With Facebook ads becoming more competitive and costs creeping up, we’re always looking for ways that we can increase the ROI (return on investment) of our ad campaigns.

Some of you might be familiar with the Facebook ad approach of driving traffic to your blog and then running retargeting ads to them to either opt in to get something for free or to buy something. It can work really nicely not just to get opt-ins or sales at a reasonable rate, but to also build traffic to your site and build retargeting audiences out of that.

That said, sometimes it doesn’t even need to be that complicated if you have means of getting someone to opt-in to get something for free or buy something right on the blog post and your ads to the blog post are effective enough.

Right now, we have a campaign going for a client that is driving blog post visitors for only $0.04 per click and is directly driving opt-ins for only $1.50 – $2.00 per opt-in. Considering opt-ins tend to be worth $5 to $10 or more, it’s clear that will be a nicely profitable campaign in the long run.

Now imagine if instead of running ads to a blog post, you ran them directly to a landing page where people could opt-in to get something for free. Let’s say you were getting the traffic for $0.66 per click, which for most advertisers isn’t bad, and let’s say you convert them at 33%, also not bad for most people. You end up with $2.00 leads from it, but the people who didn’t opt-in will have only seen an opt-in page.

Let’s say the campaign I mentioned before was specifically also driving $2 leads and let’s say we spend $200 on both campaigns. Both campaigns end up with 100 leads/subscribers. The first ends up with a retargeting audience of 5,000 who have read an article vs. simply seen an opt-in page. The second ends up with a retargeting audience of…300, all who’ve only seen an opt-in page. Huuuuuuge difference!

Circling back to what I started with, normally what is done with blog post ads is you then shoot retargeting ads either to the opt-in page or to a purchase page. For easy comparison, let’s say we try to get those people to opt in. There’s a pretty good chance you can score opt-ins from a retargeting audience for $1 or less. So you can even drive your overall cost per opt-in down by doing the full approach still.

Many people just assume the blog post approach won’t work, usually because they think it’s impossible to get low-cost traffic from Facebook unless it’s from countries with low quality traffic. The campaign I mentioned is all US traffic, and none of the visitors are people who had been to the blog before or knew of the company behind it.

This is not to say it’s not sometimes still fruitful to run ads only to opt-in page, but it’s worthwhile running some ads to your blog posts until you find one or a couple that really work (ideally not just for low-cost traffic but also high engagement) and then starting your funnel from that point to drive leads and sales.

We offer both training and services to help you with getting superior results from Facebook advertising.

Have you tried this approach to Facebook ads? Let us know in the comments below!