How to increase blog traffic with Facebook ads

Why should online businesses use Facebook ads?

With over 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the ideal online advertising platform for online entrepreneurs, businessmen, and course creators. However, simply posting on your Facebook page and relying on organic traffic to drive visitors to your website will not work anymore as the organic reach of normal posts has declined a lot over the years.

The only way to grab the attention of your fans and target audience is to use paid advertising. However, you have to be smart about it so that you can get the best results and keep the costs low.

Why is paid advertising better than posting organically?

Many of you will be tempted to drive traffic to your website or blog for free by sharing posts organically on your Facebook page. However, it is not a good strategy anymore. Thousands of people are sharing posts every minute and this has made the news feed space extremely competitive.

Even if you try to increase the organic reach by increasing the posting frequency, Facebook will limit the organic reach of each post you share. Another problem is that you have to figure out the correct time to share a post as it only makes sense to share when most of your fans are online.

Paid advertising is better because of the amount of control you have over your ads. You can target your audience based on a number of options, specify your spending limit, reach as many people as you can, and customize it as you like. 

Here are some steps you can follow to increase the traffic of your blog by using Facebook ads:

1. Turn popular posts that link to your website into traffic campaigns

By promoting ads that are engaging, you can keep the advertising costs down and drive more traffic to your website with the same budget.

Find posts on your Facebook page that directly link to your website. Then, sort the ones that have the best link-click rate. A link-click rate of around 10% can be considered good. You will be promoting these one at a time until it does not bring in any more traffic to your website.

To create the ad, you can apply the ‘Use Existing Post’ option to directly select the Facebook post that you want to promote from your page. Alternatively, you can directly enter the ‘Post ID’ of the post that you want to promote.

Don’t make the mistake of simply boosting your popular posts by using the ‘Boost’ option. When you boost a post, you cannot select the object of the promotion. Thus, you cannot control the outcome. Creating a new ad allows you to select the objective, which in this case, is to drive traffic to your website.

If you don’t have any post with a link-click rate close to 10%, you need to focus on creating better quality posts.

2. Remarket to users who are already engaged

Once you have exhausted the reach of a specific ad post, you can promote a new ad post to the same audience to keep the traffic alive. To do that, you have to create a custom audience based on ‘Website Traffic’ and select the  “People who visited specific web pages” option. In the URL field, put the address to the webpage that you promote in the previous ad.

The custom audience will only contain the list of people who have already visited your webpage and filter out people who are not interested to visit your website. By remarketing to your fans or users who find your posts engaging, you can further reduce the cost of your traffic campaigns as you don’t market to people who won’t visit your website.

3. Create saved audiences to promote ads with different topics of interest

If you own a multi-niche blog, you need to segment your custom audience list and ads. Not all of your fans or website visitors will be interested in all the topics you discuss on your blog. So, targeting groups of people based on similar interests or demographics will yield better results.

You can segment your audience or create saved audiences based on interests, people who have visited specific web pages on your website, behavior, lookalike audience, demographics, age, etc. You can also use existing ad sets to create saved audiences.

4. Promote your ad to other groups

Promoting your ad to people who don’t know you or are not familiar with your brand can be a risky move. However, if your ad is performing well within your existing audience group by generating engagement and driving quality traffic to your blog, it can be safe to assume that it will continue to perform well if you promote it to groups of people who have similar likes and interests as your fans.

Also, if a good-performing ad has already exhausted the audience that is closely connected to you, this can be a viable step.

To target different groups of people, you can create a lookalike audience who have similar interests as your fans. Additionally, you can also use the ‘Audience Insights’ tool to get a better understanding of the people you should be targeting.

5. Drive repeat visitors to your website by combining Facebook ads with Email

Technically, the primary purpose of using this approach is to get email subscribers for your website. However, once you generate a list of email subscribers, you can use email marketing to drive traffic to your blog for a much lower cost. Plus, a good email list is extremely valuable as it results in better conversion and a loyal audience.

You can target your fans or a saved audience that is performing well. For generating email leads, you have to use Facebook ‘Lead Ads’ and promote an irresistible offer to your target audience. For eg., you can offer them a downloadable ebook once they subscribe to your email list. Make sure to include a catchy Call-to-action to witness a better conversion rate.

If you are worried about your ad spending, you can create a rule to decrease your bid by a certain percentage when the cost per result exceeds a certain amount.

Conclusion

Although it is easy to get started with Facebook ads, the practice is very hard to master. If you are not careful or don’t know what you are doing, you can lose a lot of money. So, it is a wise idea to hire a Facebook ad marketing expert or professional marketing agency that specializes in paid advertising. A good marketing agency with years of experience in this field can generate the best return on investment (ROI) for you so that you can achieve complete peace of mind.

At ChainBreak Marketing, we help online coaches and consultants to achieve their Facebook marketing goals in a budget-friendly way while maintaining a healthy ROI.