I never worked with message campaigns before as I mostly used Conversions optimization for the past 3 years. 30% of my time goes to lead generation, traffic, catalog sales, post engagement and video views. 6 years ago I ran lots of page like campaigns, as my strategy was at that time (now grey area), to build up quickly fan pages for famous athletes and sport teams, and then post affiliate offers to those pages and make a lot of money. That’s when I started to play with Facebook and from there a lot of things changed.
Some changes were good and some changes were bad. The worst change was when it became hard for newbies like I was at that time, to learn this game by not spending tons of money. At that time, you could get 1000 fans easily with 20-50 USD. Now you have to pay a lot more. How did that work? Easy. You just made an ad with ‘Like our page if you like ’. Or ‘You like _, then like our page’. It was easy money and a very easy game for newbies.
A few friends of mine scaled their business to 30-50 pages in a few months, and every page brought 5-20k a month in affiliate revenue. For me it wasn’t such a big success, but I made some money so that I could later spend on learning new techniques and buying more ads. So at the end, what Facebook gave me it took back. Pretty sad, right?
The thing that it didn’t take from me is my knowledge, so I can quickly adopt and test new things not just on FB, but also on other media channels. In the end, they all work the same. You test, you optimize, you scale and then repeat the cycle. But I didn’t want to talk about this today. I started this topic just to bring the bigger picture of how some things that used to work a few years ago, now just don’t work. And how quickly we have to adapt to new things that Facebook spits out everyday.
As I mentioned before, these message campaigns were very new for me 2 months ago. But after I learnt how they work, they can be implemented to most online businesses very quickly.
So let me first tell you what a message campaign is – It’s the campaign on Facebook that optimizes for Messenger conversations. This means that it sends people from your ad to conversation with FB Messenger. You will need to change the ad copy and invite people at the end to get more help or information via chat. When a user clicks from your ad and starts to chat with you, FB sees this as a conversion and shows your ads to more and more people, who are more likely to chat during the optimization phase.
The reason why I started using those ads was my new client, who was collection leads for his service in a financial niche. He had a team of several support agents on the phone, who called each lead as soon as he or she completed a form on their website on a daily basis. The best leads as he said were very ‘hot leads’ – that means those which his agents called up to 15 mins after they signed up this form. His CPL (cost per leads) was increasing lately so he came to us if we can help him.
When I got his account I almost went crazy, as there were more than 100 small campaigns segmented by little geos of no more than 50k people. Half of the account was at small budget and half around $100. He wanted to have leads around $30 but lately leads cost went up to $50 and even $70 at some days. The problem with this account was also daily optimization, as we weren’t allowed to run ads 24/7, but we had to turn them down daily after a certain amount of budget was spent.
We also had to run ads only during the time his agents were in the office. That was 7am to 5pm Monday to Thursday. Pretty hectic scenario for campaign optimization right? Anyway, after one week I somehow figured out how to manage them with rules. I tried FB rules but couldn’t make it for the account spend limit at certain budget, so I had to go to Revealbot app and scheduled several rules there. At one point when everything was automated, and when I killed 3/4 of his nonprofitable campaigns, I realized this won’t work as I predicted at the beginning. Targeted geo was very small and campaigns just weren’t spending enough to be where we said we were gonna be.
So one day I started to test message campaigns, as I found one campaign from the past that performed really well. He or the agency before wanted to test those campaigns, and I saw it brought some cheap leads. I decided to split-test this with several creatives and just duplicate all lead campaigns into msg at higher budget. After a week of testing and scaling daily message campaigns, the client called me in excitement and told me how happy he is with our results.
So far I couldn’t really know how good they are performing, because we didn’t get daily reports of how many of those lead and message campaigns actually converted for him. But he explained weekly results and concluded that those message campaigns outperformed lead campaigns by 2x. This means that the conversion rate of final leads out of those msg campaigns were 50%, while at lead it was less than 25%. It also means that when I see 10 message conversions in my ads manager, they get 5 deals signed that day.
In comparison to standard lead campaigns where conversion was less than 25%, that would mean only 2 leads that day.
Now the final result is even better! Drum roll please!!
The conversions for leads as I said before, were costing us lately $50 to $70. But the conversion for message campaigns were costing us $6-10. What do you say about that?!
Will you try this in your business?? Will you make it work?? Msg campaigns are a great opportunity right now and definitely are worth your focus and testing. With the right steps, we think you can bring the costs of your CPA or CPL down to 2x if not higher. For sure you need to have a person who will respond to those messages, but that is very easy to do. Then you will have to test and optimize and then test again and scale and… you know how it goes. If you want us to set up this system in your business, go here and sign up with us ==> www.dimniko.com/scale
We think it is a big opportunity if done in the right way. Especially now when nobody is using this method and the cost is still very low.
Anyway, have a good day and don’t miss opportunities FB is bringing you!
The quicker you adopt, the better your business can grow.
Ciao, Matej
