Facebook ads are now one of the most popular advertising choices available. Facebook’s advertising platform, in fact, is currently second only to Google AdWords in scale. Because Facebook has such a large user base, it’s possible to target any market with your ads. However, Facebook ads come with many challenges. Connectio is a comprehensive tool (suite of tools, actually) that covers every aspect of Facebook advertising. In this review, we’ll be taking a close look at Connectio’s features to help you decide if it’s the Facebook ad solution you’ve been seeking. Connectio discounts and special promotions, whenever available, will be mentioned as well.
68% of adults in the United States use Facebook. Globally, there are around 2.5 billion users. Facebook ads give businesses a way to precisely target this huge audience. Being able to target by age, gender, location, interests, income, and other criteria makes Facebook advertising a valuable tool for getting traffic. As you may have discovered for yourself, though, there are a few problems.
Facebook ads are getting more expensive all the time. Like Google, the bigger the site grows, the more competition there is and the higher you have to bid for ads.
Facebook offers many choices for ads, with new options being frequently introduced (for example, you can now advertise with Stories). It’s great to have so many choices, but it can get you to spend lots of money on unsuccessful campaigns before identifying the type of ad that works best for you.
Testing is essential but not always easy. Unless you’re experienced with Facebook ads and analytics in general, you may find it confusing and time-consuming to track your results.
Staying compliant with Facebook’s rules. It’s all too easy to violate Facebook’s rules and have your ads removed unintentionally.
When you’re busy running a business, it can be overwhelming to give yourself a crash course in Facebook advertising. Connectio (made by the team that also created UpViral – a viral referral marketing platform) is designed to simplify the process. The service consists of 5 distinct but related tools:
Depending on your business model, you may not need all of these services. However, if you’re advertising on Facebook, at least a couple of them will be of interest. Let’s look at each of these tools.
ConnectAudience
ConnectAudience provides you with a creative approach to marketing, one that combines email marketing and retargeted advertising. Retargeting is a way to engage with people who have already demonstrated an interest in your message. For example, if you visit a website and then start seeing ads from the same company, you’ve been retargeted.
ConnectAudience uses retargeted Facebook ads that are tied to your email campaigns. Suppose, for example; you send an email with a link to a particular product. A subscriber who clicks on your link but doesn’t buy the item can be retargeted with a Facebook ad for this product. ConnectAudience lets you set up sophisticated campaigns that customize offers based on subscribers’ actions.
Some powerful statistics are supporting the retargeting approach. Click-throughs on retargeted ads are 10x higher than for typical display ads. You are 70% more likely to convert a person who’s seen a retargeted ad. ConnectAudience takes advantage of the simple fact that most people need to be exposed to a message multiple times before taking action.
Pricing for ConnectAudience
You can pay for ConnectAudience either monthly or annually. You can pay $47/month or $297/year. The annual pricing is listed as a special sale, so it may not be available forever. Both plans include:
ConnectAutomate is an ad optimization tool that directly addresses the main challenge of Facebook advertising: running profitable campaigns that provide a solid ROI. When Facebook ads first came out over 10 years ago, they were a refreshing alternative to Google Ads. They provided highly targeted ads at a reasonable cost. Those days, however, are long gone. Facebook ads have become fiercely competitive and expensive.
It’s easy to sink hundreds or even thousands of dollars into losing campaigns. To make matters worse, Facebook changed its algorithm a couple of years ago to make it less favorable to businesses. In their attempt to improve user experience, they began to favor social over commercial content. Of course, this largely means that businesses with the biggest budgets and most experienced advertising teams had the advantage.
ConnectAutomate helps you level the playing field, giving smaller and less experienced advertisers a chance to make money with Facebook ads. It’s based on the reality that Facebook rewards content (both organic posts and ads) that users actually engage with. Optimizing your ads can be done manually, but it takes a great deal of time and painstaking analysis. ConnectAutomate lets you automate the process.
ConnectAutomate turns your best-performing posts into ads. You can use Facebook’s “boost post” feature anytime you want, but that tool on its own doesn’t optimize your ads. You can end up boosting unpopular as well as popular posts. ConnectAutomate identifies the posts that are getting the most engagement and lets you automatically boost them.
With ConnectAutomate, you don’t have to spend hours going over your analytics to decide which posts to boost. You simply set up your targeting criteria, and your ads will be optimized automatically. This is an alternative to hiring an agency to manage your Facebook ads.
Pricing for ConnectAutomate
You can choose to pay $47/month or $297/year. Both plans include these benefits:
Works with unlimited Facebook pages.
Filter post types such as text posts or videos.
Choose the time frame for boosting posts to make sure your ads stay relevant.
Unlimited boost post rules. Set up “If/Then” rules to inform Facebook Connect Audience which ads to promote.
Auto conversion optimization.
Auto targeting.
The yearly plan includes two extras: Content Formula Bonus and the Outsourcing Formula Bonus.
ConnectExplore focuses on an area that many marketing tools overlook: identifying less obvious (and less competitive) Facebook interests. This is a similar concept to using longtail keywords in your SEO strategy. Rather than targeting the same interests as all your competitors, you find equally relevant but less well-known interests that fascinate your customers.
