How LeadPages Boosted Paid Media Revenue By 250% and Dropped CPL By 27%

Tim: More and more people are hailing Facebook advertising as the key to success in business. But as its popularity grows, a lot of companies are finding that it’s difficult to find a really good mix between a properly targeted audience and having a big enough targeted audience to really make a dent in the world.

Today’s guest is Andrew Scherr, the paid media manager here at LeadPages. Now Andrew is going to share a simple tactic using a native feature in Facebook that allowed him to grow LeadPages ad revenue by 250% while cutting the cost per lead by 27% all in six months. It’s pretty insane and the wonderful part is he also shares how you can do it regardless of whether you have 40,000 customers or if you have none. So if you’re looking to gain an edge in your Facebook marketing, this is the episode for you. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.

Hey, what’s up Andrew. Welcome to ConversionCast.

Andrew: Hey, Tim. Thanks for having me on.

Tim: Yeah, man thanks for coming on the show and we got some cool stuff to talk about today. One of the biggest things that people ask about is you know, how can I run effective paid media campaigns to grow my business, to increase my revenue. So I thought who better to have on the show than you to share kind of what we’ve done at LeadPages. So can you start off by telling us the results from this particular tactic?

Andrew: Yeah. So using a tactic on Facebook ads we over the last six months have grown our revenue on that platform by 250% and at the same time we’re able to decrease our cost per lead by 27%.

Tim: Beautiful. I love that. Those are results anybody would strive for. So I guess to set the stage for this, can you tell us a little bit about kind of who you are and what you do here at LeadPages?

Andrew: yeah, no problem. My name is Andrew Scherr. I run paid media here at LeadPages so anything we spend a dollar on from an advertising side of things kind of flows through me. But I work with guys like you and our content team and our design team and pretty much the whole marketing team on a daily basis.

Tim: Awesome. So you’re pretty much the guy when it comes to any kind of ad spend.

Andrew: correct. It all flows through some sort of crazy reporting that I do to either determine ROI or cost per lead or CPM or any of those kinds of metrics.

Tim: Awesome and I love it because sometimes I look at these reports that you have and I’m just like oh this really looks like a foreign language to me. But it all makes sense and somehow it continues to get better and better so I love that. So this tactic I think the best thing to do would be to just jump right in with both feet. So why don’t you tell us what we did.

Andrew: Yeah, no problem. So Facebook ads is fantastic. Their targeting capabilities are awesome and it’s very easy to target the market that you’re trying to get to down to you know, a small group of a hundred people, which we did really well for a few months. But growing as fast as we are, at LeadPages and trying to continue to grow we had to really expand the audiences that we were looking for. So instead of setting up an audience of a hundred or two hundred, very targeted entrepreneurs we just started going after audiences of people who are interested in marketing which on Facebook is 285M people. So that’s a giant audience. We did run some ads there and we had some success with it but we knew there was a better way to target this group and it’s just the native feature that’s built in to Facebook advertising but it’s called a lookalike audience.

So what we did is we set up a lookalike audience of people who are LeadPages customers and what Facebook does is it combs those people’s profiles, it combs a little bit of their browsing history and it creates a profile of our ideal users. So what we’re then able to do is pair that 285M people who are interested in marketing with somebody who looks like our ideal customer and get to a much more targeted audience. And in doing that, again it’s not necessarily rocket science. It’s something that’s built into Facebook ads. We really honed in on a better ROI and then we’re just able to grow over the last six months.

Tim: And how did you get Facebook to and again I’m going to come at this from the perspective of somebody who is not a paid ads expert. How did you get Facebook to recognize our customers? Was that just based on the email addresses of our existing customers?

Andrew: yeah there’s a variety of different ways. One way is to simply upload a list of your customer email addresses and if it matches with the Facebook profile, they start to build their lookalike audience off of those email addresses. The other way is through conversion tracking pixels and audience tracking pixels and what you would so is set – put a specific piece of script on your thank you page of your shopping cart or thank you page of your opt-in page and Facebook can then say anyone who’s been to that page we know they’ve either opted in or they’re one of your customers. And then start building a lookalike audience off of those users.

