Watch the video above to see the video version of this article.

Today in this article I am going to show you Part 3 of my 4 part series where I show you my first Facebook ads campaign for list building. What I did right…. and what I did wrong.

To review: My goal is simple – get an email subscriber for a $1 or less for buildingsocialproof.com. I mean that’s a pretty simple goal. In Part 1 I showed you how I selected my audiences; they were smart passive income with Pat Flynn and Social Media Examiner. In Part 2 I showed you how I started to optimize my audience and got my conversion cost down to $10.35 per subscriber (which between me and you completely sucks) but it’s better than not getting any subscribers which happened in Week 1, so I am getting closer.

In this article I will show you how I started to get my subscriber costs much lower. So let’s get started. First I looked at the high cost per click from weeks 1 and 2 and you can see that here:

The average cost per click was just way too high at $1.97. At $1.97 per click there is no way I can get someone to sign up on my email list for a $1. It just wasn’t going to work. I looked at changing the campaign over to “optimize for website conversions” instead of “cost per click”. This is what it looks like when you are setting up your campaign in the Power-Editor:

You can pick whether you want Facebook to optimize for clicks to website, or if you want them to optimize for website conversions. Just a side note: I had to redo my entire campaign for website conversions because it’s just a completely different campaign type. Keep that in mind when you are getting started with Facebook Ads. You want to think long and hard about the kind of campaign you want to start with.

But this did become a huge win. Facebook will optimize your campaign in ways you cannot do yourself to find people more likely to covert for you. So the first tip is to use “optimize for conversions”. Next I have a friend with lots of Facebook ads experience look at my ads. He said they all sucked and suggested I change them. Here are the ads and some changes I made:

So on the left I used to have two examples of the old ads I was running with attractive women in the pictures. On the right are two ads that my friend suggested that I create. He said to take the women out of there and put different images in there. He also said to just tighten up the wordings. I just shrunk it down and went like that as a test.

Since I was moving away from having women in the ads I included females back into the campaign. What I mean by that is I included females back into my audience selections for Smart passive income and Social Media Examiner. So here are the conversion differences of the new and old ads:

So after Week 3 I put these new ads in. You can see that the old ads did convert at a much more expensive cost than the new ads. So the new ads were cheaper. I am not sure if it is the ads themselves or if it has to do with the frequency of how Facebook shows the ads to the audiences. If the audiences have been seeing the older ads, and the new ones popped up they may have converted better. I am not a 100% sure but it does look like the new ads are working better.

So for Week 3 I changed the Campaign type to optimize for conversions. I added women into the campaigns (audiences). I changed around the ads, so this lowered my cost per subscriber to $2.38 per sign up. I thought this was a huge win. I mean to go from $10 per subscriber down to $2 is a big deal. I am starting to think that Facebook might just work for me. I cut my cost per lead from $10 each to $2 each with a few simple changes. I feel like I can get it below $1 per email subscriber now. Here are some other takeaways to help me do this and things I will be looking at going forward:

Social Media Examiner is a cheaper audience than Smart Passive Income.

International people tend to be cheaper to get on my email list than people from the USA.

Women tend to be cheaper for me to get on my email list than men.

Let’s see what other changes I can make to my campaign next week to get closer to my $1 per email sign up goal.