How To Relevancy Hack Facebook To Get Cheaper Traffic & Leads

Facebook is one of the biggest advertising networks on the planet with over one billion people on it. In addition to the network size, it also offers some of the best targeting options among advertising networks to narrow in on your ideal target.

With this advanced targeting, Facebook is rapidly becoming a go-to advertising channel for marketers as well as small business owners. Due to that uptick in advertisers coming on board, Facebook is also rapidly becoming more and more competitive.

As this happens, cost per clicks go up while click through rates go down. It can lead to expensive campaigns that fail miserably if you don’t know what your doing or you don’t follow Facebook’s best practices. Specifically their best practices around their Relevance Score.

What Is Facebook’s Relevance Score?

To put it in terms those familiar with Google AdWords would understand, Facebook’s Relevance Score is similar to Google’s Quality Score. It’s a measure of the user experience your ad and landing page delivers to a Facebook user who has clicked through.

For example, if that Facebook user clicks through your ad to your landing page on a mobile phone and they’re met with a broken page that can’t be used on mobile, they’ll almost immediately leave the page. Facebook will look at this data and determine that for mobile traffic, your ad is less relevant that another ad that delivers a perfectly mobile optimized landing page.

Similarly if someone clicks through to your landing page and they spend five minutes browsing, Facebook will see that as a positive user experience and thus more relevant than a competitor’s page where the time on site is under five minutes.

How Can I Up My Relevance Score?

Boosting the Relevance Score of any of your campaigns and ads is relatively simple; focus on delivering value and a great user experience. But to dive deeper, here are the major three factors to increasing your Relevance Score:

• Time On Site

The longer someone spends on your website, the better the user experience must be. People have a low tolerance for websites that don’t function, especially websites that don’t work on mobile. If you can get your time on site to increase, your Relevance Score will increase as well.

• Pages Viewed

If people like your site and like your content, they’ll likely have a look around for more. It’s the same principle of teaching what you know and delivering value, if you do it, people will want more.

• Click Through Rate

This directly relates back to your ad copy and images, if they resonate with the target audience, your click through rate will increase. If the ad copy and images is also relevant to what you have on the landing page, your time on site will also increase.

How Do I Hack Relevance Score on Facebook?

Good question, but here’s another: what do you spend most of your time online doing?

Chances are, the answer is reading content. For most that’s reading blogs or articles that are of interest.

You can use this behavior to relevancy hack Facebook into giving you a better Relevance Score. If you have a high Relevance Score on that content, and that content is directly related to your main opt-in offer, wouldn’t those people who viewed the content be interested in your opt-in offer?

The answer is yes, in case you were wondering.

Now to the steps you need to hack Facebook’s Relevance Score to acquire lower cost leads that are more likely to turn into customers.

Step One: Create Content That’s Relevant To Your Opt-in Offer

We’re going to use content as a way to increase Facebook’s Relevance Score, but at the same time you can use it as a qualifier to make sure you are sending pre-qualified traffic over to your opt-in offer. Our example here is an article pre-disposing pastors, priests and other church leaders to the idea of building a mobile app for their congregation. The result will be higher relevancy on the offer page, a lower cost per acquired lead on that page and a better engagement rate after opt-in due to that relevance.

Step Two: Setup Facebook’s Retargeting Pixel On Your Content Page

When you have your content ready on your blog, website or on a landing page, you’ll want to make sure you have Facebook’s pixel setup to build an audience of people who come to read that content. Even better, if you use something like Connectio to build an audience of people who have spent over 60 seconds on the page reading. This audience will be used to run a retargeting campaign and drive traffic to your opt-in page with your offer or lead magnet.

Step Three: Run Ads To Your Content

Now that you have your content ready and Facebook is building an audience based on who comes to that content, you’re ready to begin driving traffic. This is a simple process, just use the main feature image of your content page, the headline and a small paragraph introducing what your content covers for the ad. The aim with this campaign is to get a $0.05 – $0.30 cost per click and capture 60 – 80% of that traffic in the Facebook audience created of people who viewed the content.

Step Four: Retarget The Audience You’ve Created Towards Your Offer

With everything underway and an audience being built on Facebook, it’s time to turn that audience into leads. You’ll create the campaign in the same way you would if you were driving cold traffic to the opt-in landing page, but instead of adding all your targeting, you’ll be using the Facebook audience you are building. The result of retargeting people who are already interested in content relating to your opt-in offer is a cost per click of $0.35 – $1.00 as opposed to a cost per click of $1.00 – $3.00, which is average. In addition, you’ll see conversion rate improvements of 30% – 50% depending on just how relevant the content is to the opt-in page offer.

If you do a bit of math with this relevancy hack, the Relevance Score improvement can result in a +50% reduction in your cost per lead and cost per click, while also seeing an improvement on your conversion rates.

This was our result in the hyper-niche market of church pastors (12,000 total across Canada, US and UK targeting):

While the cost per click is high, the conversion rate is 66.67% and going strong.

How’s that for a hack?

Have a question on applying this for your own use case? Comment below and I’ll answer any questions you have!