How to drive paid traffic through your funnel

How to drive paid traffic through your funnel 

Knowing how to create a sales funnel is a great step towards success. Let’s take that even further by finding how to get masses of glorious traffic to go through it.  

In this section, you’ll learn:

• Facebook ad campaigns – different types, what each type helps you achieve, and how to set them up.
• Different formats for ad campaigns.
• Best practices – things to avoid including, to prevent Facebook locking you out of your account (this happens at times – be prepared and avoid the frustration). 
• Facebook tracking codes – A handy way to closely monitor ad reader activity. You’ll learn more about how they work, what they can tell you that standard analytics can’t, and how to set them up. 
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tips – including Google ads and Bing ads. 
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) checklist – A list of tips to make sure your content is optimized for search engines so you can rank higher than your competitors.  

Please remember, if you get stuck, make sure you let us know at EMAIL ADDRESS.

The First Step

The first step in actually connecting your potential customers to your offer is to pay to place your ad in front of their eyes. Whether it’s paying google ads, Facebook ads, or affiliates to promote your product, you need to put your ad somewhere people can see it before you can talk to your customer directly. What we are really trying to collect from these ads is not just sales, but email addresses, that way, instead of renting other people’s traffic sources, you can own your own and use it for free. 

There are, generally speaking, two ways we can get traffic, by placing paid social ads or by ranking in search engines. The most common of these, respectively, are Facebook Ads and Google. The key is using a diversified strategy so that you can find the customer you want and the customers that want what you’re offering can find you. 

Paid Social

Using Facebook Ads 

If you’ve never used Facebook Ads before we would recommend that you take the time to go through this article to provide you with an introductory guide to using Facebook Ads: 

https://buffer.com/library/facebook-ads-guide/

Once you get the hang of navigating the program you’ll be able to use our FB Ads strategies and templates to maximize your return on investment. 

Toolbox – Facebook Ads starter pack 

Strategy: Campaigns Strategy 

There are four basic campaigns you ought to set up to perform profitably on Facebook Ads: 

1. Brand Awareness: This campaign is optimized around successful posts. The key performance indicator to look for in this campaign is your cost per impression (CPI) 
2. Cold Conversion: This campaign is meant to reach audiences that have never interacted with your brand before. The key performance indicator to look for here is your cost per click (CPC) which is a measure of what it costs you to get one click on your ad, and also your cost per lead (CPL) which is the amount you have to spend to get someone to not only click on your ad but also opt-in to your lead gen list; at this stage, you will also be driving cold traffic right to your sales pages which would measure performance with conversion rates and cost per conversion. 

Ad sets: You will want to set up the following ad sets in this campaign 

• Interest targeting: These are audiences have an interest that you believe is highly relevant to your product 
• Broad lookalike audiences: These are audiences that Facebook will produce that are highly similar to some other audience that you’ve been targeting. A popular one here is an audience that looks like the people who have already purchased your product 
• Video views lookalike audience: This audience is people who look similar to those who have seen your ad, actually watched the ad video, but did not click on the ad. Meaning they are interested but not sold. 

     3. Warm Conversion: this campaign is meant to reach people who have already engaged with your brand either by watching your ads or going on your website.

Ad sets: You will want to set up the following ad sets in this campaign

• Visitors: These are people who have visited your website 
• % Time spent: These are people who have spent a certain amount of time on your website. You can make a few of these to market to of few different percentiles because you might find that people who scroll through 50% of your page might be just as likely to purchase as those who only scrolled through 40%, you won’t know until you test for yourself 
• Video views remarketing: These are people who have watched your ads instead of just scrolling past them.

     4. Hot Conversion: This campaign is meant to be used for remarketing to people who have already either opted into your contact list, made a purchase, or both. 

Ad sets: You will want to set up the following ad sets in this campaign

• Add to cart (ATC) remarketing: These audiences are people who have already purchased or engaged in the checkout process 
• Promotions: During your big promotions you’ll want to create ads that target only your most successful audiences. Since you’ll be offering your product at a lower price, you don’t want to spend more on ads than you have to. 

 

Best Practices: How to avoid getting locked out of your account 

Facebook ads will lock you out of your account. Usually, it’s not obvious why and requesting a review of your account will not always tell you how to explicitly avoid a lockout in the future. 

Fortunately, we’ve compiled a list of things to avoid when publishing your Facebook ads that are likely to result in an account lockout. 

Here’s what to avoid :  

• Smilies, emoticons, and emojis 
• Sensational titles, and all capitalized words 
• Any links besides the one in your call to action button 
• The prices of the products you are advertising 
• Any guarantee of satisfaction that the customer cannot immediately verify as being true. 
• Sentences describing the product as offering something that the customer cannot immediately verify as being true.
• Customer review videos
• Inciting customers with terms like “join”, “try”, “click”. 
• Sharing phone numbers, email addresses or other contact information 
• Any ad formula that is too oriented towards a “marketing” approach. 

