Social Traffic Rush

Chapter 1: Facebook Traffic Rush

Facebook (https://www.Facebook.com) is the king of social media with over 2 billion active users logging on to the platform every single month. People from all over the world go on Facebook to post status updates, read their friends’ updates, meet new friends, and more. 

As a business owner, you want to capitalize on the sheer number of Facebook users and get them to visit your website. Imagine if you can get even just a very small percentage of Facebook users to land on your website! 

You’re talking thousands of people reading your content – people who will more than likely share your post if it’s something they find super valuable and useful!

Organic Facebook Posts Vs Facebook Ads

There are two ways to promote your content on Facebook: (1) by promoting it organically to your fans and followers, or (2) by promoting it on Facebook Ads. 

With the first method, you’re not paying any money to Facebook. You’re only promoting to your fans and followers. On the surface, this may sound like a great plan. 

However, with each algorithm update, Facebook organic reach is ever dwindling. This means that even if you have millions of fans, only a small percentage is going to see your post in their news feeds!

A few years ago, organic reach was extremely good. Every time you posted something on your fan page, a large majority of your followers will see your post. So if you were promoting or selling something, you would essentially get sales without paying for traffic.

However, in recent years, Facebook has been doing its best to go back to its ‘social’ roots. Instead of showing posts from fan pages, Facebook has been prioritizing updates from people in your circle of friends. 

If you’ve got hundreds of friends, you’ll see most of their posts on your news feeds instead of posts from pages you’ve followed. This is obviously great news for Facebook users themselves, but not so much for business owners who carefully manage and maintain a huge following on Facebook. 

So, with the ever-declining numbers of organic social media traffic, many business owners have been forced to turn to Facebook Ads. 

Many social media marketers swear by the power of Facebook Ads as it is very cost-effective compared to other advertising options like Google Adwords and other traditional marketing methods.

With Facebook Ads, you no longer need to worry about organic reach. You can simply set up an ad from your Ads Manager account, target the right audience demographic, define your budget and Facebook will take care of the rest for you. 

The truth is no other social media or advertising platform can offer the kind of targeting options that Facebook offers. You can target people based on many different factors such as location, interests, hobbies, affiliations, and so much more. 

There’s even an extremely powerful tool called Facebook Pixel. It’s just a snippet of code you add to your website’s header section. The pixel is powerful if you know how to use it and read its data correctly. 

With the pixel, you can track what your visitors are doing on your website. You’ll know if they signed up to your mailing list, or if they bought something in your eCommerce store. With the Facebook remarketing feature, you can retarget people who’ve visited your site and send them highly targeted offers.  

With the lookalike audience feature, you can upload your own customer data, and Facebook will try to look for people who are similar to your own audience. This basically means reaching more of the same people with just a push of a button! 

How To Drive Traffic To Your Website Using Facebook Ads

In this section, you’re going to be learning a few ways to get people to land on your website simply by signing up for Facebook Ads. Let’s begin!

What do you want to achieve?

This is the first step on the list. You have to sort out your goals – do you want to increase your brand awareness? Do you want to get your ads in front of as many people as possible? Do you want people to visit your website? Install your app? Buy from your online store?

Facebook Ads have 3 different campaign objectives – you have to choose the right objective that will match your goals. 

For example, if you want people to visit your website, then you may want to choose the Traffic objective. But it’s not always the right choice especially if you’re targeting people who have yet to hear about your brand. This kind of traffic is called ‘cold traffic.’ If you want higher engagements on your posts, you’re going to have to convert this cold traffic to warm or hot traffic. 

For cold traffic, try getting them aware of your brand first. You can choose between Brand Awareness or Reach objectives. You’re basically introducing your brand to your target audience, sort of like saying “Hello, I’m here! I exist!” 

You can try letting your ad run for a few days while spending a few dollars each day. It’s not going to bankrupt you, you just want to test the waters. 

When your advert’s been viewed by a good number of people, then you may want to create a second advert and this time use another ad objective. You can then target the people who’ve engaged with your initial, testing-the-waters ad. 

Since they’ve already engaged with you, they’re not cold traffic anymore. They’re now known as a warm audience – people who’ve interacted with your brand previously. You’re not total strangers anymore. 

So, in the second stage of your advert you should remind people of who you are. Remember, people do see tons of content on their news feed. So don’t be shy – remind people that they’ve seen you before!

