7 Simple Hacks to Get You the Most Engagement on Facebook Ads

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about 7 simple hacks to get the most engagement out of your Facebook ads. So the first thing you can do that makes it easy— just everybody can do this, look, easy mode— you can literally just hit the boost post button in Facebook and you can drive it as a message. So you can drive people to actually engage with your message, engage as a message to you, and you can collect emails that way. And then you can build, not emails, Messenger subscribers that way. And then you can engage with those Messenger subscribers and you'll have a much higher engagement rate versus an email opt-in, for example.

Number 2, most people don't know this, but when you create an ad on Facebook, the first few seconds of that ad going live, they give you premier placement. They do this to figure out how good the ad is, where it should be placed, the cost per click, cost per, you know, CPM, whatever the bidding type you're using. And it'll tell them, hey, this is what your ad should roughly go for. But as I mentioned, they're giving you premier placement. So a quick little hack is if you keep rotating up your ads, so right when they go live, you let them run for a few minutes or whatever, and you can keep rotating them up. I know this sounds really tedious, But you can get really cheap clicks. Heck, you can even do that for the first hour. So you let the ad last for an hour and you just keep rotating it up. And what you'll find is your cost per click or your cost per CPM drastically goes down because the rates that they give you in the first, you know, few minutes or first hour is much more favorable for you.

Number 3, go for cost per engagement bidding. So by doing cost per engagement instead of optimizing for like CPM, or CPC, for example, or even for conversions, which is CPA, what you can do is you bid for cost per engagement and not Google. Facebook is going to optimize for people that are more apt to engage with your ad. And what that does is once your engagement actually goes up, it's been proven that a higher engagement ad that actually has more comments, more shares, uh, in general does better in terms of decreasing the cost per click or, and also cost per acquisition, uh, for ads that don't have good engagement.

Yes. The next one, and this one's really simple and easy. Most people optimize their Facebook ads to drive click to a page, convert them, and then drive the sale. But here's the thing, and you know this, 95+% of those visitors that click on over aren't going to convert into a buyer. In most cases, 96%, 97%, or even 98% of the visitors that click over aren't going to be buyers, but they're going to see your landing page, they're going to see the copy, they may even add your products or services to the cart, but they usually don't buy. So what you should do is set up another ad to reengage those people, remarket to them on Facebook, and show them what it would have been like if they bought the product or the service, or if you have a software, you can give them a demo of it, and even include things like testimonials, case studies, and then drive them back to the landing page where they can go and buy. It's going to be one of your highest engaging ads that creates comments, likes, shares, And best of all, conversions.

Number 5 is asking for an actual engagement. Guess what? The simple thing to do is in your ad, just ask for an engagement. You can, you can basically— what I've seen people do in the past as well is when they are running an ad to try to get people to comment and engage them, I'm actually not sure you can do this with ManyChat anymore, but you can ask people to write a certain comment in there and then a lot of people will comment. Um, and basically you're going to get a lot more engagement that way, just literally asking for it. And asking for a like, asking for a share, for example. Look, that seems really duh, really simple, but it still works.

Number 6, make sure you're using videos. Out of all the ad formats that I've tested out, videos convert the best. It creates the most engagement, it creates the most deepest connection with the people watching the ad. And when you're using videos, keep them short, to the point, ideally under a few minutes. Make sure you're using the transcription, like the SRT file, so that way if people don't have their speakers turned on, they can read the text really clearly. There's a huge difference in conversions if you have text on the video versus not because a lot of people don't have their speakers turned on. Plus, when you're on Facebook and you're just browsing, a video ad will start playing, but it doesn't guarantee, like the sound doesn't just automatically turn on. So there's no guarantee that people are going to convert. You have to have the text on the screen as well.

Number 7, last but not least, guess what? You can run a contest. Literally what you can do, you can also do this on Instagram as well. We're doing a giveaway right now where We are giving away 10 books about billionaires. And basically they can tag 2 or 3 people. The more people you tag, the more entries you can get. That causes engagement too, because you have this effect where, let's say for example, if I were giving away an iPad or if I were giving away an Apple computer, a lot of people are just going to try to get in on this giveaway because a lot of people want that, want that product, right? So the key thing is if you're going to do a giveaway, a contest, whatever it is exactly, give away something that you think might be relevant to your target audience. And then by doing that, you're going to get the right people engaging and you're going to get that engagement at the same time. So those are the 7 tips. That's it for today. But if you want to get access to marketing tools that will grow your business, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we will see you tomorrow.