Top 10 Cardinal Rules of Successful Facebook Advertising.

Facebook advertising can be one of your businesses most valuable assets or an EXPENSIVE money pit if not executed correctly. In order to be successful you need to have a disciplined approach that takes time to perfect. I have broken down what I believe are the top 10 Cardinal rules in Facebook advertising.

My team and I have developed these rules after spending over $10MM in advertising over the last couple years. We have generated over 300K+ leads in lending and real estate alone. Facebook is constantly changing, however if you can perfect the fundamentals listed below you will have a leg up on all of your competition.

Patience is a virtue. Don’t be an advertising day trader. Let campaigns run for an entire week without touching them. Facebook’s algorithm takes at least $250+ and a week (or two) of data to start learning. Make the investment, have patience and let it ride! We ran a campaign recently in Atlanta and week one leads were $13, week 2 $6.87, week 3 $5.21 and from week 4 on we averaged $3.21 a lead.
You have to spend money to make money. Online advertising takes money to be successful. I have seen many MLOs fail because they only want to spend $10 a day on ads. I am asked all the time…How much should I spend on ads? A good starting point is to spend what you make on your average loan every single month. Commit to spending this amount for an entire quarter at least.
Facebook is a high volume game. You will get a lot of prospects who will never qualify, but that is ok. You only need 20% to have good credit. At Arlo we do a soft credit pull on every lead so we don’t spend time chasing down bad deals. If you can get purchase leads for $3.50-$5 and only 15% qualify then you can still double, triple or even 10X your investment.
Maximize Facebook’s Algorithm. Facebook tracks over 400,000 attributes on every single user and updates daily. Your ad campaigns success is in the ability for Facebook to analyze your ad campaigns actions. I would venture to guess that 9 out of 10 advertisers set up Facebook tracking incorrectly. Facebook has 17 events you can use to track your website activity. The more structured data you feed Facebook, the more loans you will generate.
Video is King. Half a billion people are watching videos on Facebook every day. After switching to dynamic video ads we have seen our cost per lead be cut in half. Keep your videos 15 seconds long and use fast moving transitions and gradients to grab attention.
Provide an On-Demand Experience – Modern buyers expect an on-demand experience that most mortgage marketers fail to achieve. Your leads do not want to fill out a static long form only to be taken to a generic thank you page that states someone will call them. We have increased our conversions by 11X by providing refi leads with an on demand report and home valuation.
Test Ads Across Every Channel. Facebook’s advertising platform allows you to also launch campaigns on Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp and Facebook’s 3rd party. Make sure when running initial campaigns to let Facebook optimize the channel then you can refine what channels are generating the most leads at the lowest cost.
Limit interest group targeting. Facebook’s algorithm is the smartest tech in history…so let it do its job. I find many beginner advertisers (even “gurus”) try to add on way to many interest filters when setting up targeting.
Do not spread your ad sets too thin. Use Facebook’s DMA (Designated Marketing Areas) to target a larger population and let Facebook find the right people. Only expand to other areas when you surpass $100 a day in spending.
Do not pause, start and stop campaigns. Facebook’s algorithm needs to learn and is very finicky when you start and stop campaigns in the process. One trick is to increase budget by 10-20% on the weekends then throttle down on Monday.

Facebook advertising used to be complicated…but not anymore w/ Arlo you can launch proven ad campaigns that follow the ten rules above (plus about 30 more) in less than 60 seconds with ZERO technical skills.