Sales Funnel – Red Zmudzien

With the insane level of targeting and reporting that advertisers can access on Facebook, it would be shortsighted to not take advantage of everything available. I’m going to give a quick breakdown of an easy and effective way to create a Sales Funnel from your Facebook ad campaigns, so you can track how users are interacting with your site, what’s drawing them in and what’s driving them to convert.

We’re going to utilize the Facebook pixel and the various Standard Events in the code to measure people coming through the funnel all the way to shopping cart abandonment and ultimately a purchase.

So the 10 Standard Events in the Facebook Pixel allow us to identify and tag users based on what pages they’re visiting, how they’re using the site, as well as if they are bouncing out at a certain point or (hopefully) making a purchase on your site. These Standard Events are listed below:

Be sure to include the Standard Event line of code in your pixel for the corresponding landing page. If you want to double check or have any questions on how to edit and place the code you can refer to the Facebook Pixel Implementation Guide. The Facebook Pixel Helper is also a great Chrome extension that helps identify if your pixels are live and placed correctly on a page. Additional Pixel Troubleshooting from the Facebook developers.

What you’ll want to do is map out the path to purchase on your website so you know which Standard Event to place on which page.

View Content: This is most useful if there is a specific page on your site that you identify as a key page view such as the product page, the additional info page, a landing page with more details that could lead to a purchase etc.
Search: This will help identify if users are getting to your site and performing searches in your search bar. If they are, but you’re still not seeing sales you may need to revisit your targeting as users may not be finding the relevant content/product that they thought they would.
Add to Cart: Key step to track how many people are starting the checkout process vs finishing an order. Drop offs are useful for measuring shopping cart abandonment and retargeting, but can also point out red flags in user experience if people are not converting after adding to cart.
Add to Wish List: A great way to track extremely interested users who maybe weren’t ready to pull the trigger yet.
Initiate Checkout: The strongest indicator of purchase intent and one of the main steps to measure the path to purchase.
Add Payment Info: Again measuring drop offs here will be key.
Purchase: The name of the game; tracking conversions and using that data to optimize your ads further. You can also identify the value of a sale if you have different Thank You pages for different products
Lead: This is useful if you are having users fill out a form, redeem a free trial etc. rather than making a purchase.
Complete Registration: Useful for identifying users that sign up for a service or a subscription through a registration form.
Other: Use this to track any other key actions on your website that aren’t listed above.

Using these Standard Events as qualifiers, what you want to do is place the corresponding code on each page all the way from a Page View down to a Conversion. So you would have the standard pixel on the landing page, Add to Cart on the first step in the cart page, Initiate Checkout page gets its own pixel code, same for Add Payment Info and Purchase. Now if you have other relevant pages on the site then you’ll want to add the additional codes to those such as View Content for a key page view and the like.

In the end this will help you identify how many people came into the funnel at the top, how many came out the bottom with a purchase and exactly how many dropped off and at what part of the process so you can re-engage or tweak your campaigns.

Facebook rolls out new ad types all the time that allow advertisers to target users in unique ways or to reach different goals. Combining these various strategies into a few campaigns going through the longer sales funnel is one of the best ways to take advantage of all these ad types. This is what I like to call Attacking the Top of the Sales Funnel.

Figure out who your key demo is for this campaign; who are you trying to hit? Is it men of a certain age in a certain radius? Moms with an interest in soccer? Whatever it is, set your targeting and run a Facebook video campaign.

The beauty of Facebook video is you can sort out the users that are actually interested in your product based on who actually watched certain percentages of the video. Make sure to check off “Create audiences from people who view this video” under the designated Call To Action Button.

Doing this will allow Facebook to build a Custom Audience of users who have viewed your video. If your video gets 10,000 impressions, but only 5,000 users actually watch the video, then why would you want to waste ad spend on the 5,000 people that scrolled right past your content? Exactly, follow up with users who have already expressed an interest and given you their attention.

Now it’s time to attack the top of the sales funnel. Using this Custom Audience you have created a perfect retargeting list to hit Facebook users with a follow up message or offer. This is particularly effective if the video is more of a brand awareness play and then retargeting users in the Custom Audience with a Carousel Ad with specific products/features.

Finally, based on the results of your Carousel Ad determine which product or feature is getting the best engagement and most clicks from users? Then jump one level further down the funnel and closer to a conversion by serving up a specific offer or special to those users – based directly off which Carousel slide performed the best.

Courtesy of Facebook for Business

This is a great tactic to increase efficiency of your ad spend. Rather than throwing videos, promo posts, website clicks ads etc. all out randomly and seeing what sticks, this allows you to methodically whittle down your audience size while also increasing the user attention, interest and the likelihood of ultimately making a purchase.