Also, while planning your goals, you need to map out your strategy. You can’t just spend money on Facebook ads without knowing which variables to measure. It’s important to know when you need to stop advertising when nothing seems to be working. 

Knowing this information is crucial to succeeding on Facebook, or any other social media platform for that matter. If you’re targeting the wrong crowd, then chances are you’re not going to get very good engagement rates. 

For instance, if you’re offering women’s hygiene products, there’s no sense including men in your target audience, right? 

And if you’re targeting younger women, say 18-30-year-olds, then you shouldn’t include females outside of that age range. 

Otherwise, you’re just going to be annoying people. When people report or flag your ads to Facebook, you’re going to get a low relevancy score. 

In the world of Facebook Ads, you want to have the highest relevancy scores possible (9 or 10). This means people are interreacting positively with your advert, so you’re probably targeting the right kind of people. 

However, even if you do have good relevancy scores, but you’re not getting any sales or conversions, then you probably need to work on putting out a better offer in front of your audience.

The thing is, knowing who to target is extremely important. You don’t want to be wasting money, you don’t want to be annoying Facebook users. Rather, you want to add value. To do that, you’re going to need to know first what your audience needs which leads us to our next point.

If you don’t already have an existing demographic for your target audience, you can run ads targeted to different groups of people. 

Find out which group responds best to your ad. Once you’ve found the winning demographic, then your job just got a whole lot easier as you’ll find out in the next point.

Knowing your audience and what they want will allow you to create ads that will speak directly to them. If you’ve got a product or service that addresses your target audience’s pain points, then you just may have extremely good conversion rates. 

That’s the beauty of putting the right offer in front of the right audience – you not only bring value to a lot of people, you also reap plenty of profits in return. 

When creating ads, it’s best to know what kind of content your audience prefers. If you’re targeting older audiences, then you may want to use videos and high-quality graphics to make it easy for them to consume your content. 

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, would you want to consume content in video format or would you want to squint your way through a 2,000-word article with size 10 font!

Optimizing your ad design is extremely important too. Facebook users gets a lot of visual stimulation from the photos and videos their friends share with them. You have to stand out too if you want people to notice your ad. 

In fact, it’s your design that’s going to convince people to stop scrolling on their news feeds long enough to scrutinize your graphics and read your title. If it’s something that interests them, then they’ll likely click and read your entire post on your website.

If you’re trying to get people to sign up to your mailing list, then you have to offer them something of value first. 

You don’t just create an ad on Facebook asking people to sign up for your list. You can’t just expect people to give you their email address simply because you asked for it. No, it doesn’t work like that. 

If you want people to follow your call to action, you’re going to have to give them something valuable first, so you’ll gain their trust. 

When creating your ads, you need to specify where you want your ads to appear. There are quite a number of places where you can place your ads – in people’s news feed, the right column, in the audience network, in instant articles, and Instagram. 

To determine the most optimal placement for your ads, you’re going to have to do a lot of split testing. When testing, you’re going to have to isolate variables one at a time, so you know exactly what’s working and what’s not. 

For instance, if you want to know why people aren’t engaging with your ads, then you may want to split test by creating a second advert with a different cover image, or a different title, and so on. 

Split testing may feel like an unnecessary expenditure, but most Facebook Ads experts suggest split testing your way to success. It’s better to know what’s going to contribute to your success, and what’s going to impede it so you can adjust as necessary. 

Is Facebook The Right Platform For Your Business?

Just because Facebook has billions of active users doesn’t mean you’ll automatically find success on the platform. If you’ve tried different combinations of ad objectives and ad creatives and nothing seems to be working, then perhaps you’re targeting the wrong crowd. 

You may feel like you’ve spent far too much money just to quit cold turkey, but sometimes it’s better to cut your losses while you still can. 

The good news is Facebook is not the only social media platform on the planet so you can always seek out your target audience somewhere else. 

However, for those who’ve found their audience on Facebook, then know that you’ve got one of the most powerful social media tools at your fingertips. 

Facebook will not only help you drive traffic to your website, but you can literally grow an entire community on the platform. 

In addition to publishing content on your brand’s fan page, you can also create a Facebook group to make engaging with your audience even easier. This way, you not only establish yourself as an authority, or as a leader in your industry, you also let people know you’re ready to help them out when necessary.