Facebook Advertising
Facebook started offering Ads in Feb 2007. Being the biggest social platform, it offers plenty of opportunity for an advertiser; spread brand awareness, generate sign-ups for events or courses, sell products.
Reasons to Advertise on Facebook
– People spend a lot of time on the platform
– Provide target demographics for the perfect audience
– Cost effective (ROI)
– Increase Brand Awareness
– Helps with Retargeting to existing visitors
– Help increase revenue, sales and leads
It’s a platform that provides the advertiser the opportunity to educate the audience about what your business is all about, what services/products you offer. A level of customer engagement to create sales but also to create advocates and influencers to extend your reach.
Facebook offers different ways to advertise
– Single Image Adverts or Domain Ads. As it says, a single image with text above and below and a link back to your website or landing page. (images are 1200x628px)
– Multi-Product Ads (Carousel Ads). Like the single image, we have text on the top and link with description on the bottom, but now we have multiple images. You can add up to 5 images. Each can be a different image.
– Video Ads. They are videos ranging from 10 seconds up to a huge 120 minutes. They are the most engaging form of advertising on Facebook, resulting in higher interaction and conversions. Like the other, its text above a description link below.
– Lead Ads. These are lead generation ads designed to collect details for potential sales, names,email,phone within Facebook and export the data to your own CRM (customer relationship management system) for future follow-ups. As before, with have text on the top, an image and a signup option, this will pop up a compact form for the user to leave details.
– SlideShow Ads. This format provides all the features of single and multi images in combination to create a visually immersive ad.
– Collection ads. These ads combine video and slideshows. Similar formats to the others except you start with a video which fades or moves out of the advert for a slide show to replace it.
So how do we set up advertising
Setting up a Campaign. You will need to determine the spend for the campaign Facebook offers two model Auction and Reach.
– Auction: You will set a bid strategy to achieve your goals
– Reach and Frequency: You will advertise at a fixed cost
The Auction approach offers choice and flexibility but cost is less predictable as you are competing with other advertisers.
The Reach and Frequency option provides a fixed budget with predictable delivery, but your reach may be less than that of an Auction Ad.
Setting the Objective. There are three types of advertisement and each has different objectives.
– Awareness within this we have Brand Awareness and Reach
– Consideration
– Conversion
Awareness: Adverts that help create brand/product/service awareness
– Brand Awareness: Aim to increase awareness. They don’t emphasise interaction, opt-ins, or click throughs. It is all about the brand too product/service association.
– Reach: Is about your advert being seen by as many targeted people within your budget. Its benefit is a targeted audience for your website/landing page.
Consideration: Adverts for those people thinking about the product/service and researching it for a future purchase.
– Traffic: Useful for driving traffic to our website. This can come from a podcast, reading an article, a new mobile app. It showed these ads to people with a past interest in the product or service.
– Engagement: When you want your audience to engage with the advert, generate more Page likes, Event responses, interaction on offers. Build an engaged audience within Facebook to develop future ad campaigns.
– App Installs: Great for directing users to the App store to download your App.
– Video views: Promote your video for high numbers of views, all about audience creation for future engagement and campaigns.
– Lead generation: Obtain leads without leaving Facebook, collect data with consent like name, phone, email, etc. Export this into your CRM for future follow-ups.
– Messages: Ads designed to convert the users’ interest in to a sale. It targets through Messenger, where you can have a chat bot, or representative act to provide information to generate a sale/conversion.
Conversion: Adverts for those ready to purchase.
– Conversions: Ads aimed to increase sales of any type, including sign-ups, opt-ins, and any downloads.
– Product/Service Sales: These ads promote your e-commerce store and your whole product/service offering. You integrate your e-commerce catalogue with Facebook for a seamless experience and future campaigns.
– Store Visits: Direct people to the physical store to increase your footfall.
Within each of these objectives, you can create split tests (A/B Testing). Split test are two versions of an advert selling the same item with parameters altered, for example: 25% off or reduced to £same price as the 25% off. Or you can have Next Day Delivery or Free One Day Delivery. People respond to different options and you can see which works best for the targeted demographic. You improve on the successful test by comparing it to another parameter. For example, changing the image or color within the ads, The Call-to-Action, element position, audience targeting and so on.
Also, when running tests is to understand what is a successful test, what was the metric tested against? CTR, Clicks, CPC, Conversion, Likes, Views, etc.
So when we log in to Facebook Campaign manager for the first time, we see the dashboard with much of the information above shown.
Now we understand what we are going to do and why we can begin creating our first campaign.