Facebook announced a feature – Facebook Appointments that allows leads and prospects to request appointments using the native Messenger platform – Facebook appointments 2 years ago, there are new things of it that works to optimize your Facebook lead gen in 2020. 

Currently, there are some limitations to the feature – such as the inability for the customer do just directly book in and confirm appointments, but one of the big drawcards (and a reason why this feature, once fleshed out a bit more, will be HUGE in the lead gen space) is the push notification reminders sent to customers from Facebook by using Facebook Appointments.

So let’s have a look at how to set Facebook Appointments all up:

STEP #1: Go to your Facebook Page

Click on the button bottom right on your cover photo and select ‘Edit”.

STEP #2: Click “Book With You” and then select “Book Now” – click “Next”

STEP #3: Select “Appointments on Facebook”

Note: you can actually choose to have your button redirect straight to your third party booking page (such as ScheduleOnce) by punching in the URL.  You can also choose to use integrated third-party tools (like MyTime) – the drawback here is that these won’t have the native push notification reminders due to the limit of Facebook Appointments.

STEP #4: Create a Service

You can add in the price of the service although payment won’t be able to be made at this stage via Facebook. Click “Finish” once you’ve added in the services.

IDEA:  Working with realtors?  Why not show all their active listings as separate services, that way when someone books in they can choose the listing they’d like to view.

How it Works

Once you’ve set up your Book Now button you can create a post to promote the new feature and invite your fans to book through Facebook Appointments in some time.  You can also run some ads to this post (just pull the post ID) – so, for example, if you wanted to retarget people in your funnel with the post you could.

Once someone clicks on Book Now it triggers a Messenger appointment request.  They advise you on their free time and once they send this off, you will receive a message or the request.  You then need to confirm the appointment (and you can add in phone numbers in the confirmation text box here).

Syncing Your Calendar

You can view all your Appointments by clicking on the top tab “Appointments”

If you go under your Page settings, you will also see “Calendar” on the left had column.  You can sync your Google calendar here so that when appointments are made they go straight into your calendar.

Want more?

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Ad fatigue usually takes on the same symptoms as normal FB ad inflation costs, but whilst the latter is uncontrollable and unpreventable in many ways, FB marketers have a few key tactics up their sleeves when it comes to ad fatigue.

WHAT’S AD FATIGUE

Ad fatigue is quite simply an audience becoming blasé or “immune” to your creative and funnel. Meaning the audience has seen the ads so many times that it starts to lose its efficiency.

In the marketing world – they call this “billboard blindness” – and on FB – where users have complete control over what they choose to pay attention to  –   the effect is even more prominent than what you might see in the traditional marketing realm.

WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS?

It can be very easy to mistake ad fatigue with actual normal FB ad inflation costs (as more and more advertisers hit the platform, prices naturally go up).

The typical signs of ad fatigue include:

1. High CPMs – FB loves fresh content (makes sense as it’s main aim is to protect the user experience) and may try and stall you when your “stale” content starts to illicit negative feedback from your audience or result rates start to drop. One of the ways it does this is by increasing the CPM.

2. Stalled or lowered results – Where your campaign was crushing it for it’s first few months, results have seemingly started to come to a crawl and you’re still spending all your budget, but getting nowhere near the results you once were.

3. High negative feedback – Showing the same ad to the same person repetitively (that is NOT a warm audience) will likely result in people hiding or blocking your content.  Facebook is extremely sensitive to this type of feedback, and usually – if your ads are not balanced out with positive feedback, this will ultimately affect your ad account (you might have problems getting ads approved etc).  if you once had low to medium negative feedback, but suddenly have high negative feedback – it’s a telltale sign of ad fatigue.

4. High frequency – You – generally speaking – want to keep frequency at the top of funnel down to around 1-2.  In the bottom or end of your funnel – high frequencies are ok (and in fact, often work best).

How Can You Fix It?

So, there are a number of tactics that you have in your sleeve as a FB marketer. I’ve listed these out in order of “easiest” to implement, to slightly more “pain in the ass”… if you can get away with the former, all the better – but bear in mind you might need to go all in!

1. Exclusions – make sure you have ROBUST exclusions at the ad set level for your top of funnel campaigns.  Typically, you’ll want to exclude a custom audience of anyone that engaged with ads or posts in the last 365, and also exclude all those that already took the action required (such as made a purchase, or booked a call etc).  This will ensure FB can ONLY show you top of funnel ads to fresh eyeballs.