Most people who advertise and even marketing tools have limited access to Facebook’s data on interests. Anyone can study Facebook’s public API data, but this is fairly limited. Meanwhile, many targeting tools on the market give you information about interests that you can’t even target on Facebook.
Connectio is one of the few companies that actually have access to Facebook’s own Ads API. When you use ConnectExplore, you can access proprietary data that tells you exactly what users are interested in. This provides you with an extremely powerful advantage when it comes to ad targeting.
Find untapped interests that your competition doesn’t know about.
Quickly add interests to your ad manager with a single click.
Find less competitive markets by targeting foreign languages.
Lower your ad cost by targeting less saturated markets.
Pricing for ConnectExplore
While the previous Connectio products we’ve looked at are billed monthly or annually, you can gain lifetime access to ConnectExplore for a one-time payment of $197. This includes a 30-day free trial subscription to ConnectSuite, which includes ConnectAudience (see above), ConnectLeads, and ConnectRetarget (which we’ll look at below). Keep in mind that the one-time payment only covers a lifetime subscription to ConnectExplore. If you want to keep the other services, you’ll be billed $97/month after 30 days. You can choose to skip ConnectSuite and only get ConnectExplore.
Many businesses use Facebook to generate leads. Lead generation is crucial to business models such as SaaS or just about every B2B service. It’s equally valuable in industries such as real estate, insurance, finance, and many others. Facebook ads can be a powerful tool to attract leads. However, as with all types of Facebook advertising, competition is stiff, and it’s often difficult to get a good ROI. ConnectLeads provides a way to automate your lead generating strategy on Facebook and improve your targeting and conversions.
Sign up more mobile users. Facebook users who respond to your ads can click to subscribe without even entering their email address. This alone can improve your signups as many people, especially mobile users, are tired of filling out forms.
Feeds your leads directly from Facebook to your autoresponder and sales funnel. You don’t have to download files and upload them to your autoresponder.
Cloud-based software works with any operating system and device that’s connected to the internet.
Automatically distribute coupon codes to get even more signups. You can create coupons for leading platforms such as Amazon, Shopify, and Teespring.
Facebook Lead Ads (one of Facebook’s own services) is already useful for signing up new leads. ConnectLeads makes the process much faster and more convenient, both for businesses and people signing up. You save all the time you’d otherwise spend downloading subscriber lists into Excel and transferring them to your autoresponder. This type of manual work can lead to errors, especially when managing multiple campaigns and sales funnels. With automation, your list building becomes almost effortless.
Pricing for ConnectLeads
As noted above, if you sign up for ConnectExplore, you can use ConnectLeads as part of your 30-day free trial to ConnectSuite. If you’re only interested in ConnectLeads, you can get a 7-day free trial. After that, the service is billed at $47/month or $197/year.
Would you like to improve your conversions by 3-4 times? Retargeting can provide you with this boost. As it gets more challenging to run profitable Facebook ad campaigns, retargeting is the one practice (when done correctly) that can help you increase your conversions. However, simply retargeting as it’s often practiced can yield disappointing results.
All retargeting methods are not the same. If you treat all of your website visitors as hot prospects, you can waste a great deal of money marketing to the wrong audience. ConnectRetarget lets you finetune your retargeting. For example, there’s a big difference between a visitor who spends two seconds on your site and one who’s there for 5 minutes. The benefits of effective retargeting include:
Build brand awareness. In a distracted world, people need to see a message several times before it registers.
Reach people most likely to become customers.
Build your email list and generate qualified leads.
Improve conversions and profits.
Pricing for ConnectRetarget
You can subscribe to ConnectRetarget for $47/month or $297/year. Both plans include:
Unlimited behavioral retargeting audiences.
Pre-made audience templates.
Premium support.
30-day refund guarantee.
Bonus Package: Advanced Retargeting Strategies video course, Ultimate Facebook Ads Guide, Retargeting Ad Swipe File, and the Definitive Guide on Facebook Retargeting.
You can also try out ConnectRetarget as part of the above-mentioned 30-day ConnectSuite trial that comes with ConnectExplore.
Connectio has a wider range of tools and plans compared to most services. You really need to consider which of the tools, or which combination, best suits your purposes. Here’s a summary of what each of them is best for.
ConnectAudience -Helps make your email list more profitable by connecting it to retargeted ads.
ConnectAutomate -Automates the process of turning your most popular posts into ads.
ConnectExplore -Identifies lesser-known Facebook interests so you can target a more precise niche and save money on ads.
ConnectLeads -Lets users sign up to your list from Facebook by clicking. This is especially good for signing up mobile users.
ConnectRetarget -Provides advanced retargeting to reach people who have demonstrated interest by visiting your website.
ConnectSuite -A bundle that combines ConnectExplore, ConnectAudience, ConnectLeads, and ConnectRetarget for $97/month (this is actually all of Connectio’s services except ConnectAutomate.
If you’re looking to gain access to as many features as possible at the lowest price, ConnectSuite is the best deal. However, you may only want to work with one of the tools at this time.
Connectio is a powerful software suite to help you get more out of Facebook. For anyone who is frustrated with their experience with Facebook ads, or who has perhaps noticed declining results as the cost of advertising rises, one or more of Connectio’s tools can make a big difference.
