How do you know whether your Facebook ad campaign is successful? You first need to define your goals and determine what “successful†means to you.
Getting a certain amount of sales?
Getting a certain amount of revenue?
Making a particular ROI?
Building your list up to a certain size?
That’s simple enough to figure out, but once you define your campaign goals, what’s the best way to reach them?
Most advertisers put ads in, hope for the best and really don’t know how well it’s doing. When selling higher-priced products, sales revenue early on won’t tell the whole picture, but how do you know how much cost per lead cost or cost per click should be to get the sales you need? What if one of your expectations, such as sales conversion from leads, ends up being significantly off? How do you know if the campaign may still be able to succeed?
Planning is a crucial first step
It’s not enough to have a specific ROI, sales, revenue or list-building goal. You have to have a clear path of how you’ll arrive at that goal.
Without planning, looking at campaign results is like looking at random jigzaw puzzle pieces without having the full picture – it will be mostly meaningless.
Without planning, you won’t even know if you’re spending the right amount or if your goal is actually reachable or should be modified.
It’s clear how important it is to plan, but you need to know what to actually look at.
What data should you look at or determine in order to plan your campaign properly?
If you have a straight-forward situation of offering a lead magnet (freebie) leading to purchasing a product or service, here are the primary data points to consider:
- Goal for Units Sold: How many units do you want to sell of your core offer?
- Sales Conversion Rate: What percentage of your leads convert to sales? This is something you would estimate upfront and then adjust as you have data from your campaign.
- Goal for Leads Acquired: How many overall opt-ins will you need to reach your goal? The above two items can help determine that.
- Opt-in Conversion Rate: What percentage of visitors to your opt-in landing page convert to leads? Like sales conversion rate, you would estimate this initially and then adjust as you have data in from your campaign.
- Link Clicks: How many overall clicks from your ads to your website do you need to reach your goal lead/sales goals? The above items will all help you figure this out.
- Campaign Run Time: How long will you run the campaign? Sometimes you only have a limited time window, while in some cases, other factors may help you figure out how long you should run the campaign for.
- Leads Per Day: How many opt-ins do you need per day to reach your lead goal given the campaign length?
- Link Clicks Per Day: How many link clicks do you need per day on your ads to reach your link click goal given the campaign length?
- Price: Determine what you’re pricing your core offer at. Are you providing a discount in the ad funnel vs. your normal pricing?
- Goal Gross Revenue: How much revenue are you targeting to bring in before cost of goods sold and advertising costs are factored in?
- Gross Profit Percentage: What percentage of each unit sold is profit?
- Gross Profit Per Unit: Factoring in cost of goods sold but not advertising costs, what is the dollar amount of gross profit per sale?
- Goal Total Gross Profit: How much revenue are you targeting to bring in from you core offer before advertising costs are factored in?
- Maximum Cost Per Lead: How much can you afford to pay per opt-in to reach your profit goals?
- Maximum Cost Per Click: How much can you pay per click to reach your profit goals?
- Maximum Daily Ad Spend: In order to get the sales you need to reach your profit goals, if your ads performed at the maximum cost per click/lead, how much would you need to spend per day considering your campaign length?
- Actual Cost Per Lead: As you run your campaign, measure the actual cost per lead and see if it’s falling under this maximum.
- Forecasted Total Ad Spend: As you run your campaign, determine the total ad spend you will need to reach your goals based on the actual cost per lead you’re seeing.
- Predicted Profit: As you run your campaign, see based on performance what your current profit is but also how much you expect to profit through the entirety of the campaign factoring in ad costs.
- Predicted ROI: Calculate along the way your predicted return on investment factoring in ROI costs, which helps you determine if you can possibly raise your goals.
Big list, right? Keep in mind this is for a simple straight-forward funnel. What about if you have an upsell or a downsell? That adds even more items to track for each of those, since you should take sales of those into account in your planning.
Bottom line, while it can be time consuming, planning is a must to make sure you’re have a pathway of success mapped out for your campaign.
If numbers and calculations aren’t your thing, we have an exclusive powerful spreadsheet that will help you calculate everything you need when planning your campaign based on a few goal inputs from you. We’re giving it away for free for a limited time – click here to download it now and get access to our free training.
