Asking Facebook Ads Experts: What is Your Most Successful Campaign & What Ad Type Was Used

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Probably, if you’re anything like our digital marketing team, you’re currently running or have run Facebook ads in the past, and it’s likely you’ve experienced some great campaign wins, as well as some campaigns (or spends) you wish you could have taken back.

Today’s article focuses on some of the wins from 16 of the best Facebook ads experts from around the world, with the question: How do you grow your business with Facebook ads?

What is your most successful Facebook ads campaign and what ad type(s) did you use?

We learned that digital advertisers are very creative in their targeting of audiences and test a variety of ad formats.

What did each Facebook ads expert say?

Trustpilot

A webinar we promoted earlier this year was promoted using several types of ads, but eventually found Carousel Ads to be most effective. From the beginning to the end of the campaign, we exceeded our registration goal by 55% and decreased our registration costs by more than 50%. In order to optimize on mobile devices and Instagram, we launched Carousel Ads that performed better. In particular, carousel ads generated five times as many registrations as image ads on Android & iPhone.

Typically, we do not put resources behind webinars, but we thought this topic would perform well. Carousel ads (16.74%) contributed to the overall conversion rate of 11.26%, while image ads contributed to 8.27%.

Managing Director of Global Digital Marketing, Marion Barel

Fullstory

“Our most successful advertising campaign was a lead generation retargeting campaign using static lead ads based on data-driven insights!” After analyzing pages that users tend to visit before conversion — our pricing page, our features page, and a few customer stories — we took the top 25% of all site visitors to the pages that did not achieve conversion. In addition, we hyper-targeted our services only to those in our target market based on their industry, company size, job function, and location.

By A/B testing creative copy, and the number of lead generation fields required, we were able to drive over 150 form fills a month.”

Allison Quirk, Marketing – Paid Acquisition

WordStream

Our most successful Facebook campaign was the promotion of a webinar called 7 Reasons Google Ads + Facebook Make the Perfect Pair with a video ad type. We had a very well-rounded strategy that converted at 35% while generating over 1,500 conversions at a $20 CPA. Our sales team qualified 20% of these leads.

The offer promoted a topic in high demand. In addition, the theme aligned with Valentine’s Day, so our ads delivered a compelling impression while driving relevancy to popular themes across prospect feeds. As part of our creative, we created a video that followed best practices, especially through animation. We hear this from our Facebook contacts all the time; to prioritize motion in our ads, which continues to perform well across our campaigns. By leveraging lookalike audiences and interest pairing, we sealed the deal with the right audience targeting.

Kristina Simonson, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist

Acquisio

As part of our ebook download landing page, we used Website Conversion Ads to drive leads. With Facebook’s wide selection of CTA buttons, we were able to A/B test which CTA brought the most quality leads. Despite the fact that the traffic we got was less expensive, it was still highly relevant. Our cost per result was nice and low since Facebook has a large reach.

Katya Ladryda, BBM Subject Matter Expert

CAKE

In just 30 days, our lead conversion campaign for a CAKE demo generated 32 high-quality B2B leads. The CPA for the campaign was $125.19, which is right on par with the industry benchmark for B2B SaaS technology companies. Using the guidance of our Facebook account manager, we segmented our ad groups into three categories: Detailed Targeting, Lookalike Audiences, and Custom Audiences. In doing so, we were able to effectively target the right audiences while also preventing the ad groups from competing with each other.”

Sarah Wilson, Digital Marketing Manager

Hanapin Marketing

Our most successful campaign on Facebook, for the travel client Icelandair, uses campaign budget optimization instead of individual ad set budgets. By using budget optimization, we increased overall conversions by 74% and decreased cost per conversion by 43%. To improve both volume and efficiency in a high-priority market, we used CBO in tandem with image and carousel ads, geo and audience targeting, and conversion objectives.

As a result of no longer manually adjusting budgets by ad set, our team was able to focus on the big picture strategy and other tactical opportunities. In our PPCHero post, Increasing Facebook Ad Conversions and Decreasing CPC, we discuss our success with this client.

Aaron Childs, Paid Social Account Manager

Madkudu

“One of our customers, Drift, used Facebook’s value optimization engine to deliver its most successful campaign. By sending MadKudu’s predictive lead scoring data to Facebook’s bidding optimization AI, Drift trained Facebook to bid based on the predicted spend of each lead. The Facebook Ads feature is more commonly used by ecommerce players, who send Facebook transactional data to train its Ad engine.

Through the use of MadKudu’s predictions, Drift was able to train Facebook to optimize bidding for qualified leads. They applied this tactic and saw a 300% increase in conversion from Facebook spend.”

Liam Boogar-Azoulay, Head of Marketing

AgoraPulse

“There’s one campaign that worked well, but had low reach since it was retargeting our pricing page visitors (15k unique visitors per month). Whether we like it or not, most “ideal” prospects compare AgoraPulse with the competition! We wanted to own that conversation so we decided to retarget users who have visited our pricing page with a link to an unbiased pricing comparison of our tool against our two main competitors.

By helping our prospects determine if we were a good fit for them price wise, we had very high-quality clicks, trials, and ultimately very high ROI on the ad. Our money was returned within one month, and as these subscriptions are recurring, the ROI is phenomenal! However, the retargeting audience is limited, of course, and tracking was done on users who had not yet started the free trial and only clicked.

