If you are going to use Facebook ads to advertise an opt-in then you need to tell Facebook that you want to optimise your ad to increase conversions on your website. Facebook will then optimise your ad to show it to people in the audience you have selected who are most likely to sign up, not just click on the link to your website. (There is another option to collect leads for your business – you use that option if you are using a Facebook form rather than a landing page).
But for the website conversion option to work, Facebook needs to know when some sign ups. The way you do this is by setting up a thank you page.
What is a thank you page?
A thank you page is a page people only see when they have entered their email and hit the button to sign up to receive your opt-in.
It doesn’t have to be fancy – though I have seen some super creative and funny thank you pages. Below is what mine looks like. It tells people to keep an eye out for my email to confirm their subscription.
How to set one up
Setting up a thank you page is a two stage process.
1 Set up a page on your website
The first thing to do is to create a new page on your website. While you will publish the page, you won’t add it to any menus so people shouldn’t accidentally stumble upon it. As you can see above I like to tell people to keep an eye out for my sign up email and what it will look like so they don’t mistake it for spam. You could also let people know if you have a Facebook group they could join or some other action you want someone to take. Make your thank you page do some work for you.
2 Tell your email provider
Once you have the page set up you need to tell your email system that once people have entered their email that they should be sent to this page rather than to the system generated page.
If you are using Mailchimp you would do that here:
Click on the relevant list (the list you want people who sign up to your opt-in to join) and then select sign up forms and general forms:
Then select the Signup “thank you” page form and change it to your new thank you page url and you are good to go.
If you are using ConvertKit click on the form which relates to your opt-in. Go to settings and click on the main settings. Click the radio button to change it to redirect to another page and type in the url of your new thank you page and hit save.
Now when people sign up instead of going to either Mailchimp’s or ConvertKit’s standard thank you page people will go to your thank you page on your website.
One catch could be if you are using a plugin to add the sign up form to your website. Most do allow for a redirection but at the time of writing it wasn’t standard in the bloom plugin. I am a fan of Thrive Leads for adding sign up forms to my WordPress site.
To get things to work with telling Facebook about conversions you will also need the Facebook pixel on your website. Then when you set up your Facebook ad you will tell Facebook that a conversion occurs when someone gets to your thank you page. The pixel will then work its magic and tell Facebook that someone got the Thank you page.
You can also use these thank you pages in google analytics to find out where all your conversions are coming from so you know where to invest your energies.
Facebook ads can do wonderful things but you do need to have the frameworks in place around them to get the most out of them.
