Today I’m coming right out of the gate with a #protip:
When running list building ads, or ads to your blog posts or other “ungated” content, this is how the Placement section of your Power Editor should look:
That’s right: I want you to run the majority of your ads in the Mobile News Feed and the Desktop News Feed. Unless you’ve got proof that the other placements (Audience Network and Desktop Right Column) are good converters for you, forget them.
(They’re almost never good converters, which is why I don’t want you to waste your time on them.)
Facebook Will Choose Which One’s Better
Whether you want them to or not, Facebook will do its optimizing thing, figure out which one of those 2 placements in “better,” and then almost exclusively run your ads there. For most of my clients, the Mobile News Feed ends up outperforming the Desktop News Feed, so they get way more impressions on mobile.
That’s cool, Facebook. I’ve tried to ignore your optimization and run my ads on Desktop only, but those campaigns never do as well as when I let you optimize my ads for me. So you do what you need to do to get me the best possible results, OK?
“So should I ALWAYS run my Facebook ads on mobile?”
Not necessarily. There’s one situation in which I usually exclude the Mobile News Feed from my placement:
Whenever I’m trying to sell something.
Naturally I check my data first: because of the way Gumroad, my payment processor, and Google Analytics play so nice together, I can check out a very simple report in GA to see what kind of computer or device people are using when they purchase Absolute FB Ads, my self-study Facebook ad course:
The secondary dimension I’m looking at is Mobile (Including Tablet). The purchases that say “No” in that column were made on desktop computers.
As you can see, the majority of the sales I’ve made came from Desktop, so I tend to stick to the Desktop News Feed for my ads’ placement when I’m running ads that promote a paid product or service.
What to Do If You Don’t Have E-Commerce Set-Up in GA (and You Don’t Use Gumroad)
Setting up E-Commerce in your Google Analytics account isn’t nearly as easy as setting up goals. I tried to teach myself so I could teach you to do it, but it requires much more advanced coding knowledge than I’m willing to learn.
All is not lost, however. Hopefully you’ve got a goal set up for any products you sell; this will allow you to see if people were on a mobile device or desktop computer when they reached your “thanks for purchasing!” page.
(If you don’t have that goal set up yet, don’t waste another day without that important info. Here are some very easy-to-follow instructions.)
Now look at this report:
After searching for my “thank you” page under Behavior > Site Content > All Page, I added the secondary dimension Mobile (Including Tablet) to break down the visits to that page on desktop versus mobile.
Once again I can see that more than 75% of my conversions come from people who are using a desktop computer or laptop.
So should I run Facebook ads on mobile? Google Analytics tells me no, not when I’m trying to make sales!
And even though Facebook reports that over 30% of their users check Facebook exclusively on mobile devices, it looks like they still wait until they’ve got a bigger screen and a keyboard to make the majority of their purchases.
100% TRUTH! I see the same thing. I think it’s too much for people to scroll through a sales page and buy on mobile – especially when the purchase price isn’t in the “impulse” category.
I have seen sidebar ads work well for sales though. The benefit of the sidebar is you can use it for retargeting page visitors and not worry as much about frequency since it’s much less intrusive.
Thanks for the great insight!
PS – Just started listening to your podcast and am loving it! The last two episodes have been on point as my wife and I are starting to figure out how to scale our business with better systems and hiring help.
Hey Tony, always great to see you here in the comments! That’s really interesting about sidebar ads – I sense a guest blog post in the making… :) Any interest? My readers could definitely benefit from your experience! Let me know what you think –> clairepells.com/guestpost
Ya I don’t think people are quite ready to buy things like that on mobile yet. Especially larger ticket products, you need to think it through more and read through the copy, do research. People do that on their laptops not phones.
Its so funny to as I was literally running these same goal reports in GA this morning!
I second Tony on the podcast last EP was right on point for me, I think I am going to start out with 1 on 1 clients in a coaching style than a Done For You Service.
Hey Jay! I can’t emphasize enough just how surprised I was that the coaching offering sold so well. I think people would have preferred to hire me for Done For You services but the coaching was way more affordable than my Done for You prices. Let us know how it goes when you start seeing some traction!
Thank you for this breakdown, good to know!
Thanks for writing this! You confirmed a lot of what I know :) please don’t stop posting stuff like this!!!