Facebook Ads
Dashmeet Talwar
Digital Marketing Enthusiast | Customer Care Advocate | Enhancing Customer Experiences Through Innovative Marketing
Facebook uses its advertising platform exclusively, allowing them to appear in Facebook feeds, Messenger, and even on non-Facebook apps and websites. They represent a variety of formats, such as video slideshows and single images, and can be targeted in ways that range from broad to very specific.
Creating an ad on Facebook is much different than posting an item on your personal page. The wording you use and the time of day your ad is placed will all have an impact on the amount of traffic they drive.
What are Facebook ads?
In Facebook ads, businesses place advertisements that are paid messages. This allows you to write in your own voice, and you can reach the people who matter most to you, as explained in the social network's beginner's guide.
Everyone is allowed to post on their Facebook pages for free-but you never know who will view them. This is why the word "paid" appears in the definition.
Paid ads let you target specific demographics and you can be as specific or as general as you'd like.
Advertising on Facebook comes in different formats and with a range of spend options, including:
Besides letting you select the actions you want to be billed for, you can even specify how Facebook will bill you. This does not mean they only charge you for results you want, but you can specify the method of billing, such as being charged based on the number of views or clicks your ad receives.?
Why are Facebook ads important?
Among all social media marketing platforms available, 96% of marketers believe that Facebook leads the pack in return on investment (ROI):
The fact that Facebook has such a broad audience might seem expensive, but it is not. Facebook allows you to specify a maximum spend and charges less to reach the same audience as you would on another platform.
Customization
Due to the amount of information that Facebook has about every user, you can customize Facebook ads for virtually any demographic factor you can imagine. Customising Facebook ads is one of the most appealing features of Facebook advertising.
Plus, customising the audiences that see a particular post can cut your customer acquisition cost.
What Is the Best Facebook Campaign Objective?
Facebook ads are all about matching campaign objectives to outcomes you want to achieve. If you choose a campaign objective that is not aligned with your campaign objectives, you're putting your campaign at a disadvantage from the start.
Facebook uses your selected objective to learn about your campaign goals and what action you want people to take after they've seen your ad. Your ads will be shown to the people in your target audience that are most likely to take the desired action, based on the information in the algorithm. As an example, if you choose the Traffic objective, Facebook will place more emphasis on showing your ads to those people in your target audience who click links most frequently.
Facebook gathers a great deal of information about Facebook users' behaviors, interests, and actions, and then uses this information to serve relevant ads to them. Your campaign objective tells Facebook what you want people to do.
Here's a list of the different types of campaign objectives you can use on Facebook and when to use them. Choosing the wrong objective can result in your ads being shown to the wrong people at the wrong time.
Awareness Objectives
The Brand Awareness campaign objective and the Reach campaign objective are intended to reach the most people in your target audience within the budget constraints you set.?
The awareness objective optimizes for impressions because it lets you show your ads to the maximum number of people within your targeted audience. This typically results in low clicks and engagement on ads produced using this objective.
Choosing one of these objectives is a bad idea if you want to make sales or drive website traffic, because you want your advertising budget to be spent on showing your ads to people who are most likely to make a purchase or visit your website.
Facebook shows your ads to those people who are most likely to remember your brand when they are based on the Brand Awareness objective.?
As part of Ads Manager, you will get access to "estimated ad recall lift" data, which shows you how many people Facebook believes will remember your ad two days after it is seen.
A brandlift study, however, would provide you with the most accurate ad recall data. Due to this, brand awareness campaigns are usually used by larger brands with big budgets that can accurately measure their results. Other campaign objectives can be more effective for small businesses seeking to increase awareness.
This objective is useful if you want your brand to be memorable and are interested in measuring the effects of advertising on recall.
Optimising your ads for impressions is also part of the Reach objective. Within your budget limits, Facebook will show your ads to the maximum number of people in your target audience. If you wish to get as many eyes on your advertisements as possible but not expect people to take immediate action after viewing them, you might choose this objective.
You can choose the Reach objective if a local event is being organized, and your goal is to make as many people aware of the event as possible. In contrast, if people were seeking to book tickets in advance, this would not be the most appropriate objective.
Consideration Objectives
Consideration campaigns are divided into six objectives, including traffic, engagement, video views, leads, messages, and app installs, each optimized for an action, such as link clicks or comments. Your Facebook ads will be shown to people within your target audience most likely to perform the action you've chosen.