To sum up, Facebook, simply put, does not want you to publish ads that look like ads. They prefer that the content appears organic and resembles a personal fb post and less like a post advertising a product.  

Save the selling and marketing formulas for the sales page to which your call to action will lead, and let the post appear simply as interesting content. 

Facebook Ad Campaign Walkthrough

The success of your product on social media will largely depend on the success of your ad campaigns. This applies especially to Facebook, where your ads can be curated, managed and analyzed at a highly professional standard. If you want to know what works with your audience and what doesn’t, Facebook ads are the way to go.

Let’s take a look at the different Facebook ad formats, and what they look like to your consumers.

Consideration Ads

This ad campaign tends to target cold traffic. These are people who have never heard of your company or course before. These are harder to persuade, as they will encounter loads of different ads on their socials throughout the day. Your campaign needs to be special, and get them thinking about the problems your course can solve. 

So, what counts as a consideration ad?

Anything that:

• Drives natural engagement, such as page likes or website views. A great way to do this is by linking to a blog post on your company’s website. The article should cover a topic that your product is linked to. For example, if your course is about correct running technique, the blog post could be something like ‘Top 5 Running Shoes To Use During The Rainy Season.’
• Gets customers responding to company-related events.
• Builds up views on a video that discusses your company/course.

Basically, if it helps people engage or think about your business, it’s a consideration ad. 

Take a look at a pictorial example below.

Notice how this isn’t directly triggering a sale, but rather increasing awareness and engagement with the company.

Conversion Ads

While a consideration ad is more gentle in its approach, conversion ads make sure the viewer takes some form of action. This could be on your website, to help build your email list or trigger a sale, or on your social pages, to increase exposure.

These ads allow for the best analysis, but cost the most in the long run. These send readers a long way down the sales funnel. In some cases, a conversion ad’s purpose may be to secure a sale there and then. 

The use of the ‘Book Now’ button is an instant giveaway that this is a conversion ad. Kayak is making sure that every reader that clicks this ad has the intention of comparing prices and ultimately booking a flight. In the case of an online course, a ‘Buy Now’ button would be more appropriate. 

Lead Form Ads

This is a very niche type of ad, and should only be used in very specific circumstances. This ad, when clicked, sends the user to a form that they must complete in exchange for a bonus or offer. This is usually how you build your email list, and acquire prospective customers’ details. 

Don’t expect to build your list by simply sending Facebook users to a form page – you’ll need to offer in something in return. This is where your irresistible offer comes in. Think about what is valuable to your target audience, and make that the standout part of your ad. Take a look at the example below:

Notice what the ad does well.

1. A good offer to entice cold traffic (10% off next order)
2. Acquires details in exchange for the offer, building up the email list.
3. Nice simple formatting 
4. Not too many parts to the form so the customer doesn’t leave the page.
5. Visible buttons to guide the reader through the signup process.

Campaign Formats

We’ve just discussed the different purposes a campaign can have but have not gone over the formats an ad can take.

Photo. Simple. Easy. Effective. One image with the relevant content and call to action. If you’re looking for simplicity in the beginning, we would recommend opting for a photo ad.

Slideshow Ads. A step up from photo ads, consisting of multiple photos that the reader can scroll through. Only opt for this campaign format if it’s necessary to show more than one photo to your readers. 

Video. These tell a much better story than a photo/slideshow campaign. It also gives you a better chance of running through all your important course details. You might also want to film yourself discussing the course, or including video testimonials from real customers. The more personable the ad is, the better.

Canvas Ads. These cover the full mobile viewport. Fully immersive and an instant attention catcher. This can be in either photo or video form. 

Templates: Ad copy
Fill these high converting templates to deliver successful ads.

 

Facebook Tracking Codes

Sometimes, the analytics provided with a Facebook ad campaign are not enough. Rather than seeing how many people click on your ad, you might be interested in knowing what those people do once they’re on your course’s website, for example.

This is where the Facebook Pixel comes in. It’s a little piece of code that you place on your website that allows you to closely monitor the reader activity of your targeted ad campaigns. 

It gives you an extra bit of insight to make sure you’re showing the ads to the right kind of people. After all, if all the people that click your ads aren’t taking action on your website, it might be time to restructure the campaign audience.

Facebook Pixel

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that allows Facebook to track the traffic it sends through your pages, allowing it to collect data such as page visits, how far down the page they scrolled, time spent on pages, purchases, cart abandonments, clicks and much more. 

The pixel is an essential part of running Facebook ads without which your website could not communicate and exchange data with Facebook ads. It is essentially an I.D. code that lets Facebook know which ad account is connected to your pages.  

