3 Phase Guide to Lead Generation with Facebook Ads

Meg Hopkins • March 19, 2020

How to convert better, high-quality leads through Facebook Ads

Facebook Lead Ads allow us to create higher converting marketing campaigns that we struggle to find through various avenues. We are able to capitalize on the vast amount of Facebook users to gain better conversions rates, meaning that we are able to target specific audiences to generate better, high-quality leads.

You may be familiar with how Facebook Lead Ads work, but what you may not be familiar with are the 3 Phases of Lead Generation within Facebook Advertising.

Below, we will go through each phase, point out tips to implement when setting up your ads and the overall cost of getting through each phase to continue on to the next one.

Let’s start at Phase 1: The Learning Phase

In order to begin, Facebook recommends setting a budget of $25 a day to properly “learn” how to best serve your ads to your audience (potential leads). Why $25? Basically, this gives Facebook enough daily budget to experiment with and slowly start converting leads.

As Facebook learns more about your audience, your few conversions, your ad set and your ads, they collect more and more data. With this data, they are able to better learn who best to show your ads to and capitalize on gaining those crucial conversions, or leads. As Facebook learns more, they are able to target users to generate high quality leads.

In the Learning Phase, your typical cost per lead (CPL) is estimated to be around $25 to $50. This may seem pricey, but because the ad campaign is still in this learning phase, performance is less stable and the cost per action (CPA) is usually worse, meaning that costs are higher.

You will go through the Learning Phase until you have at least 100 leads. At this point you can create a Custom Audience through Facebook which you can then use to create a Lookalike Audience, a group of targeted users that share similar characteristics with your Custom Audience.

We know that the price to get through the Learning Phase is a bit much, especially if you are looking just get more newsletter subscribers but trust us it is worth it!

Cost to get through Phase 1: $3,000

Phase 2: The Growing Phase

Now that you were able to create a Custom Audience from those first 100 leads received in the Learning Phase and you’ve created ads targeting your Lookalike Audience, your CPL should begin to come down.

This is called the Growing Phase and it’s where Facebook uses its own knowledge of those first 100 leads to find the best people to show your ads to, your Lookalike Audience, generating even more leads.

The CPL in this phase is typically $10 to $20. You will be in this phase until you generate at least 1,000 leads through your Facebook Ads, the magic number to generate high-quality leads through a Lookalike Audience. Be sure to check out our latest post on The Rule of 1,000 to better understand Custom and Lookalike Audiences and why this phase is very important to generating leads that convert.

Cost to get through Phase 2: $10,000 to $20,000

Phase 3: Maturity Phase

After reaching 1,000 leads through your Facebook Ads, you can now create a new Lookalike Audience that will further expand your targeted reach. In this phase, Facebook will have much more data to use to optimally target your ads to the appropriate users, users that have the best probability of converting to new leads.

In Phase 3, the Maturity Phase, you will get more leads for the same budget that you are currently using. At this point your CPL should be under $10. This is the typical CPL range where most (if not all) businesses are comfortable. With that being said, it can take some time and money, usually $13,000 - $23,000, to get to this preferred CPL range that is generating the most high-quality leads.

During this phase, your ads are about as intelligent as they can be and should no longer be changed as part of your optimization strategy. That said, you can continue to tweak your ads (using various images, videos and text) to see which performs best. At DigitalTreehouse, we recommend using Budget Optimization at this point to let Facebook decide which ads to show for optimal conversions

Cost to get to Phase 3: $23,000

Facebook Ads can be pricey and seem overwhelming, but in the end, they do work if done right. That is why we are here to help you navigate all your social media advertising fears.

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