3 Golden Rules of Facebook Advertising

Facebook advertising can be highly effective and a good choice for marketing budgets, big and small, but there are things to remember in order to give your campaign the best chances of success. Here we look at the 3 most important ones… 

Monitor 

As with a website, your Facebook communications can be amended, updated and optimised. Once your Facebook advert is live – be it video, canvas, a slideshow – the Facebook system allows you to see what’s going on. This means you have the opportunity to assess what’s working best. If you have set up one advert for one ad group and the ad isn’t getting the results you want, create another. Try different wording, different visuals and maybe a different call to action. With more than one ad live, you can glean greater insights from your activity.

Facebook now gives you the ability to carry out A/B testing directly on your adverts. This makes rolling out and comparing a few adverts a fairer process as - once the Facebook bots deemed one ad to be more successful than another - traditionally Facebook would increase the frequency with which this ad is shown over the other(s), to automatically develop a more effective campaign for you.

With A/B testing, Facebook understands that you intend to directly compare them and so won’t prioritise one over the other, even if one is performing better.

Back to analytics… They can seem overwhelming but to avoid getting daunted or lost, it is important to know what it is that you see as success for your campaign. Then, if you want people to click on the advert and be taken to your website, you need to look for the number of link clicks, and importantly, the link click-through rate (CTR).

If you want to generate awareness then you want to see:

• the reach
• the number of video views
• the length of time people viewed your video for
• all clicks (taking people to your Facebook page or website).

When you know this, you can also dig deeper and evaluate the demographics of the people interacting with your advert, giving you the chance to evaluate the precision and effectiveness of your targeting.

Monitoring your advertising on any platform is crucial. You control the outcome of this campaign and rather than seeing your ad in a paper (not to say that print newspaper advertising isn’t correct for the right campaign) and thinking that you wish you’d said something else, with this form of advertising you can continually track and optimise your advertising activity and give your organisation the best chance of success.

 React

If someone has a problem, address it. If someone loves something, talk to them, thank them. When your advert is live, people see the advert and the comments and reactions that accompany it. If someone has had a bad experience with your product or service and they say so on your advert, you have options - but please don’t do nothing. 

If the comment is offensive then you can hide it, block it, report it. If, however, the comment is not left by a mad fool and is someone who has had an experience of your product and it was a negative one, here is your chance to ask them about it and make it right. Not all negative comments can be resolved with a conversation, but it is worth a try. You have the opportunity to turn this into a positive referral. 

 Learn

We’d be lucky if we got everything right the first time, but we wouldn’t learn quite as fast. It is from my mistakes that I’ve learned lessons I won’t forget. This has helped to shape my advertising strategy; implement more effective tactics from the beginning, distribute budget for timeliness and amplification…

I’m still learning, and it’s one of the things I love about my job - but this isn’t about me, this is about you getting the results you want from your campaign. If you have the time to try, I highly recommend it – it’s rarely dull.

If you barely have time to sip your coffee, the team at Kenyons can help; give us a call and we’ll listen and learn about what you need. Then we will react with the support that you want.