When it comes to paid advertising, there are many different platforms. Some work better than others, depending on the brand being advertised.
Facebook advertising is one platform that can be great for brand awareness, but I’ve found it can take some tweaking to return an excellent ROI for some businesses.
Here are my tips and suggestions for things to consider when setting up Facebook advertising campaigns:
1. Run short, very targeted Facebook campaigns
Due to the way you are targeting people on Facebook, it works best to run shorter campaigns – anything between a few days and a few weeks – to ensure that you are not always bombarding the same people with the same message.
It’s different depending on who you are targeting, but if your pool of people is too small you could be showing your ads to the same people over and over again, which may well get on their nerves.
2. Think about your audience(s)
Remarketing, lookalike, interests, location – make sure you try out the audiences who are most likely to engage with your brand. Monitor the performance and tweak accordingly.
Facebook shows engagement for the different age brackets, genders, etc. so use this information to learn who is engaging with your ads and who is engaged when on your website (who converts into business) and optimise accordingly.
3. Focus on frequency and relevance score
These metrics don’t often show up in the default columns in Ads Manager, so choose customised columns to find them and find out what scores your campaigns, ad sets and ads are getting:
“Relevance score is calculated based on the positive and negative feedback we expect an ad to receive from its target audience.”
“Frequency is the average number of times your ad was shown to each person. You may see this number both at the ad and ad set level of a campaign.”
You want to see a relevance score as high as possible and a frequency between 1-2 to see that your ads are performing as they should be. If they are not then pause or tweak your campaigns to try and improve them.
4. Target your Facebook advertising by location
If you are a small, localised business then this is extremely important to get right. This can be as targeting a city, or even a specific address. It can also be based on an up to 50 mile radius of a ‘drop pin’ if you don’t need to be as specific as to a defined location, but just a region around one.
You can also set your location targeting based on these criteria:
5. Utilise the ad types
There are various ad types to choose from, so try a few and test out what works for your brand and campaigns. Test different lengths of video and slideshows, and different numbers of images in carousel ads to determine what your audience engage with most.
6. Use call-to-action buttons to tell your audience what you want them to do next
Whether you’re looking for a new sign up, shopper or download, make sure you add the appropriate button to your ads to tell your audience what they should do when they get to your site.
7. Bidding / budgeting
It’s important to bid and budget accurately to ensure you get the most from your Facebook ads. Setting too high a budget for a campaign with a small audience could mean that the frequency for that campaign will be too high. On the other hand, under bidding per click means that the number of people who see your advert in your target audience will be reduced.
If you have multiple ad sets for different audiences but there’s overlap between those audiences, that could stop some of the ad sets reaching their maximum spend. Facebook will avoid showing people multiple ads from the same advertiser.
8. Don’t forget Instagram
Remember to hook up Facebook and Instagram as it’s growing and growing:
It would appear that a lot of advertisers are already doing it. Its active advertisers have grown from zero to 500,000 in one year.
9. Reporting / conversions / tracking
Firstly use Google’s URL builder to create tracking URLs so that you can see the traffic in the campaigns section of Google Analytics.
The Facebook pixel, is a piece of code that can be placed on a website to measure, optimise and build audiences for advertising campaigns. It allows you to target people with remarketing ads and lookalike campaigns but also track conversions on your site – know if the people coming from your ads are in fact carrying out your CTA.
If this is all a bit much for you and you’d like help with Facebook ad campaigns, give us a shout!