Imagine this – You’re running Facebook advertisements with the objective of driving website traffic. A user comes across your ad, clicks the call-to-action button, and is directed to your website. The landing page is slow to load, the services and desired action are unclear, and the person has lost interest. You’ve lost one potential customer and now have an issue on your hands that could have been avoided by preparing your website for Facebook ad traffic. 

It’s common to believe that running web traffic ad campaigns is all about ad creative, ad copy, and targeting. What’s the key to really seeing results with web traffic ad campaigns? There are several optimizations to consider before those ads go live. That’s why we’ve put together the checklist every franchise needs to get started!

1. Clearly display the action you’d like the user to take on your website
2. Collect email addresses 
3. Disable pop-ups on landing pages
4. What can you do to increase your page load speed?
5. Is your website mobile-friendly?
6. Install a Facebook retargeting pixel
7. Set up a Google Analytics account

✓ Clearly display the action you’d like the user to take on your website

Once you’ve successfully driven an interested user to your website, the goal is now to do everything possible to convert them into a paying customer and not lose their attention. Make it very clear what your services are and what is being offered, while providing the best user experience possible. Most importantly, whether making a purchase, signing up, requesting a quote, or a free trial, make the steps to complete the desired action as frictionless as possible.

✓ Collect email addresses

There’s already traffic being driven to your website, you might as well take full advantage and optimize your website for collecting email addresses. The benefits? Aside from making that person feel more engaged with your brand, once you’ve acquired an impressive email list you can use that to create a lookalike audience and target future ads to an audience with similar attributes. The trick here is to offer something you believe is worth submitting contact information for (ie. free course, free quote, free trial, newsletter subscription, case study, etc.).

There are multiple placement options you can set up to collect email addresses on your website:

• Sidebar – This is one of the most common and convenient locations for an email opt-in because it can essentially go on each page and is in view of the user without distracting from the primary content of the page.

• Footer or header – Create a thin bar to place at either the top or bottom of the page. Clearly display a simple call to action and have it stand out to the user as much as possible.

• Blog posts – If website visitors enjoy what they’re reading, it’s likely that they’d submit an email address to be notified of a new blog post or for a newsletter subscription. This way, you grow your own engaged audience, while simultaneously contributing to an email list for a lookalike target audience for future ads.

✓ Disable pop-ups on landing pages

Pop-ups on your landing page are not only an unnecessary distraction but Facebook is not a fan of advertisers using them. If you choose to activate a pop-up on your landing pages, Facebook may even reject the ad. On other web pages, pop-ups can be an excellent strategy for converting customers or simply collecting emails. When it comes to web traffic ads, Facebook prefers a landing page with no active pop-ups. It’s all about the user experience. They clicked on your ad to view your webpage, not your pop-up!

✓ What can you do to increase your page load speed?

The loading speed of your franchise website page not only directly impacts traffic and conversion but also your site’s organic ranking on Google’s search engine results. If you want to dive into the details of your website’s page speed, use the PageSpeed Insights Tool to have clarity into what the status of your page currently looks like and what could be slowing the page down. 

To get you started, here are a few ways to help increase your page load speed:

• Compress your images – Oftentimes, there are images that are much larger than they need to be, in terms of the pixels. Take a look at the media on all pages of your website and compress images wherever possible to take off some of the heavy weight that’s slowing down the load speed. One tool that can make your life easier for this is a WordPress plugin called WP Smush Image.
  

• Host your website on a dedicated server – It doesn’t matter how streamlined your landing page is if you’re hosting provider is slow. Although shared servers are ofter cheaper, using a dedicated server can quickly boost your page load times. 

• Enable caching – Along with using a dedicated server, ensure you have caching enabled. Caching allows visitors to store some code from your webpage on their device. Caching allows repeat visitors to load your web pages much faster. 

• Clean up your media library – After some time, your media library fills up with images that are extra, old, or unused. This all plays a role in a poor page load speed. Identify and delete those unnecessary images, GIFs, or videos in your media library for a faster page speed.

✓ Is your website mobile-friendly?

Over 98% of Facebook users access the app on mobile, according to the Statista Research Department. That is an important piece of information to keep in mind when running ads on Facebook. As you’re creating your landing page, or your website in general, it can look one way on a laptop or desktop view, and a completely different way on a mobile view. Check and recheck that the pages on your website look and function well on desktop and mobile.

✓ Install a Facebook retargeting pixel

Install a Facebook pixel (also known as a Meta Pixel). Don’t miss out on the opportunity to target website visitors and start to understand the actions people take on your website. What this means is that you’d be installing a piece of code that tracks and collects data on user activity on your website for optimizing and personalizing ads, as well as retargeting. 

According to Meta for Business, here are some of the major benefits to installing a Facebook pixel:

• Ensure that your ads are shown to the right people.
• Drive more sales.
• Measure the results of your ads.

To learn how to set up and install a Facebook pixel visit Meta for Business.

✓ Set up a Google Analytics account

Google Analytics is a free tool that is highly recommended to track Facebook ads more effectively and attribute sales revenue to your campaigns. Why use Google Analytics to track your Facebook ad success? You’ll have a full view into not only what conversions were generated, but the complete path taking the website visitors to those conversions. 

How to Track Facebook Ads in Google Analytics:

Step 1: Create a trackable link – Generate a URL parameter for your ads. This can be done by using Google’s free URL builder.

Step 2: Create your Facebook ad – In Facebook Ads Manager, add your trackable link to the “Website URL” field or the “URL Parameters” field. 

Step 3: Track performance in Google Analytics – Keep up with a routine of looking up your ads’ performance in Google Analytics by campaign name and stay aware of how your ad is performing on your website.

Final Review

Once you’ve checked everything off the checklist, remember to go back and take one final look at your landing page before those Facebook web traffic ads go live! Always keep the customer journey in mind. What kind of experience do you want them to have on your website? What kind of impression will they have of your brand? 

Try checking things off the checklist, keep up with analytics and reporting, and watch the impact that preparing your website for Facebook ad traffic has on the campaign performance.