pixel audience.

Once you make your selection, the platform will walk you through the next steps to creating your audience from your chosen source.

Using Your Custom Audience

Once you have built your custom audience, you can save it for future advertising campaigns. This means you can start creating ads that have the same objective but present it with new copy, creativity, and a call to action. For example, for a lot of our service-based clients, we'll drive traffic to their website either using Facebook traffic ads or Google ads. From there, we'll build a custom audience and create a lead generation campaign on Facebook. It is all about being strategic with how you are presenting your brand and advertisement to the consumer.

You can also use the lookalike audience option to grow your fan base and expand your pool of potential buyers. If you've been running traffic ads for a little while, and your traffic is converting, you can use lookalike audiences to find people who are similar to your best customers. It's all about presenting the information to those who are most likely to convert.

We know this is a lot of information. If you would like to take a more hands-off approach to Facebook advertising, click here to schedule a demo with us, and let's Turn Social Into Sales with our turnkey advertising solutions!