The pixel is simply placed into a tracking code that you must embed in your pages 

Let’s take a look at how to install a Facebook Pixel onto your website.

Before you start, you’ll need to have the following things:

• A business website. This should be the main destination for most of your ads. 
• The ability to update your website’s code. If you aren’t allowed backend access, consult the support team for your hosting provider. They might be able to add the Pixel code themselves.

Step One: Go to Facebook’s Event Manager. It should look like the image below.

Step Two: Click the Green circle with a ‘+’ symbol in the middle. This can be found on the left side of the Events Manager homepage. It will look something like the image below.

Step three: You will be brought to a popup like the image below. Click ‘Web’ and then click ‘Connect’.

Step four: Give your pixel a name. This can be anything you like. You may also be asked to enter your website URL. This is what appears in the search bar of your website. Make sure to copy and paste all of it. Click ‘Continue’ when you’re done. 

Below is an example of what a URL looks like: 

Step five: There’s multiple ways you can add a Pixel to your website. In this walkthrough, we are going to cover how to add the Pixel manually into your site’s code. Start by going back to the homepage of your Event’s manager.

Step six: Select the Pixel you have just created and click ‘Continue Pixel Setup’.

Step seven: Select ‘Install Code Manually’. 

Step eight: Copy your pixel base code. The code itself is quite long and looks something like this.

Step nine: You need to locate the header template in your website’s code. This will be different depending on your hosting provider and the type of code used. If you are struggling, ask customer support for a little guidance.

Step ten: Paste your base code at the very end of the header section, as shown in the image below. Click ‘Continue’. 

Step eleven: The Pixel is now successfully installed. It is now up to you how you want to utilize the tracking power of the Pixel to gauge ad performance. We recommend the ‘Events Setup Tool’ on Events Manager as a good starting point for customization.

Toolbox – Facebook tracking code

Template: Facebook tracking code 

Should we keep the below or does the new process above cover it?

1. Firstly you’ll need to locate the pixel for your Facebook ads account. 

• Open up your Facebook ads manager 
• Navigate to your business settings 
• Now on the left sidebar click on “Data Sources” and then “Pixels” 
• All your different accounts and their pixels will be displayed here. Select one and you’ll see the pixel ID highlighted in blue 

1. Copy the following tracking code into your funnel if you want it to track on every page or into individual pages if you only want to track the activity of specific pages:

• Log into your Clickfunnels account and navigate to your sales funnel
• In the sales funnel go to “SETTINGS” and scroll down to the HEAD TRACKING CODE field.
• In this field copy the following code”: 

src=”https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=COPY YOUR PIXEL HERE&ev=PageView&noscript=1″

/>

NOTE: Make sure to adapt the three-letter currency symbol to the currency you are using for your transitions. 

Search Engine Marketing

Google Ads 

With google ads, you have the ability to place ads in front of those who are searching for your product.  The more popular a keyword or phrase is, the more expensive it is to place a corresponding ad. 

Toolbox – How to Use Google Ads 

When you search in google, the first results which are marked Ad are paid ads whereas the first results without the Ad label are organic results. To learn how to use paid Google Ads you can check out this article: https://blog.hootsuite.com/google-ads/

Bing Ads

Bing Ads work in exactly the same way as google ads do only using a different platform with slightly different features. 

Toolbox – How to Use Bing Ads 

To learn how to use paid Google Ads you can check out this article: https://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/bing-ads/bing-ads-intro/

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The other half of traffic sourcing is making sure that you rank highly in search engines so that when people search for a specific need, problem or solution you’ll be among the first listings to show. To do this you can either pay Google to rank you more highly for certain keywords, or you can rank organically sheerly on the merits or your content. 

As opposed to paid ads google ads, search engine optimization does not require you to pay to rank your website. Instead it relies on the quality of your content and page design and the number of external references to your site. In other words, if people are interacting with and sharing your website, it will rank higher in the search results. This means that half the game is about optimizing the content on your pages and the other half is about increasing the number of links off your page that lead to your website. 

Off-page

Off-page SEO is simply a matter of reaching out to webpage managers of sites related to your own. 

Listing websites and directories are an excellent place to start because they are always looking for new, high-quality pages to direct traffic to. BOTW, AboutUs, and Spoke.com. Are all good examples of directories that are useful for any kind of website, simply searching “directories for (enter your market/niche)“ in google can quickly connect you to the perfect directories relevant to your product.

Another excellent way to create backlinks to your website is to write comments on people’s blogs. Find a blog related to your product, and just leave an interesting/helpful comment with a link leading back to your website. You can go to blogarama to find all kinds of blogs to comment on. You can also write your own blog posts that link back to your site for other websites that are looking to add quality content to their page. Just reach out and ask them if you can write them a nice, quality blog post and link the post back to your site. Those websites might even be likely to pay you for the blog post.    