Since these objectives are designed for low-intent actions, a substantial percentage of the people in your target audience are likely to take action when presented with these objectives. You risk getting low-quality leads with low-intent actions if your goal is to drive sales.
Choosing Traffic campaign objective as your primary campaign objective will allow you to optimize for clicks on links or impressions on landing pages. According to their previous behavior, Facebook will present your ads to those people within your target audience most likely to click your link.
In the ad set level, Landing Page Views will allow Facebook to show your ad to people who click your links and wait for your website to open so that they can view it before clicking on your link.
The destination URL can be any website you wish on the ad level of your campaign. The Facebook pixel should be installed on your website if you want to optimize for landing page views.
Facebook will display your ads to people in your target audience who are the most likely to engage with them. Choosing Engagement as the primary objective will ensure that your Facebook ads are shown to people who are most likely to engage with them.
There are three types of engagement that you can choose from when setting up an ad for this objective:
Your ads will then be shown to the audiences most likely to install an app if you choose the App Installs campaign objective for your app. Having an app and wanting to increase downloads is a great goal for your campaign. Clicking the ad will take them directly to their app store to download your app.
It is necessary to register your app with Facebook and implement the SDK in order to track event data in Ads Manager from your app for the best results with this objective.
There are two types of App Installs campaigns: automated and manual.
Facebook will automate the creation of app ads for you, enabling you to focus on other things. The first time you set up your campaign, you create an ad set with a single banner ad and add up to 50 images or videos, five text options, and five headlines using Dynamic Creative. Facebook then creates ads based on your audience's reactions.
When you choose Video Views as your objective, Facebook will prioritise your video ad to show it to people in your target audience who are most likely to watch the video.
During the campaign creation process, you have the option of choosing an audience that you think is most likely to watch your ads for at least 2 seconds or 15 seconds or more (ThruPlay).
Video Views have been proven to build trust and awareness among cold audiences. To take people further down your funnel, retargeting audiences can be created based on how long they watched your video.
Video Views campaigns work best when your video gets the audience's attention immediately and delivers the main message within the first few seconds to compel them to continue viewing. For those who are unable to hear or are watching without sound, you should add captions to your video if it includes audio.
Video creative can be used with virtually every Facebook advertising objective, so choosing the Video Views objective only makes sense if you are primarily interested in getting people to view your video without causing them to take any further action (such as purchase).
Adding a contact form to your Facebook ad can be done using the Lead Generation objective. If you need to collect more information from the prospect, you can customise the form to ask other qualifying questions.
Clicking on an ad prompts the user to provide details including their name, email address, and other contact information. Since the user can choose to add or customise data to the form quickly using Facebook, there is no need to enter it multiple times.
Through a Zapier integration or using a Facebook partner, you are able to download the information collected from the form straight to your CRM.
When your objective is to take action on Facebook Messenger or Instagram Direct, using the Messages campaign objectives can be very effective. Facebook shows your ads to those most likely to respond to a message based on their history.
It is important to have someone who monitors your inbox and responds to incoming messages promptly - many users expect to have a response within 10 minutes.
In line with these guidelines, it's important to let the user know that you're starting a conversation with them and explain why. This is because users who aren't familiar with this type of advertisement may be shocked when the ad opens their Messenger application, which can occasionally seem intrusive.
In the time it took to write this article, new privacy regulations have rendered some messaging-related ads, targeting, and audiences unavailable in Europe and Japan. Some messaging campaigns have also been paused.
A Facebook conversion objective, Catalogue Sales, or Store Traffic, encourages people interested in your business to buy or use your product or service. You need to set these up first before you can use them. These objectives are optimised for higher-intent actions such as purchases.
The costs of impressions and link clicks for conversion objectives are often higher than those of consideration objectives, but it's important to add up all the costs.When you use this approach, your ads may end up costing less per conversion overall, since they are shown to the portions of your audience most likely to take action.
You may wish to use "Conversions" for your business if you want to motivate people to take action. Activities and classes can be signed up for, items can be added to a shopping cart, items can be purchased online, an app can be downloaded, etc. The success of this campaign depends on being able to market products or services, so it's ideal for businesses that are already established or aim to grow their sales.?
领英推荐
This campaign can be optimised using several methods using Facebook Advertising, including optimising landing page views, controlling link clicks, and maximising return on investment. Additionally, these conversion campaigns can be presented in multiple formats, including images, videos, and slideshows.
