Earlier this summer, we shareda case study on how Ladder used Facebook Lead Ads campaigns to decrease our cost per lead and cost per qualified lead by 80 percent. This test, however, wasn’t an easy task. Here’s a quick recap from Stefan Mancevski, Ladder’s director of marketing:
With this in mind, I wondered if we could use this method to grow our newsletter audience using a gated piece of content in a Facebook Lead Ad. For this experiment, I decided to use an old blog post transformed into a downloadable infographic of the 50 Tools We Use to Grow Businesses. Since we’ve never run a Facebook Leads Ad with a gated piece of content before, I hypothesized that targeting a broader audience would earn us between 50-100 newsletter subscribers.
Here’s exactly how I set up this ad:
The objective of this campaign is to collect email addresses to add to our Ladder Newsletter. I opened Facebook’s Ads Manager (or Power Editor for some) and created a Lead Generation campaign.
Then, I began building the ad set. For this initial test, I didn’t use any custom audiences or lookalike audiences, but I did want to specifically target audiences in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Since our infographic has a broad set of marketing tools that can appeal to a broad audience, I decided to keep targeting as broad as possible.
The end result was an audience of about 47,000,000 people and an estimated daily reach between 230-690 people.
I know what you’re thinking: “47 million people? Why on earth would you want an audience this large?”
I decided to keep our audience as broad as possible in order to give us a benchmark the cost per newsletter subscriber so we can figure out what price we should optimize for as we test narrower audiences in the future.
Finally, I set our daily budget to $10/day, enabling us to still reach our audience in a cost-effective manner.
For this ad’s creative, I simply reused the banner image from the blog. I felt it conveyed exactly what visitors can expect in the infographic.
For the ad copy, I wanted to make it clear what this piece of content is (i.e. “the ultimate list of the 50 apps every startup should have”) and why they need it (i.e. “for exponential growth”).
Like our initial Facebook Lead Ad test earlier this year, we decided to err entirely on the side of ease of completion and get as many newsletter subscribers through the door as possible.
To do so, I only required visitors to enter their email address–which is already pre-populated by Facebook. It also did not include an intro screen or a place after form submission where new leads can click through to the Ladder homepage.
From here, we ran the ad, and results were pretty astounding. For 7 weeks (Oct. 19 – Nov. 30), here’s what we observed:
For a baseline test, I’m really pleased with these results. Our goal was to get our cost per lead around $2 per newsletter subscriber, so getting nearly 200 newsletter subscribers for $2.83 each is an awesome result.
Finally, although this wasn’t our primary goal, I’m pleased this ad also helped us attract 15 people to “Like” our Facebook page.
Looking ahead, I’ll run additional tests, primarily focusing on different audiences. The first test (currently ongoing) will focus on a narrower audience that is interested in both marketing and one or more of the marketing tools included in the infographic.
I hypothesize that by targeting people interested in marketing and specific marketing tools with an infographic of our top 50 marketing tools, then we will attract fewer newsletter subscribers, more importantly, but they’ll be less likely to unsubscribe from our weekly newsletter and more likely to be high-quality business leads. We’ll update this post in two weeks with the final results.
My second test would be to target a broader audience interested in entrepreneurship. I hypothesize that by targeting individuals interested in entrepreneurship, then we will replicate similar results to our broad marketing interest test: we will spend between $2-3 per lead and earn about 200 newsletter subscribers over a period of 7 weeks.
Sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest movements in the field.
More from Ladder Blog
The art world is being disrupted by generative AI, and artists aren’t happy. Generative AI models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion were trained by scraping millions of images from the internet, without permission. Artists claim this violates copyright, while the companies training these models argue this falls under fair use.
Read More →In the world of digital marketing and data-driven decision-making, creative testing is a pivotal tool in achieving business growth. Gone are the days of relying on gut feelings or guesswork; now, business decisions are powered by data-validated insights, meticulously collected, analyzed, and validated. This transformative process empowers businesses of all sizes, from established enterprises to budding startups, to thrive in an ever-evolving digital market. This article looks at the practical applications, challenges, and innovative transformations associated with creative testing, offering you valuable insights and actionable strategies to implement in your own digital marketing efforts for achieving growth and success.
Read More →
