Did you know that on Facebook, you can collect e-mail? That’s right. You can collect leads. It’s pretty straightforward. You can run ad campaigns with a lead collection button. It can be Find Out More, Sign Up or other language.

Regardless, if you’re running this type of campaign, it must be highly targeted.

It’s really important that your targeting is spot on. I put this part of Facebook ad marketing at this point in the list of marketing methods because this takes quite a bit of work.

Lead Generation

You should be quite familiar with Facebook before you even try this. You should know your way around Facebook’s ad system before you engage in paid lead generation because it can get quite expensive.

If your ad doesn’t get many clicks or it’s super finely targeted, you don’t really have that many people to work with, and this can drive up your costs. You have to know how to optimize your ad campaigns on Facebook for this to make sense.

You can optimize on many levels. There are three levels you can optimize:

Level 1

You can tweak the freebie you’re giving away. This is the free stuff that you are giving away, so people are motivated to enter their e-mail address into your form.

Maybe you are giving away free membership access. Perhaps you are giving away a booklet or a book or a report, a set of templates, a set of graphics. Possibly even giving away software or a mobile app. Whatever the case may be you are giving out freebies, and you need to optimize these.

What I mean by that is the freebie that you give must motivate the most people in your target audience to sign up for your mailing list. This is not easy.

You cannot assume that just because you think that your booklet is awesome or is the next best thing since sliced bread doesn’t automatically mean people will agree with you. It doesn’t work that way.

You may have to switch from one freebie to the other until you get a high-enough sign-up rate that would tell you that the freebie that you have selected is the right one.

Thankfully, this is fairly easy to do with Facebook. You basically run different ads that offer different premiums.

Level 2

Level 2 optimization focuses on optimizing your ad copy. As I’ve mentioned above, lead generation campaigns on Facebook can and do get very expensive. It seems like you’re doing all this for basically a handful of e-mails. This is why it’s really important to make sure that you run a fully optimized campaign to get the most results.

How do you do this? Well, you optimize your ad copy on an elemental level. Still, I want you to get a heads up this early on regarding the amount of optimization that you would have to do. It is quite intensive. You can’t leave things at a surface level. That’s just not going to work.

Level 3

Level 3 involves optimizing based on conversions. When people click on your Learn More or Sign Up button, they’re shown a form. You’re going to have to keep tweaking that form to say what it needs to say to convert as much of your traffic into list members as much as possible. This takes quite a bit of time and attention to detail.

Again, you have to run these experiments while minimizing your costs. Once you find out something that works, optimize it to increase its level of conversion.

Once you have picked a winner that cannot be optimized any further in terms of conversion rate improvements, that’s when you scale up. That’s when you pour in the dollars to reach as many people as possible to boost your mailing list sign-up.

Pixel Retargeting Campaign

Facebook enables you to put their tracking pixel on your website. It will then track where people go on your site. If people end up at your shopping cart, for example, you can then run an ad reminding people about your site or reminding people about the products that they almost bought. They see these ads on Facebook.

Whatever the case may be Facebook Pixel Retargeting gives you another bite at the apple. One of the biggest problems with e-commerce is that prospective buyers abandon their shopping carts.

A large chunk of these buyers simply decide at the last minute or at some point in the buying process to dump their shopping cart. They don’t do follow through.

This is where the retargeting campaign begins. It’s basically a way of reminding people who have already expressed an interest in whatever it is you’re offering to come back. If anything, you recycle traffic that you have gotten from Facebook.

Another benefit of this technology is that it pulls traffic from Facebook that you did not get from it originally.

For example, if you did an independent marketing campaign completely free of Facebook but you put a Facebook Retargeting Pixel on your page, when people from that independent campaign, maybe it’s a forum promotion or search engine optimization or another social media platform or whatever source, go back to Facebook to check their accounts, your ad will show up. Sounds awesome, right?

These are all possible through a Facebook Pixel Retargeting Campaign. There are two steps to it. It’s pretty straightforward.

Install Facebook Pixel on your website

The first thing that you need to do is to install the Facebook tracking pixel on your site. To do this, you just go to Facebook’s business section and look for their pixels instructions. It’s pretty straightforward. Even if you are using WordPress as your content management system, installing Facebook Pixel is a breeze.

Next, you need to make sure that you drive traffic to your site. This means that you have to let traffic flow to your site for quite some time before you launch a retargeting campaign. It’s not a good idea to launch a campaign as quickly as possible.

You have to have enough targeting pixels installed in people’s browsers for this to make sense. Otherwise, there are just not enough people to work with. Now, keep in mind that if you are in a niche that has generally low traffic levels, then you would have to conduct your campaign even though the overall traffic flow to your website is fairly low.

Run ads on Facebook for retargeting

The ads that you’re going to run for Facebook Pixel Retargeting are going to be a bit different from the normal boosted posts or picture links that you run on Facebook. Instead, these are going to try to achieve two things. You can remind people about what they did.

Maybe they wanted to buy something, but they changed their mind at the last minute. Perhaps they were reading some sort of conversion article and were about to enter their e-mail address, but they didn’t. Whatever the case may be you’re reminding them to come back to what they were doing before.

The other thing that you can do with your Facebook Pixel Retargeting campaign is to pull people deeper into your website. Usually, a website is composed of two parts.

The first layer is the content layer meaning you’re trying to get people to know about the problem, like your particular solution and eventually trust the solution enough so they can buy.

The other part, of course, is pretty straightforward. It’s all about buying. But there’s a complication. A lot of people would go through the content layers, but they never make it through to the actual buying part. They never make it to your conversion page. This is where retargeting ads that pull people deeper into your website makes a lot of sense.

For whatever reason somebody reading an article on your site decides to close the window and get out of your site, you can run ads that tell them about content but another piece of content that is related to what they were reading before. This pushes them further down the conversion funnel.

Alternatively, you can run an ad that promotes your conversion page. Basically, what you’re saying to the prospect is you’ve figured out what my website is about, and you have a clear understanding of what I have to offer.

Maximizing your results from Facebook Pixel Retargeting

I suggest that if you want to maximize the results you get from retargeting, promote your squeeze page. That’s right. Promote the page that recruits people to your mailing list.

Usually, there’s some sort of freebie. There’s usually some sort of book or booklet that you’re giving away so people can enter their email address.

Whatever the case may be push the squeeze page. Don’t dump them to your sales page unless, as I have mentioned above, they actually reached your shopping cart or conversion page and changed their minds at the last minute.

That’s pretty much the only situation where you should retarget showing an ad that goes directly to the conversion page. Other than that, convert them to sign up for your mailing list.

It’s your mailing list with its many chances at gaining attention, building trust and gaining credibility, which actually will do the heavy lifting as far as converting that prospect into an actual sale.