Facebook has gotten a lot of press in recent months and most of it hasn’t been so great. However, as marketers, we rely on platforms like Facebook to do our jobs. Because of this, it’s hard to ignore the importance of this kind of advertising and the potential returns it can produce for business and clients. Therefore, being aware of providing the best possible experience to users is essential.
However, when advertising on Facebook vs other advertising channels there are some universal truths. In this article, we are going to be discussing what you need to be aware of and how you can best optimise for this kind of advertising in the long run.
Creative Matters for Facebook advertising
This cannot be understated! Your creative is going to be the first thing a potential client or customer is going to see. You have probably heard this a thousand times by now, but users are going to make a split-second decision when they see your ad. And if your ad doesn’t stand out or look intriguing to your audience their going to just keep scrolling. It’s becoming easier and easier to avoid ads and customers are becoming more and more desensitised to them and therefore far better at ignoring them. So, you need to not only stand out but also provide some kind of value in your ad.
One way you can do this through investing in good photography and graphics. Furthermore, trying and use the idea of familiarity in your ads to make the user more likely to resonate with your ad in a positive light, is a great tactic to use throughout your advertising campaigns.
Moreover, keeping your ad copy punchy and clear will also help your ads perform better throughout your campaigns.
If you yourself don’t have an internal design team to create great graphics for your ads, you can always use free tools such as Canva and Animoto. We would also recommend investing in the Adobe Creative Cloud suite as this will help enormously when creating Facebook ads.
Don’t Spend a Fortune
It can be easy to fall into the trap of spending a fortune on campaigns, but often increasing a budget isn’t going to make a failing campaign better or give you the ROI intended. In fact, there are many ways you can create low-cost campaigns which perform just as well if not better than high-cost ones.
When creating low-cost campaigns, you can further try engagement campaigns. These are often cheaper than goal orientated campaigns and will increase the footfall to your page or site. However, another good alternative is a traffic-based campaign if you are wanting more footfall to land on your site.
It’s important to recognise when using low-cost campaigns, you will often need to make fast decisions in the moment, as you don’t have the budget to fall back on and test new options. If you are seeing a drop off in key metrics or something not working properly you will need to iterate quickly. This could be updating your targeting options, writing new ad copy or testing new landing pages.
Be Careful with lead ads
Lead ads often sound like a great idea, they allow users to quickly and efficiently complete a form which will give you lots of their details. However, they can be a bit too easy for the user. Because there is so little effort involved, the quality of leads you might be collecting are often far lower than what you might expect.
In addition to this, your sales team might struggle with the sheer volume of leads they might need to get in touch with. And because the form was so easy to fill in, the potential lead might virtually be cold as they may have forgotten all about your business or service by the time you contact them. Therefore, ensuring your targeting is precise as possible to get the best possible leads is vitally important.
One way you can review your lead quality is through keeping track of your leads through whatever CMS your using. Using tools such as Zapier to connect Facebook to a content management system will mean you can optimise for quality not just volume.
Another tactic to ensure you get the most out of your leads is to use custom conversions for qualifying leads. This means you can add a follow-up link into any conversations with leads and see what ad groups and campaigns are providing the best leads. This allows for optimisation in the future.
Let the Facebook Pixel work for you
The pixel isn’t just a tool for your remarketing lists, it’s a brilliant tool which is able to optimise your campaigns for the most appropriate audience. When you set up the pixel ensure you are giving it as much data to work from as possible. This means the pixel should optimise delivery of your ads according to what it sees on your site.
In fact, recent studies have shown an audience with no targeting performed better than the lookalike audience. This was because the pixel was doing all the work!
Best Practice isn’t always the best
Most of the time best practice is to be advised. However, you shouldn’t constrain yourself in order to use best practices.
Some common best practice examples are as follows:
- Nurture cold traffic through sequence ads before making the sell
- Video is far more engaging to audiences
- Split ads by placement, demographics and device for better relevancy
- Don’t rely on conversion ads as CPM's tend to be higher
Although the above examples are usually invaluable to creating an effective campaign you shouldn’t stick to them if they are going to affect your long-term strategies.
Key Takeaways
If you’ve only got a small budget, then you’re going to need to react quickly to changes and to optimise your campaigns to not only focus on giving the users something in return but also providing an enjoyable experience; be it through creative graphics and images or a well-thought-out customer journey that develops with the user.
If you would like help developing your PPC strategy and optimisation of your account, the Innovation Visual team would be happy to help! Contact us today to talk to an expert or contact our client services manager jo@innovationvisual.com to find out in more detail about our services.
Credit to Jon Quinton for inspiring this post, with his talk at BrightonSEO
