Pre-Qualify Clicks on Facebook

As a marketer, what kind of an audience do you want? A huge browsing audience? Or a small targeted one? Quantity? Or quality?

What I really want is a very eager target market who all want to follow through. (LOL! Who doesn’t?!) With an estimated 185 million users worldwide, Facebook is a massive audience. How in the world do you narrow that down?

The secret lies in weeding out the “curiosity clickers”. This is known as “pre-qualifying your clicks”. In short, it means to discourage unwanted clicks by telling viewers more about the offer in your ad. Yes – your CTR will drop. But your conversion rates will increase.

I have just read a fantastic blog post on this very topic and I thought you might benefit from it as well. Chad (CDF Networks) discusses the importance of pre-qualifying your clicks. In his post, Chad lists four excellent ideas to help us pre-qualify our clicks.

It really got me thinking that there must be even more we can do – especially on Facebook where the targeting options are unlimited! So here are a few more ideas to add to Chad’s list.

1. Target your audience by: gender, age, sexual preference, marital status, education, etc.
2. Use Keywords: tv shows, movies, books, authors, hobbies, games, applications, employers, schools, careers, etc.
3. Make Your Headline stand out: Use this valuable real estate to grab the attention of your target audience. A good headline can make all the difference.
4. Call to action: “click here” or “Limited Time” or even “Special offer” can encourage them to follow through.
5. Target by Workplace – Here is another great post from CDF Networks which examines this in more detail.

Facebook takes some creative thinking to be successful. I am sure there are thousands more ideas we can come up with to pre-qualify our clicks and save heaps of money on Facebook ads.  But I thought this was a pretty good start!

Want to learn more? Read Facebook Advertising in 8 Easy Steps.