As a result of this campaign, we spent $1,300 and generated $1,680 in MRR. With an average customer lifetime of 19 months, that would result in a $31,920 ROI. The revenue tracking with the Meta Pixel isn’t perfect since it only records the first month of MRR, and it doesn’t track recurring revenue, so this is just an estimate based on our LTV average metrics.

Emeric Ernoult, Co Founder & CEO

Closed Loop

We recently tested Facebook’s 15-second mobile-optimized video ads to promote a new offer for residential customers. Videos were optimized for mobile and pushed to Facebook & Instagram newsfeeds and stories.

Compared to the 30-second video format that we had previously used, the campaign performed much better. Compared to the previous 30-second video format, we saw a 36% increase in CTR and a 36% decrease in CPA. As a result of these results, the client will keep using 15-second mobile-optimized ads and expand the program.”

Heidi Buhl, Digital Advertising Manager

AKvertise

One of our most successful Facebook advertising campaigns was for a sunglasses company. We tested single image static ads during the holiday season, and they were extremely successful. After we began running single creative video ads as soon as we could, those outperformed everything else during this peak ecommerce time of year.

In addition, we created animated e-gift card ads to entice last-minute shoppers as we moved closer to the holidays and shipping was no longer guaranteed for holiday delivery. There is no doubt that video ads outperform static image ads, regardless of industry or campaign objectives, and in this case, they helped our client drive record sales.”

Akvile DeFazio, President

PixelMark

A targeted conversions campaign/traffic ad for a birth center was created based on a target audience of expectant mothers. The ad content and CTA appealed to the desire for a better birth outcome by focusing on pathos. In the end, the ad increased engagement by 800% because it was well-targeted, relatable, and garnered tons of social proof (comments, likes, and shares).

Ruben Aguirre, Founder/Funbassador

SocialCents Media

I’ve run hundreds of successful ad campaigns for clients – all with different definitions of success. Traditional standards are:

  • Low CPR – Cost Per Results – and like to keep it under $0.10
  • Content strategy that includes static content, video content, and campaigns to reach local audiences
  • Consistent monthly website traffic and call now campaign(s), avg 1M+ impressions, 20k+ clicks (locally within 25 miles)

It was a 25-dollar ad that resulted in more than 500 leads for one of my clients. That particular ad was static, but the entire campaign was a combination of static and video that probably contributed to its success.

Lindsey H. Barber, Owner

Linear

We created our most successful Facebook ad campaign for a commercial flight school. We used a video ad to offer a free flight to see the 2017 solar eclipse from 12k feet in the air.

As a result of the high conversion rate and the volume, we were able to sort through and find the most qualified leads. The video itself received almost half a million views, and we were generating leads for less than $5.

In the following months, the school expanded to a second location and tripled its fleet of aircraft. There’s not always a solar eclipse in the news, but there’s always something in the news that gets people’s attention. Think about how you can take advantage of these events to the advantage of your clients.”

Luke Heinecke, Founder & CEO

FOUND – SEO Agency

“One of our fashion ecommerce clients needed sign-ups for their website, so we implemented a really successful campaign across Facebook and Instagram. In order to achieve the lowest CPA, we initially developed a testing framework to determine the best creative, format, and targeting approach.

Our video carousel attracted the best results, likely as it was the most engaging for our young and fashion-conscious audience. While our target CPA for the campaign was £2 per sign-up, the video carousel attracted a significantly lower CPA of £1.58.”

Ruth O’Brien, Social Account Manager

Anicca Digital

A 10 Marketing Framework ebook is currently being promoted as part of a conversion campaign, with a cost per download of around £1.50.

Our choice of Conversion Ads over Lead Generation Ads was based on our desire to send people to a landing page on our website where they would be able to complete a form and request a PDF or a printed copy. In addition, our form was directly linked to SharpSpring CRM, and recipients were added to a list for future email marketing, and they were also automatically added to our remarketing lists.

We started with a narrow audience of about 35k, which we then expanded to over 200k by adding additional job titles and interests. The Instagram placement proved to be the most effective, and men were converting at a much higher rate than women. As a result, we focused our entire budget on men on Instagram, lowering the CPA. On our best day, we generated 16 leads from 2,794 impressions for £1.42 – a 0.6% conversion rate!

Ann Stanley, Founder & Managing Director

Instapage

A series of ad elements, including captions and icons in text, as well as video versus images, were tested as part of a recent campaign. To test out how to best use video content on social media when driving conversions, we launched a series of Facebook video assets and focused on AMP. In addition to video driving better results against conversion metrics, captions in the video and icons in the text also boosted conversion rates.

A lower CPA was observed for video ad formats. Videos with captions had a 40% lower CPA than videos without captions. Videos with icons in text had a 12% lower CPA than those without icons.”

Madeleine Xavier, Director of Demand Generation

What did we learn from these Facebook ads experts?

With such a wide variety of campaigns and impressive results, Facebook ads continue to prove they’re a viable channel for marketers to advertise their products and services. Optimize your post-ad click experience to a dedicated post-click landing page, hyper-target your audience, experiment with ad types, and experiment with ad types. Your ads and conversion rate will benefit.

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