2. Rest your audiences/creative – Setting ad sets up for lifetime budgets and allowing ad sets targeting different audiences to “tag team” each other (ie: one is live, whilst the other is “resting”) is an advanced strategy (shared by Tom Hiscocks) to preventing abuse of audiences.

You can also try “dayparting” – running your ads at various times of the day.  So you’d have one ad set with one creative running from Monday-Wednesday (for example) and another ad set with a different creative running from Thursday-Sunday.

3. Two week refresh – Facebook recommends refreshing creative every two weeks!  I know, I know.  The last thing you want to hear as a busy FB marketer trying to juggle everything else on your plate.  But if your client is dealing with small localised audiences (ex: 40,000 people), frequent creative refreshes will ensure that audiences aren’t exposed to the same thing over and over again.

4. Different funnel – A last resort, when you have tried out the above two options without any luck – and ESPECIALLY if you are dealing with a small top of funnel (cold) audience), it may be time to test out a totally different funnel.  For example, if you were giving a free trial before, come in from a different angle – such as gamification.

Short of all of the above working, and depending on the timeframe from when you were first getting great results to it starting to dwindle, you may need to consider that the normal FB inflation effect is what is causing lowered and more expensive results.  A year or two ago – we used to be able to easily acquire webinar leads for clients for as little as $5.  These days, the average cost of a webinar registration is about $10-$15!  Facebook ads will continue to rise in prices and little can be done here except adopting a constant creative testing loop.

Think you may have ad fatigue? Tell me in the comments below…

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The word oCPM is getting thrown around a lot these days, but few understand the actual meaning – or rather – the implications of what this stands for and how to leverage it in campaigns.

For those of you who haven’t come across the terms before:

oCPM: optimised cost per thousand miles/impressions

CPM: cost per thousand impressions

oCPM vs CPM – THE SIMPLE EXPLANATION

Facebook can either choose to optimise ads for impressions (CPM) or optimise for a specific action.

Here’s how it works in practice: Facebook KNOWS that certain people in your audience will be more likely to perform on action over another.  This includes retargeting/warm audiences.

It knows this because it’s reading your emails, it’s following your online searches and behaviours, it’s seeing all your content and interactions through Facebook, it’s even listening to your actual conversation via Messenger! 

It has a lot of data on you.

It knows if you are in the Consideration phase of a marketing funnel, or the Acquisition phase – it knows the difference between you wanting to book a trip overseas and just looking for trips overseas or if you’re just an avid travel content junkie.

The easiest way to think of this is to compare it to Google Adwords. Google allows you to run display ads (blanket marketing) or to target people based on search (people in the consideration phase of the funnel)* (big props to Tom Hiscocks for this analogy!)

…Think of it like this 

Facebook is pretty much the same – it can feed your ad out to replicate a blanket display marketing approach OR show your ad to those most likely to perform action (search).  The latter is part of the algorithm called Expected Action.

The main difference here is that – unlike Google where you need to run one or the other (Search or Display), Facebook will switch between the two automatically and can also be controlled manually by you.

CPM is therefore blanket marketing – Facebook will try and get the best CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

oCPM is leveraging Facebook’s data brain to optimise your campaigns for an action you want.  The CPM will typically be more expensive here, however, results for that specific action will typically be more effective.

How do I Know If I’m Using oCPM?  

With the exception of Brand Awareness and Reach campaigns – every campaign objective has the ability to use oCPM.

The above illustrated the campaign objectives that allow for optimised cost per mile (oCPM).

When you are using one of these objectives – at your ad set level, you can select between CPM and oCPM by selecting the conversion event or link clicks.

oCPM = Link Clicks or Conversion ad set delivery optimisation 

CPM = impression or reach ad set delivery optimisation 

oCPM vs CPM – WHICH ONE SHOULD I CHOOSE? 

Facebook recommends that you use oCPM where possible.  While your CPM will typically be more expensive here, your results will be improved.

However, below is a general graph/guideline on the strategic application of oCPM vs CPM.

Using CPM is typically done in situations where: 

• Your ads are stalling (i.e: you are losing in the auction process)
• You need mass awareness/reach – popular with brands
• You’re CPM is costing you way too much (again: you’re losing in auction process – read more on why here)

In the above, you’ll notice that Link Clicks is also counted as oCPM – this is because it’s still optimising for a specific action (Link Clicks).

oCPM vs CPM – FINAL NOTE  

oCPM simply means bidding for an OPTIMISED ACTION on Facebook.  It’s using Facebook data to improve our results.  CPM simply means bidding for impressions.

Got any questions of oCPM vs CPM?  Pop ’em below of joining me in the Facebook ad Hacks group.