Needless to say, making over $3,000 from an ad campaign with a budget of $50 is pretty awesome. Ever since we started using AdEspresso to manage our Facebook ads, we’ve been able to produce results like this for our clients. AdEspresso’s A/B testing and real-time analytics paired with Facebook’s specific ad targeting features has definitely played an important role in helping us succeed.
But before I get ahead of myself, let me give you a basic idea of what AdEspresso is. AdEspresso is a Facebook Ads Manager that allows you to easily create and test hundreds of creative variants and audience segments.
It also provides insightful real-time analytics and suggestions for optimizations, so that you can easily pause your worst-performing creatives and edit your target audience on the go. AdEspresso makes it much easier to see and act upon what is working and what’s not working while your campaign is live.
Now, here’s the exact process we used to generate a 5384% ROI with Facebook Ads using Adespresso.
We Chose a Specific Audience Based on Facebook Interests
Before we did anything else, we chose exactly who we were going to target our ads to. This way, we were able to build out creatives that were sure would resonate with our audience.
We jumped in AdEspresso, created a campaign draft, and went straight to the audience section to take a look at who we could target.
For these ads, we decided to target people on Facebook who were interested in specific brands or products in our client’s niche. We wracked our brains to think about what people who enjoy adventure products like the one we were selling were interested in. We chose some specific interests that aligned with the adventure product we were selling (i.e. bushcraft and topography), and did some research to find brands and publications that featured products like this.
AdEspresso gave us some suggestions for additional interests based on our selections, and before we knew it, we had a target audience of 13 million people.
We Wrote Ad Copy Variations
After pinning down our target audience, we were ready to build out copy that would resonate with the people in it.
We created five short and snappy headlines that cleverly told the audience how they would benefit from using the product, focusing on specific pain points that people who didn’t use this product encountered. Though some ad experts suggest you keep your headline to five words or less, all of our headlines in this campaign were 8 to 10 words long.
Next up was the ad text. We used the text as an opportunity to expand on the benefits of our product while keeping the copy concise and compelling. We kept our text variations to about 20 – 30 words long, about double to triple the length of the headlines. Each variation included the all-powerful word “you” so that our audience would imagine what they could do with this product.
We also used space within the link preview to prompt users to buy with a call to action that stressed the urgency.
Picked Several Compelling Images to Test
After spending a good amount of time on the copy, we had to pick images that would draw people into actually reading the ads. After all, the Facebook newsfeed is a crowded place. Images tend to be much more powerful than text in this space.
We chose two images to test in this campaign: one that showed the product in use and another product shot that featured all of the components in the package. The people we planned to target were sure to recognize the product from the image and be compelled to read more about it.
Built the Ads in Adespresso
Now it was time to really take advantage of the A/B testing features that AdEspresso offers. We opened up our draft that we created for identifying an audience, and jumped right in.
First, we chose to promote an External Website in AdEspresso, since we were optimizing for off-site conversions.
Next, we copy and pasted all of our headlines and ad text, along with the product page URL and link description, into the ad manager. We also threw in our two images and chose the CTA button, “Shop now”. Finally, we selected to place the ads in Facebook’s desktop feed and mobile feed. Though ads placed in the right-hand column may be cheaper, it’s a lot less likely that people will actually click or even notice the ads there. So newsfeed it was.
AdEspresso instantly created 50 ad variations based on our headlines, ad text and images, and provided us with ad previews so that we could see exactly how each ad would look before we published them. We chose to track conversions and engagement with Google Analytics and a Facebook Pixel.
Since we already chose our audience of 13 million, we moved on to the budget & bidding section. We selected a budget of $58 total across three days, optimizing for off-site conversions with AdEspresso’s own Automatic Optimization feature. We also chose to use Facebook’s Automatic Bid so that we didn’t have to spend a lot of time monitoring these ads once they were up and running. Then, we pushed the big “Publish to Facebook” button. The ads were now in review.
AdEspresso has a nice little summary of your entire ad campaign on the right side of the screen before you publish, so that you can make sure everything looks good before your ads are shown to the world. You can even take a look at all of your ad variations right from the publishing screen, which is awesome if you’re paranoid like me and like to quadruple check your ads.
Optimized Ads for Conversions with AdEspresso’s Help
Along with the easy ability to perform A/B testing, my favorite thing about AdEspresso is the way it reports on ad performance while the ads are live. From the dashboard, we could find a graph presenting our campaign’s performance over time based on the performance indicators we were most interested in, including CTR, CPC, and conversions. Below that, we could see our campaign details and total ad reach and frequency.
But the most helpful feature is definitely AdEspresso’s Tip of the Day. Once we hit a certain number of impressions, AdEspresso began to suggest which ads we should pause based on our goal. It suggested that we pause all of the ads with a certain combination of headline and image because ads featuring those two creatives were 70% more expensive than the average of the other active ads. All we had to do was click a button and, boom, all of the ads with the low-performing creatives were paused.
We also took a look at AdEspresso’s “Top Factors” summary throughout the days the ads were running. This section let us know the top creatives that were impacting conversion rate for the better and for the worse. After we garnered enough impressions, AdEspresso cleanly showed us the top-performing and worst-performing ad headline, text, and image. We then paused the worst-performing creatives with the click of a button. AdEspresso also let us know which creative type was impacting our campaign performance the most, whether it was images, text or headlines.
This made it incredibly easy for us to optimize our campaign to make sure that only the best ads were running so that we could generate the highest ROI possible.
Got Detailed Insight for Future Campaigns
Truth be told, AdEspresso isn’t perfect. The manager didn’t generate any type of report for us. Although we could see which creatives performed the best by viewing an insightful graph inside of AdEspresso, we couldn’t export that graph or any of the ad performance data.
We could only export raw data in an excel sheet. However, the insight AdEspresso gave us into our ad performance and target audience is indispensable. We used the Dashboard and Ads Reporting tabs to see the most impactful data.
In the Dashboard, AdEspresso showed us which interests we targeted generated the highest and the lowest CTR, so that we could easily identify who we should continue targeting in the future.
We could easily access comments on our ads in the Dashboard – one big improvement from the Facebook ad manager – to see exactly what our audience said about our ads and product. The relevancy score and engagement metrics were all easily found in the Dashboard. We could also see a concise summary of key performance indicators, including conversion rate, CPC, main revenue, conversions, and CTR.
Finally, the top ads section in the Dashboard instantly allowed us to see which creatives worked the best together for future ads.
We dove even deeper into the performance of each of our creatives in the Ads Reporting tab, which allowed us to see performance indicators for each ad creative, along with the ability to check out how two creatives performed together in one ad.
All of AdEspresso’s reporting can be found in real-time as well as months – and years – after the campaign ends. While this information was important in helping us achieve such a high ROI with this campaign, it also gave us the insight we needed to continue running successful campaigns with ridiculous ROIs, which we’ve been doing for about a year now. If you haven’t used AdEspresso yet, it’s definitely time to check it out.