How to Optimize Facebook Custom Tabs for More Conversions

By Jim Belosic
Published July 1, 2015

Do you want to boost conversions from your Facebook app?

Have you thought about promoting it with Facebook ads?

Supporting your Facebook custom tab with complementary Facebook ads will drive more views and deliver more conversions.

In this article you'll discover how to combine Facebook custom tabs with Facebook ads to boost conversions.

Discover how to optimize Facebook custom tabs for more conversions.

You may have heard this saying before: Benefits sell, features don't. Focusing on the benefits for your target audience can make a big impact on conversions from your ads.

Whether your Facebook custom tab app is a promotion, contest or newsletter sign-up form, your goal should be to get the people who come to the page to take the action you want them to. How do you do this? You focus your messaging on how filling out the form will benefit your customer.

To figure out your most important benefits to promote, create a features and benefits chart and spend some time brainstorming. Start by filling in the features column of your chart. Next, think critically about each feature you've listed and the value that it provides to the audience you're targeting with your ads.

List your features and benefits (how each feature provides value to your target) in columns. Image: Shutterstock.

Once you've filled in both sides of your features and benefits chart, pick the top two to three benefits. Promote these two or three benefits with your ads and emphasize them in your app copy.

The bottom line is, to make a greater impact with your app's copy and drive up conversion rates, focus your copy on the solution that your product or service provides. In other words, focus on the incentive your brand is offering. If you keep your copy about your visitors' wants and needs, you'll see more success with your ads.

After you've identified the key benefits you want to promote, the next step is to determine the most important goal of your Facebook ads and design a custom tab app to reflect it. Here are some goals you might have:

Capture the email addresses of users who are interested in your product or service.Drive downloads of a lead-generating resource.Get people to take advantage of a special offer by downloading a coupon.Get sign-ups for an online marketing event you're hosting, like a webinar.Drive engagement (for example, voting and/or an image submission on a photo contest) on a marketing campaign you've built. This ad clearly supports the goal of driving downloads for a lead-generating resource.

Your Facebook ads should always direct people to an app that has a clear focus, rather than to your website. Why? Your website is full of distractions. The fewer distractions your ads' destination has, the more likely you'll accomplish your Facebook advertising goals.

To optimize conversions from your ads, design your Facebook custom tab app without any of these design elements: a navigation bar; social icons; unnecessary links, tabs and buttons; and drop-down menus.

The ad above leads to an uncluttered, custom tab app.

Remove any information or clickable link or button that doesn't support the goal of your landing page.

Split testing different versions of a Facebook custom tab app is tough for two reasons. First, if you don't have a large Facebook advertising budget, you may not get enough traffic to your app to make any valid assumptions.

Second, there are too many variables. You could end up going in circles testing a million little things, everything from the color of your call-to-action button to the copy of your secondary headline.

Instead of split testing your app, it's better to split test the three main components of your Facebook ads: the headline, body copy and image.

It's easier to split test ad components than it is to test custom tab app components.

Discover your best-performing Facebook ad, and then update your landing page's design to incorporate that ad's headline, copy and image.

After a few days of running your Facebook ads, you'll be able to determine which ad is performing best. Based on what you discover, update your app's headline and primary image to match your highest-performing ad. Doing this allows you to capitalize on your highest-converting Facebook ad messaging without getting caught up in time-consuming testing.

Of Facebook's 1.44 billion monthly active users, 40% use it on mobile devices only.

This statistic means one important thing: You should design all of your Facebook custom tab apps with mobile users in mind.

Consider Facebook's increasing number of mobile users when you design your Facebook ads' landing page.

Nothing will kill your conversion rate faster than mobile users clicking on a Facebook ad in their news feed only to discover the app or landing page it links to is blank, doesn't function well or is tough to navigate on a small screen. Including a form that's difficult to fill out via a mobile device is even worse.

Since Facebook doesn't support custom apps on mobile, consider using a third-party app building tool that will allow you to design apps (from templates or from scratch) that are automatically optimized for all mobile devices. No fancy coding skills are required.

You can also build mobile-friendly apps using HTML and CSS to build your own responsive web pages.

Whether you create your Facebook custom tab app with a tool or on your own, be sure to test it on your mobile device before you start running your ads. This is the best way to catch any errors or discover you need to tweak your app's design before you put money behind driving traffic to it.

Conclusion

If you want to get more bang for your Facebook advertising buck, your Facebook ads and corresponding apps need to work together to drive conversions.

What do you think? How do you design your apps/landing pages to optimize your advertising results? Do you have any questions about building apps for your Facebook ads? Feel free to leave your thoughts and questions for me in the comments section below.

Tips for optimizing Facebook custom tab apps for conversions.

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&appId=167506593384213&version=v2.0″; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));About the Author, Jim Belosic

Jim Belosic is the CEO of ShortStack, a self-service software that allows businesses to create engaging campaigns for social, web and mobile. Other posts by Jim Belosic »

View the original article here

Original source: How to Optimize Facebook Custom Tabs for More Conversions.
http://www.jretechnology.com