Okay now to dive into what you came here for. Maybe you have stared an Ad or two and to play it safe you started with a relatively basic Audience with one to three interests and advance options. Your Ad copy is simple and straightforward, but after a week of a $5.00 per day ad campaign you have not gotten and conversions, whether via messenger, link clicks, or signups.

What is the problem? Why are Customers not interested in your ad? Before you take another step take a look at your insights. How many impressions do you have? Compare that to the audience size you created. If your audience is 50,000 potential people and you have 600 impression your ad is not relevant to your selected audience and you should at this point change your audience up. Do not change your ad copy because you have not ruled that out as a negative factor in your conversion rate. If you delete both your ad copy and your audience you are not going to collect enough information to make a more informed ad later and you will continue to see a lack of conversions.

Create a new audience! Here is where I have had some trouble and found a way to think outside the generic marketing thinking when it comes to building campaigns. Facebook Advertisement is so well developed that you can narrow your ad down to items that include specific age ranges, income, household status, and a few others. The problem is this also means your potential audience is going to be very small, so unless your ad is seen by 100% of your audience do not expect much in the way of conversions.

Think Outside The BOX! Seriously, if you read the HubSpot post on using Audience Insight or you have used this tool before, you understand that Audience Insights is primarily based on people’s interests. You can guess all day long at what your audience interests are, but you should do some more digging. Miles Beckler makes a great video on using Audience Insights to take your competitors customers using this amazing tool. He mentions how he spends hours at times creating an audience. For the first dozen or so ads I ran this did not make sense to me. I simply built the copy I wanted, then selected the local geographic area I wanted to market to for the particular service/product and then built an audience based on what interests I felt where relevant to that topic.

What a waste of time…or lack thereof. I saw ZERO conversions and just wasted money, even if it was only $5.00 per day it was still wasted. However, this small budget lets me see what I was doing wrong and make changes to improve.

          Every time my clients get a new customer I go to their Facebook page and see what pages they liked and created a basic excel spreadsheet to compare to other customers interests. This is where I find common interests within my customer base. This can be events, restaurants, drinking holes, magazines, video games, TV shows, and a lot more.

Think about your friends here. Most of your close friends share a lot of common interests with you right? So why wouldn’t your customers who used your product/service have similar interests, and this extends to additional potential customers?

Let me give a real-life example based on my side hustle business Doc Mobile Auto Detailing. This business generates roughly 50% of my income at the moment. I spend a lot of time testing things that I do for my digital marketing clients with this business. I ran one ad and targeted some really basic stuff. I narrowed down the local geographic area I wanted to serve because I can’t drive 5 hours to complete detail but I can drive within a 30-minute radius right! I then targeted interests such as “Auto Detailing,” “Car Wash,” and brands that I use and felt like my customers might like.

This method did bring me some customers but not very many. I realized after talking with those customers that many of them worked within a similar industry so they had hookups for auto details or they generally did the work themselves, but I won them as a client at least for one service due to a lack of time availability. Hence why it only worked with a small crowd, most people who can do something themselves will put it off until they have the time to save the money.

I then targeted high-quality car brands hoping to capture an audience that is interested in taking care of their cars. Remember you do not have to have your service as one of the interests, such as being a plumber, because your audience may not be interested in plumbers on Facebook but they still need one. Rather what interests you target is who your ads are shown to. After three days of low impressions on my “fancy car” targeting, I was driving through a nice neighborhood with a lot of nice cars. I started to notice the local college football team had a flag on almost every neighbor’s door. “Light BULB”! I pulled over and opened up One Note on my phone (favorite note taking program by the way), and I then started down a rabbit hole of Facebook Interests.

I looked at first the college football team and added that as an interest in the Audience Manager, I got 500,000 for my potential audience. I then targeted one vehicle brand at a time that I wanted to detail, and after 4 top brands being entered I now had an audience of over 250,000 people in a 25-mile radius that I could service. I changed up the photos in my ad to include high-end vehicles I had detailed and ran it at $5.00 per day.

Within 24-hours I had closed two clients, after three days I had closed five clients, and now from this one ad I continuously get 3-4 customers per week which for me is around $600.00, and I am spending only $35.00 per week on this ad. That is a pretty solid return on ad dollars, and if I upped my daily bid amount, I could reach more of that audience each day.

I run multiple ads for this one business with a maximum budget set at $150.00 per week because I can detail one vehicle and have my overhead (minus materials) taken care of for the week, everything else is profit. Each ad may serve the same geographic area but those ads target various interests, if those interests do not yield conversion, I start digging deeper and finding new ones to test.

An easy way to see how this works is to pay attention to the ads that you see. Why do you think you see these ads? For instance, I get ads for Knife brands all the time, and I like nothing regarding knives on Facebook. I see them all the time because they probably target as an interest another brand I like knowing that my demographic is Veteran Military and likes this particular brand and may like knives. Which I do like knives but I am not in a buying position. But at this point, I have seen these companies’ ads enough and checked out their reviews and products, which when I am ready to buy a knife, I won’t do any shopping around.

By targeting high-end cars, I am assuming that most people who buy nice cars want to take care of their investment. Then by also targeting fans of an expense private college football team, I am targeting people who have nice cars and are interested in Football, and I have been able to close a lot of them. Many of them see my ad more than once (based on my 1.21 Frequency Score) so I am pretty sure that those that I have not closed yet will when they are ready to have their vehicle detailed. If my ad slows down, but I am still getting good impressions, it may mean I need to run a deal to give more incentive to buy, or then change my copy and test that with the same audience.

To wrap this up, remember to get comfortable using the Audience Insight tool. Then start small and build basic audiences and see how they perform. Dig deeper into the audience you selected to see what common interests they have to be able to create more specific targeting. For example, say I wanted to target Oil Rig workers who work long shifts and are in town for a short period, but when targeting just Oil Rig Workers, I get almost zero conversions. However, if I start looking up guys and gals who have Oil and Gas listed as their occupancy, I can find what bars they go to when they are in the area or interests they have and then target those, so my ad has a better chance of getting on their Facebook and Instagram feeds creating more conversions.

To end this all, if you are interested in getting a walkthrough of this process one-on-one, you can contact me directly, and I will answer any questions you have. If you are running into some hiccups as you test this method out for yourself, leave me a comment!

Thanks for stopping by and hope to see you around again

-Cal