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Tim: I love this because this is a way that people can find more of their ideal customers and you hear a lot of people out there saying oh you need to find your ideal customers and focus on your ideal customers and you know, market to them. But a lot of times people have no idea who their ideal customers are or what they look like and even if you look at the actions that your customers are taking and you kind of look at what they’re doing whether it’s in an info product or a SAS product and something like that, even if you look at those things it can still be hard to pinpoint who is that person and how do I find more people like them. This is a really clear easy way to do that using Facebook’s kind of native abilities to target really specifically right?

Andrew: Most definitely and through the custom audiences, you aren’t necessarily able to see the person but there is another feature inside of Facebook which is completely free if you put the tracking pixel on your site that goes through demographics of people who are going to your site, people who are purchasing, people who are opting into stuff. And a lot of times what people find is who they thought their customer is actually someone completely different. They just Facebook then to kind of profile who their actual customer is versus who they thought their customer was.

Tim: So interesting. And along with that, you know, I know that there are a lot of people listening to the show who might be you know, early stage. Maybe they don’t have a lot of customers or maybe some of them even any customers. Is there a way to implement something like this that can still get them great results?

Andrew: Definitely. SO the minimum threshold to build a lookalike audience is 100 users .So 100 people who have taken this specific action. So we have over 100 customers , we can set it up for our customers. If you don’t have 100 customers kind of the next on the totem pole would be your leads. So set up a custom audience of your leads if you have a hundred leads. They aren’t necessarily a customer but they’re someone who is interested enough to download a piece of material you put out there.

And then if you don’t have that hundred threshold for leads, you could build a custom audience just off of your website traffic. So people who are going to your website, people who look like people who go to your website and then combine that with some sort of interest like marketing, video marketing, online marketing.

Tim: Could you do this even with say a competitor’s website? Could you get traffic from a competitor’s website and build the lookalike audience to that?

Andrew: Not specifically. You could get there in a roundabout way. So you could run ads for people who are interested in your competitors and then set up a custom audience for people who clicked on that and then build a lookalike audience off of that. So —

Tim: Interesting.

Andrew: — I think your native targeting capabilities of just saying I want to go, I want to put my head in front of people who are interested in in these four competitors would be your best bet to go after a competitor. And then from there if they become your customer, become a lead you could build a lookalike audience off of that.

Tim: Awesome. So it sounds like basically being able to target your ideal customer in a variety of different ways but the key is really finding that person and what they’re doing and using Facebook’s kind of native abilities to target them is a really powerful way to grow your revenue, grow your audience and keep your business moving forward and it’s especially I think interesting because of our quick growth the fact that we’ve been able to or that you’ve been able to do that with our company growing so quickly I think is pretty powerful. So its speaks to the power of this feature.

Andrew: Yeah I couldn’t agree more and I work a lot here with Bob the Teacher, Jake [indiscernible [0:08:35]] and helping customers kind of implement Facebook ads, look at Facebook ads a little bit of coaching on Facebook ads and I can firmly say there’s not been a single person we talked to that we haven’t found a good use case of Facebook ads for. You don’t have to be LeadPages, you don’t have to be growing as fast as we are. You could be just starting yesterday and there’s probably a good use case to use Facebook ads in some way, shape or form.

Tim: I love it and of course we have a free course on Facebook advertising that you can get if you go to LeadPages.net/facebookadvertising, again completely free. You can watch the course right on the site. You can download it all and watch it later. But it’s a great way to learn a little bit more about how to use Facebook ads for your business. So Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate you sharing this awesome tactic with us.

Andrew: Thanks for having me on Tim, it was great.

Tim: Andrew is a good, good man and I’m excited that he got to share that with us. So to get that Facebook advertising course I mentioned, again just go to LeadPages.net/facebookadvertising, that’s LeadPages.net/facebookadvertising, and check it out.

On another note, if you’ve been struggling to grow your list but know you can’t spend every second of your life trying to fix that problem, then you’ll want to attend this Thursday’s live webinar hosted by yours truly. It’s called Four Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List without Spending All of Your Time Marketing and it’s happening this Thursday at 3 p.m. eastern time. I’ll be answering all your questions live as well as sharing how LeadPages has grown our list to well over $150,000 subscribers. I definitely want you to register. So to do that, take out your phone right now. Text LeadPagesLive that’s all one world LeadPagesLive, text LeadPagesLive to the phone number 33444. Again LeadPagesLive that’s just one word, text that to 33444 or you can go to LeadPagesWebinar.com and register there. Again LeadPagesWebinar.com. I’ll see you there Thursday and we’ll see you next week on ConversionCast.