Keep. In mind that you can also create backlinks to your product on social media. There are plenty of social media platforms on which you can create blogs or info-content, and post your comments on other people’s posts, all of which should link to your website. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tiktok, or anything else, if you can find your audience there, you should try to create some backlinks. 

SEO On-page

There are also things you can change on your website itself to improve your organic search ranking. These things are your metadata, and your page content.  

Your metadata dictates what your listing looks like to people when your site shows up in the search results. This includes, the heading, the description, the keywords, and the image connected to your google listing. Make sure that these are all in line with your audience’s most common search terms. 

Your page content also has a huge effect on your google search ranking. The trick here is to have text references to your audience search terms, tons of video and image content, fast page load speeds, and the most commonly forgotten: page formatting. 

If your page is not properly formatted the Google algorithm will have difficulty reading your page and will automatically rank it lower than a page that was more appropriately formatted. Keep things simple: every section of your sales page should have a 1 headline, maybe a subheading, a text block, and a graphic (image, or video). Make sure that each headline includes an important keyword that your audience is searching for. 

Lastly, make sure that the information in your sales pages is useful, clear, and high quality enough for a human to understand, appreciate and potentially share. Don’t post unedited, confusing or irrelevant information. 

SEO Checklist

You’ll need to be aware of how to make your website look appealing to search engines, such as Google and Bing. This is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and allows you to get a lot of natural traffic. If you aren’t willing to fork out a lot of cash in paid ad campaigns, SEO is the way to go for company exposure. The key is knowing how to do it.

The topic of SEO is a long and complex one. There’s so many different parts to it, that it would require a whole new course to go through every important detail! Instead, we’re going to give you a checklist of things that optimize your site’s ranking capabilities. Think of it as a bumper SEO to-do list. 

• Produce engaging high-quality web pages in the form of articles and blog posts. These will be auxiliary pages to your main sales page. Importance: Very high
• Ensure articles are above 800 words and include videos, photos, and interactive elements. Importance: High
• Ensure your website (and articles) targets keywords relevant to your niche. Importance: Very high.
• Ensure your website is correctly formatted, with proper use and structure of H1/H2/H3, etc. text. Importance: Very high.
• Ensure the density of keywords within your articles is high enough for search engines to notice it. Make the implementation of these keywords look natural. Importance: High.
• Link to other articles/webpages on your website. Make sure they all feed to important pages that you want search engines to see. Importance: High.
• Make sure other people’s websites link to your articles/web pages. These are known as backlinks and are critical for SEO. Importance: Very High.
• Ensure your website has a sitemap to help search engine crawling. Importance: High.
• Make sure your website has mobile phone compatibility. Importance: High.
• Make sure your website doesn’t have any broken links. Importance: High.
• Make sure the meta-titles and slugs of every article/webpage target relevant keywords. Importance: Medium
• Implement a favicon on your website. Importance: Low.
• Connect your social media pages with your website. Importance: Very high. 
• Make sure your website is fast and responsive. Importance: Very high.
• Make sure the page sizes on your website aren’t too large. This can sometimes trigger slow loading times. Importance: High.
• Cache all your images and graphics. Importance: Medium.
• Make sure your website has a custom 404 error page. Importance: Medium.
• Make sure to use SEO-friendly URLs. Importance: Medium. 
• Make sure to get backlinks from respectable, prestigious websites. Importance: High.

If we were to highlight one part of this checklist as the most important, it would be the production of quality content. Interesting and engaging articles/web pages have such a profound impact on your website. It adds another dimension to the scope of your business, as your blog readers can be easily converted into long-term customers. It’s as easy as that.

Summary

In this section, you learned all about how to drive traffic through your sales funnel. You looked at:

• Facebook ad campaigns – different types, what each type helps you achieve, and how to set them up (brand awareness, cold conversion, warm conversion, hot conversion).
• Types of ads – consideration, conversion, and lead form 
• Different formats for ad campaigns – photos, slideshows, videos, etc.  
• Best practices – things to avoid including in your campaigns (emojis, all caps, contact details, etc) to prevent Facebook from locking you out of your account 
• Facebook tracking codes – You learned how to set up Pixel to get more from your analytics.
• SEM tips for Google and Bing ads. 
• SEO checklist – You have this to refer to, so you can make sure you do everything necessary to rank higher than your competitors. 

Congratulations on completing in this section! There was a lot to take in here but you’re well on your way to e-learning success. Please remember, if you get stuck, make sure you let us know at EMAIL ADDRESS.

You’ve now completed 3 of 5 chapters. Almost there.