How I Got My First 2 Newbie Facebook Ad Leads

WAHOO! This morning, I got my first 2 facebook ad leads complete with name, email and phone number!

I this post, I wanna share how I got the leads & sprinkle in a few lessons and learnings along the way.

WARNING: I’m no facebook ads expert. Instead of buying a course, I decided to just use the money for ads & learn on the job. If you’re a newbie like me, this post may be the perfect intro to facebook ads.

The 3 Step Setup & Important Things To Know

In the past, these little details confused the heck out of me but this time, I decided to just take it slow & learn step by step so I could get it. I simply started to place the ad, & when I didn’t know something, I’d talk to A.I. until I got it.

The 3 Big Buckets To Bend Your Brain Around..

Campaign

The Goal (Traffic to a page, leads, etc).

Ad Set

1. Who You’re Targeting with your ad (a group of people with similar characteristis like age, sex, parental status, interests, etc)
2. Placement – Where people will see your ad (facebook news feed, instagram , sidebar, reels, etc)

Ads

The Actual ad or ads you place

Before I jump into what happened and what I learned in each of these areas, along with where my leads came from, I wanna share with you what I decided to advertise.

2 good marketing rules of thumb.

1. Offer something free that generates a lead because the vast majority of poeple won’t buy anything until after several exposures and follow up is essential.
2. Make it something they want (who are you advertising to and what do you know about what they already want?).

With these 2 handy dandy little pieces of marketing wisdom, I decided to advertise my Online Recruiting Secrets training series (offer) to network marketers (audience).

Back when I was living in a trailer and struggling in my business, I remember thinking to myself… “Man, If I could only generate daily leads, I could sponsor more people and if I could sponsor more people my downline would grow, and so would my income.”

So…. I’m guesing, there might be others out there who are in the same situation I was. (fingers crossed).

What You Offer Vs. How You Offer It

Once you know what you’re offering, & who you’re gonna offer it to, we gotta craft a message that speaks more to what the offer’s gonna do and less about what it is.

I packaged my ‘offer’ in 2 different ways.

1. An actual offer, including a detailed description of what they were gonna get (but described with benefits). (click here to see it)
2. A Story (you can click here to that)

The last piece for the ad is the image.

The reading I did online said that an image with a close up smiling face would likely perform better but I wanted to test it myself.

I chose 5 stage pictures to show credibility & ran them each as a seperate ad but with the same copy.

With multiple ads in one ad group, Facebook will rotate the traffic and you can see which version of the ad does better.

I quickly started to notice that the smiling face image was getting a higher click through rate and as you can see in the image below, the cost per click was the lowest with that image.

I ended up pausing this ad alltogether because I’d spent $29 bucks for zero leads.

Conclusion: The “Traffic” campaign (goal) was getting traffic but not converting to leads. If you get 100 unique viewers to a page and no leads, something’s definitely wrong.

I killed the traffic campaign & switched to “Lead” campaign.

The Wonderful World Of Stastistics: As a rule of thumb, 1,000 is a good general number to shoot for before making any conclusions.

2 Options For Facebook Lead Campaigns

You can use your own capture page OR you can use facebooks instant lead form (shown below).

I decided to test both so I setup 2 campaigns.

I probably could have put these together in the same campaign, because they have the same goal, but I wanted to give them each their own daily budget and budget is set at the campaign level.

Ad Sets – Targeting & Placement

Targeting: Facebook seems to want you to use their A.I. Targeting vs defining your own, & Facebook also seems to want to run your ad in 50 million different places within their network.

You can turn off their auto targeting and setup manual targeting (which gives you more control), or use some combination of both.

If you’re running a story ad, or an ad with longer text description, be aware the ad won’t look right in certain placements because some places won’t fit all your text.

You can tell facebook exactly where you want you’re ad shown, and where you don’t want it shown.

For my story ad, I chose to only show it in the newsfeed because that’s where all the text will fit.

Once Upon A Time…

The theory behind newsfeed story ads is you can provide value & pre-frame your offer without looking like an ad.

Hopefully, people will like it more and maybe even comment & share, which as the potential of reducing your ad cost.

Oh, and don’t forget to pay attention to the image size.

When you’re selecting your placements, Facebook will tell you what size image to use and you may not wanna use a “one size fits all” approach here.

Where I’m At Now

I have 2 ads running, one with a lead form and one for my lead capture page, each with a $10 per day budget.

For my lead capture page campaign I have my target market set to network marketing parents in the U.S. and being shown in the facebook newsfeed only.

2 ads – one for offer and one for story.

You can see that I’ve spent $17.28 for zero leads so far.

You can also see that the total reach and impressions are still below 1,000.

They say the facebook algorithm needs a bit of time for the A.I. to learn how to optimize your ad & that’s why I’m not in a hurry to shut this one off, just yet.

The 2 Lead Surprise!

Surprisingly, the 2 leads popped in with the ad that had the least amount of copy, via the facebook instant leads form.

On the ad-set (targeting & placement) level, it’s being shown to my target audience and using advantage placement.

I’m using advantage placement here (rather than picking & choosing the placements) because as I was placing the ad, it seemed to give me some cool options for adding shorter copy that I thought might work without the full story being shown.

The best part here is that this ad was placed just yesterday & was the easiest one because it didn’t require writing out a big long story or offer.

Just an image with all those text variations you see above.

Are $7.50 Leads Worth It?

To me, YES because I’m new to facebook ads and just being able to get a couple leads from this new skill pumps me up!

Plus, since this ad was placed yesterday, there’s still a chance the cost will go down (fingers crossed).

To me, the cost for ads at this point is more like “Tuition” I’m paying for my education.

And if I do make a sale, even of my lowest cost product, I’ll earn $20 up front, so there’s a chance these leads can be still be profitible.

Final Takeaways

During this process, I’ve been tempted to feel a bit like a failure because I was learning and spending money with no results.

I had to remind myself that this is a new and skill and all real skills take time to acquire.

I’m also reminded that everything is “Figure Out Able.”

When I started to set up my first ad, it felt very slow and clumsy because there was so much I didn’t know or understand. (Still is of course) ;-).

BUT, I kept clicking around, looking at things, and talking to A.I. and step by step, was able to learn, get some ads placed and YES OH YES, get some new awesome leads!

Of course this is the just the beginning of paid ads for me, and there’s still much to learn but I’m excited for the journey.

Thanks for stopping by to read (and hopefully learn) with me and if you have any tips or experience with Facebook ads, please share below. I’m all ears. 🙂

Paul

PS: Essential to this whole process of placing ads and collecting leads is a page builder tool where you can capture leads and/or deliver your free offer. This is what I used & can’t say enough about it. It’s an AMAZING tool and, it pays $20 residual commissions for referrels which can really help to offset marketing costs, and even, make your marketing profitible!