Facebook PPC for SaaS – Easy Wins

Facebook PPC ads are often seen as easier to run than the likes of Google Ads. Marketers can kick their campaigns off with smaller budgets, they can have a hyper-specific audience, and Facebook Ads is a really straightforward platform even for SaaS.

But beginners and experienced users both run into roadblocks. Maybe the audience you’re targeting didn’t turn out to be the right move, or maybe your conversion rate is just terrible. It happens, and overcoming these obstacles can be a chore. But don’t lose hope.

Everybody needs a win every once in a while, and we can help you out. Read on and discover some easy wins for Facebook PPC for SaaS.

Easy Wins for Facebook PPC

1. Targeting Granularity

Facebook PPC - Targeting Granularity

I want to jump in and start with a really advanced win straight away – Targeting Granularity. So the more granular a target audience on Facebook PPC ads is – whether they’re going to your software site or start a free trial – the more expensive it is to go after that target audience.

For example, if you outline the criteria of your audience and say they must like Salesforce’ page, they must be an admin of a Facebook page, they have to be in a specific age bracket, and they have to be in this location, your cost-per-click is going to go up.

How do you solve this? The best way to work with this but continue targeting a specific audience, is to target a broad audience but then exclude the low-performing demographics once you’ve got enough data to confidently say “Nope, these people aren’t right for my software”.

It’ll take you some time to go through this process and rebuild your target audience, but it’s going to save you a lot of money.

2. Audience Targeting

PPC Audience Targeting

Speaking of audience targeting, make sure your targeting is done right. So you know who your customer is, their persona and so on. But when it comes to Facebook PPC, what is their ideal age range? What interests do they have? Think about what makes them the perfect customer.

Really detail out who your ideal customer is, because Facebook Ads has a lot of options here. You’re going to be paying more to begin with if you go straight to interest-based targeting. However, you’re getting people in the door who you can also retarget later.

Moving on, what job titles does your ideal customers have? Maybe HR staff benefit from your software the most, or perhaps marketing staff.

And then there’s Facebook lookalike audiences. If you’ve got any existing customer data such as an email list, you can use this to create a lookalike audience. This is a great easy win for Facebook PPC ads and it helps to broaden your targeting strategy.

3. Generate Awareness, Retarget with Facebook PPC Ads

Generate Awareness and Retarget Facaebook PPC Ads

This is a mistake I see a lot of companies make when running Facebook ads for the first time. In particular, software companies do this – going straight for sales.

So they try to drive people to sign up and become paying customers. That sounds like a good goal, and it makes sense. But when you’re starting off, it’s better to generate awareness, build your audience, and retarget them. It’s ideal to do this instead of saying “Hey, we’re X software company, buy our product right now!”.

You should instead take the approach of generating awareness, get the customers in the door and onto your site, then then go with an aggressive retargeting campaign to get them to convert.

This is a Facebook PPC strategy that’s working really well for our software clients right now. I recommend this rather than just dumping all of your budget into sales campaigns early on. Build the audience first, retarget them, then get them to convert later.

4. Offer a Free Trial

Offer a Free Trial for SaaS

This is really obvious but it’s worth the reminder: offer a free trial. And there are a few things that people mess up on when they offer free trials.

Things like having customers enter their payment details – this is counterproductive. You’re basically saying, “Hey, you’ll get a free trial, just give me your credit card number”. Even if you say that you won’t charge them upfront, this is a friction point that is going to dissuade people from signing up.

In addition, don’t heavily limit access to features because users haven’t paid yet. Give them a free trial for a short period, this is much more effective than feature limiting. It gives people a chance to actually use your complete software, have a real user experience, and they know exactly what their money will buy them.

Remember that this kind of traffic is cold. If you have a Facebook PPC ad with “Check out my free trial!”, you’re interrupting their browsing to tell them that your software exists. So if you have obstacles like a paywall, fewer people will try the free trial.

Some great examples of this being well are Zapier, Tispr, Dropbox, and Hubspot. We highly recommend you check out their sites and see how they offer free trials. They get you in the door, let you use their product, play around with it, and if you like what you see, there’s a chance you’ll convert.

5. Increase Creative Testing for Facebook PPC

Increase Creative Testing for Facebook Ads

Facebook PPC ads used to be all about the audience testing, trying to find who’s the right person to convert and who’s the exact demographic that’s going to buy your product. That’s changed a lot lately.

So what my team and I came up with is actually 4x the creative testing. The reason why this works is because Facebook gets to a point, once you’ve got enough conversion data on a weekly basis, where it will then let you turn on open targeting.

What this does is find people for you without needing to apply things such as them having to like a specific page or fall into specific demographics. And this gets you cheaper cost per conversions than you’d get from standard targeting where you’re refining your targeting strategy. With this in place it becomes less about audience discovery and more about creative testing.

So I suggest that you split test your Facebook PPC ad creatives four times more than you usually do. This also helps to reduce ad fatigue since you’re providing fresh ad copies, thus reducing your frequency score, and people are less likely to report your ads too. Spend a lot of time on your ad creatives and limit how much time is being spent on audience discovery.

6. Use Facebook Video Ads

Facebook PPC Video Ads

This next one is also obvious, but Facebook Video Ads are really good for SaaS. Why? For the most part, it’s because it can be difficult to explain software without visual aid. If you try to explain your SaaS without a video, it’ll be ten times harder than if you had a short 7 second video which explains your solution and conveys a lot more information in literally seconds.

Don’t just have a stock image for your Facebook PPC ads. I highly recommend you give this a shot – hire a graphic designer to help you out, or a video editor. There are freelancers out there who have experience creating these types of videos and with consideration to how much value these video ads have, it’s truly worth the investment.

Make sure the video looks good, explains your software really well, and in return you’ll get more user engagement and a higher CTR. This will also give you a great setup for retargeting users based on their watch time, and you can create Facebook lookalike audiences based on that too.

That’s just a side benefit but overall, Facebook Video Ads are incredibly effective.

7. Retargeting Placements & LAL Audiences

Retargeting Placements & Lookalike Audiences

The final piece of advice I’ll give you for improving a Facebook PPC ad campaign is that when you’re retargeting a small audience, it’s better to target all placements. This is because when you split up campaigns by device, platform placement, and so on, it increases your costs and it can also hurt performance.

By targeting all placements, you can reduce your costs and it’ll be easier to scale the campaign too. So whenever you’re retargeting, go after all placements ads.

Also, lookalike (LAL) audiences work great when you layer then with other targeting criteria so that they’re not too broad. Having a 2% LAL audience who converted before, who like this Facebook page, and who fall into this demographic – that’ll narrow down exactly who you want to target with your ads and the clicks you get will be much more relevant.

Run Facebook PPC Ads with KonvertLab

That sums up some of the easy wins that will help push your Facebook PPC ad campaign in the right direction. It’s tough to grasp ads if this is new territory for you, understandably, and these easy wins aren’t just a way of helping campaign performance. They can give you confidence in your own marketing abilities too!

If you still struggle to get results from your Facebook ads, don’t lose hope. SaaS sales can be tricky but with the right help, campaigns can be very successful. Book a call with KonvertLab and we’ll help you get that higher conversion rate you aspire to have.

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