Conversion Campaigns: Common Knowledge or Rookie Oversimplification?
In any given discipline, you will find items of common knowledge that, while generally true at the basic level, are actually not exactly true in all circumstances.
In Facebook Ads management, one of these true-but-not-really-true paradigms is the idea that you should run conversion campaigns and any other kind of campaign is a waste of money.
The idea behind this belief is that, as a business owner, what you want is conversions. You don’t want clicks. You don’t want likes. You don’t want video views. You want conversions. So it doesn’t make sense for the Facebook algorithm to optimize for anything other than what you want: conversions.
That makes sense, and it is a good rule if the structure of your advertising campaign is relatively simple, but is an oversimplification. In reality, Facebook’s other optimization options can help your business to generate business at a much more cost-efficient rate than a straight conversion campaign will.
Using Facebook Video Views to Build an Audience
One tactic we use to efficiently generate business with Facebook Ads is to start with a video views campaign and then follow up with a conversion campaign.
This of course doesn’t mean that you aren’t running a conversion campaign. It just means that you don’t start with a conversion campaign.
These campaigns use a video of 2-3 minutes relating to the client’s offering. The video may provide valuable information, or it may just be funny and entertaining. We target the desired demographic, and we run the video as a video views ad for several days, until it has been viewed by 5,000 to 10,000 people.
Once we have built the desired audience size of video views, we then turn off the ad.
We then create a conversion campaign for an introductory offer. We point the ad to a sales funnel, and we target the audience of people who viewed the video. The final result is a flow of conversions that come at a fraction of the total cost that we would pay for a straight conversion campaign targeting the larger target demographic.
Similar tactics may be used with Facebook’s other options for ad optimization, such as likes.