Your online store's catalogue is intended to be displayed to generate sales for your products. As a way to keep your audience engaged, these campaigns display ads from your online store or catalogue, and then allow the customer to click on them to make a purchase. As a way to upsell and cross-sell to potential customers via these campaign ads, then track that outreach via conversions, link clicks, and impressions, these ads are more dynamic than other ads.
Store Traffic can be very effective if you have more than one brick-and-mortar store and want to drive more foot traffic. Adding your store locations and hours of operation to Facebook will be necessary before you can utilise this objective. A radius can be manually set in your store settings on Facebook or it can be set automatically, so people in a certain radius see ads for your closest store.
Companies with multiple locations can accomplish this goal. Reach is the best option when you only have one store and you want to reach your local target audience.
If you have more than one store, and you want to drive customers to the store closest to them, then the Store Traffic objective is perfect for you.
How to Set Up a Facebook Ads Campaign
Step 1: Set some goals for your Facebook Ads
Before you jump in and create any adverts, it’s important to first think about why you’re advertising and what you’re aiming to achieve. By setting yourself a few goals ahead of going live with ads, you also have something to measure your success against.
For example, if you’re looking to increase downloads of your mobile app through Facebook Ads, you could set a goal of 100 downloads in the first month. This will also help you when it comes to choosing the correct objective for your Facebook Ads campaign in Step 3 below. Some more example goals could be:
?Step 2. Head over to Facebook Ads Manager
All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads Manager tool, which you can access via Facebook, or by clicking “Ads Center” in the left sidebar menu on your Facebook page, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook Page.
Once you’re in your Ads Manager, you can navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.
Step 3. Choose your objective
When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 15 options here for what you might want to achieve:
With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:
Awareness
Objectives that generate interest in your product or service:
Consideration
Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it:
Conversion
Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service:
Once you’ve selected your marketing objective, you’ll then be asked to name your campaign:
Step 4: Define your audience and budget
Customizing your target audience
This step is extremely crucial for the success of your Facebook Ads campaigns. The audience for your ad can be customized based on all the following demographics:
In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events. You can also further customize your targeting using custom audiences to retarget people who have already interacted with your business.
Example: Choosing an audience for a Buffer ad
Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way in order to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the following audience demographics:
This gave us an estimated reach of up to 3,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are how many we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.
Setting your budget
Once you’ve selected your target audience, you next need to choose how much you’d like to spend on your ad. When you set a budget, it’s important to remember that this figure represents the maximum amount of money you want to spend. You can also set your budget to Daily or Lifetime:
Step 5: Create your advert
This is where it gets really fun! It’s now time to choose the images (or video), headline, body text, and where your ad will be displayed on Facebook. For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image(s) or video.
There are two ways to create adverts: Using an existing post or creating a new advert. Here’s a quick look at both options.
Using an existing post
For certain types of adverts, such as boosting posts, you can create your ad using an existing post that’s already been shared on your Facebook Page. To do this, select the ‘Use Existing Post’ option from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From here, you can choose which Page you’d like to select a post from and pick an individual post from that Page to use as your advert:
Creating a new advert
If you’d like to create your advert from a blank canvas, the first task is to select the format you’d like to use for your advert. Facebook Adverts look slightly different depending on the results you want. Facebook currently offers 5 various formats for adverts:
Note: The formats available to you will vary based on the objective you set for your advert during Step 3 a little earlier in this post.
Once the format is selected, you need to add the content to your advert (the images or video and the copy). This part is incredibly important to making your advert stand out in within Facebook’s or Instagram’s feeds. If your ad is going to be a success, you want your image and copy to be enticing enough to make people want to click.
The recommended image or video specs are normally placed next to the area on the screen where you upload your content, but as a rule of thumb:
Image specs:
Video specs:
?Step 6: Choose your ad placements
Advert placement defines where your advert is shown and with Facebook Ads, you’re able to choose which locations your advert will appear in. Adverts may appear in Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and right column. You may also create ads to appear on Instagram.
Facebook recommend using the default placements for the objective you chose, which enables Facebook to optimize placements for you in order to get the best possible results at the cheapest overall average cost.
However, if you want to select your own placements, Facebook recommend the following choices, broken out by campaign objective:
Step 7: Place your order
Now, your advert is ready to go. To submit your ad click the ‘Place Order’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live (you’ll receive a confirmation email from Facebook once the ad is live).