Are you wondering if your Facebook ads are getting face-time? Are you concerned they are not adding any value to your marketing strategy? If so, you’re not alone.
Like all digital marketing platforms, Facebook is always implementing new services and switching up best practices, as well as changing their algorithms. These changes can seem overwhelming to any business, large or small, national or local, that is trying to use it as a marketing channel.
With so much information to process, how do you even start? What’s more, when you start, how do you know if it’s working?
Let’s start at the beginning.
1. Why Run Facebook Ads?
More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook to connect with what is important to them. In fact, there are over 900 million visits to Facebook per day. The Facebook Ad platform allows a business to present their ads to selected audiences that they can define (think demographic data like age, gender, hobbies, education). The site allows for very granular, very specific ad targeting to people who truly are your ‘perfect customer.’ Want to present your offer to home owners who live near a specific place of business who have an interest in DIY home repairs? Facebook is the place to make that happen.
Facebook is also a relatively low-cost ad platform making it a good place to start if you are looking to dive into the paid advertising space.
2. What types of businesses can benefit from Facebook Ad campaigns?
Facebook is able to collect an extremely large amount of personal data from its users. What does this mean? A business can offer very specific messaging and offers to the customers they want to reach.
For example:
- Have an email list? Mailchimp makes it easy to import your email list into Facebook. This list can be divided into custom audiences and targeted with the most relevant ads accordingly.
- Create a lookalike audience (a custom list of Facebook users who are similar to your existing ‘fans’ i.e. customers). Serve them an offer or ad you know has resonated with your customers in the past.
- Leverage Facebook for retargeting website users who may not have completed a transaction while on your website the first time.
3. What are some campaign setup best practices?
First, there is some homework to do.
Get the details on your audience. If you install the Facebook pixel, you have a lot of opportunity to view data about conversion-specific pages of your website. On-site user behavior is key if your audience isn’t converting. Also, dissect Google Analytics to learn more about your visitors’ geographic information (cities, states, countries). Upload your client emails to Facebook (if they have given you the go-ahead to do so). Isolate these audiences, get granular, and shoot for micro, as mentioned before. It should be noted that Facebook Ad segmentation best practices vary between B2C and B2B.
Have a clear understanding of your objective. Why are you running this campaign? To drive traffic, increase brand awareness, or drive sales? If there are several objectives, such as one pertaining to those who have never been to your website (i.e. get them interested in your brand) and one pertaining to those who have been there before (and you want them to convert), make sure your campaign is set up to reach both, which would require separate ad sets, etc.
Keep content fresh. For each campaign, make sure content and imagery are different and suit their intended audience. Keep an eye on Facebook reports and adjust ads as needed based on engagement factors.
4. How do you measure success?
Facebook offers many measurement basics to give insight into the success of your campaigns. If you have defined clear objectives for your Facebook ad campaigns and put in place the right means to track what is important to you (UTM parameters, etc), identifying whether the campaign is successful should be straight forward. The Facebook Ad platform as well as Google Analytics should give you the information to determine whether your ads are generating the needed return (visibility, purchases, sign-ups, etc.).
So, what happens if you don’t see the results you were looking for? This is when you start fixing the problems. Facebook Ads reporting platform gives you flexibility to view data and make informed changes.
Places to start adjusting campaigns:
- Shift budgets based on audience response and test different messaging to improve performance
- Create new audiences based on results, get more granular to ensure just the right message is delivered to your targets
- Update the content images, types, and links for each new audience you identify.
Though there is much to learn (and to keep up on), Facebook Advertising is certainly worth the investment if this is where your audience is hanging out.
