Facebook has proven to be an excellent platform to build your personal brand and handle customer service inquiries. It’s also becoming a favorite place for marketers to advertise their products or services with Facebook Ads.
If you’ve you played around with Facebook Ads, then you know it can get rather costly. To make sure that you get the biggest bang for your buck, give these 8 hacks a chance when setting up a campaign through Facebook Ads.
1. Segment Your Audience
With Facebook Ads you can segment your audience in several different ways. For starters, you want to group together your audience based on interests. From there you would create one ad set per topic. If you had nine targets of interest you would could create three ad sets. For example, if you were focused on online marketing, one ad set would focus on AdWords while the second box would focus on Facebook Ads. This type of segmentation allows you to create ads that are specifically geared to the topics you’ve included in your ad sets.
Now, you can also segment your audience into other factors such as their behaviors, gender, education level, relationship status, income, and even which age groups are the most profitable thank to the Power Editor. Let’s say that you want to target your audience by income. Go into the settings of your ad set with Power Editor, click on Demographics, followed by Income. You can then select the income range that bests suits your business.
2. Become a VIP Socializer
If you’ve had experience with PPC before, you’re probably familiar with Quality Score. For those who are new to the world PPC, Margot da Cunha explains that this is “the mystery metric that takes into consideration factors such as an ad’s click-through-rate and relevancy (keywords, to ad text, to landing page) to determine a score on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest.” This is important for marketers because the higher your Quality Score, the more visibility you’ll receive at a lower cost-per-click.
Facebook has something similar called a relevance score which is determined by post engagement. Margot suggests that you become a VIP Socializer “on Facebook by stealing the highest CTR ad copy and creative from your paid search/display ads and re-purposing it in your ads on Facebook.” This should give your relevancy score a little nudge, which in turn will increase your ROI.
3. Target Lookalike Shoppers
Facebook ads has a handy feature called ‘Lookalike Audience.’ These are potential customers because they have similar interests as your current customers, and better yet, who are more likely to visit your site and fill-out forms. With Facebook Ads, you can easily target this new audience.
The Facebook Help Center has a detailed guide on how you can create a ‘Lookalike Audience,’ but here’s a brief rundown; you Create Audience in your Ads Manager. When creating your Custom Audience, select the specific parameters, such as “People visiting specific web pages but not others,” county, desired audience size, and source (any Custom Audience, conversion pixel or Facebook Page).
4. Using MPAs for Content
In 2014, Facebook unveiled multi-product ads (MPAs). This allows advertisers to display multiple products in a carousel-type ad unit. Alan Coleman shared 8 different ways that you can take advantage of MPAs on Moz to promote content rather than products.
- Multi-package ads that display two different pieces of content, such as a travel agency displaying two travel offers, in order to have visitors click on a website.
- Multi-offer ads that have several different targeted ads. Sticking with travel, one ad would focus on meal discounts, while the other highlights discounts for children under a certain age.
- Multi-location ads that could promote multiple locations of a business at the same time.
- Multi-episode ads that could be used for a continuing video series. You could place all episodes in one location.
- Multi-people ads may be used if you want to include different images of people in one ad. For example, you could have different people modeling your new clothing line.
- Multi-UGC ads should highlight multiple fans or customers of your product.
- You can even target past customers. For example, you could showcase before and after pictures of your clients if you’re a plastic surgeon, landscaper, interior designer.
5. Pixels
Facebook describes Conversion Pixels as:
“Conversion pixels are used to signal events that happened while the user was browsing your website like viewing a product, registering or even adding a product to his cart. This pixel is best used in conjunction with oCPM to drive a particular event.”
Marketers could use these to align campaign strategies with the desired outcome. That was all well and good, but you had to change this for each new promotion. Facebook has wised up and will be launching Facebook Pixel in the latter half of 2016. With this feature you can build custom audiences for retargeting, optimize your ads for more conversion, track conversions, and create lookalike audience members. in short, this is easy to make your marketing campaign on Facebook a whole simpler.
To create a Pixel, go under Ads Manager and open up Tools. Click Pixels>Facebook Pixel and create your Pixel. You then add the Pixel to your website’s pages and even customize it for specific events.
6. Use the Conversion Funnel to Optimize Your Ads
Do you know when and how to optimize your ads? One of the most effective times, according to Jason How on Post Planner, is to start is by examining the metrics at the end of the conversion funnel. For example, if you’re using Facebook ads to to product sales, investigate the total number of sales & cost per sale. By doing, as opposed to only focusing on click-through rates & reach, you can modify your ads so that they’re more effective and avoid ending ads that have been working.
7. Optimize Your Images
Since Facebook is a pretty visual medium, it’s only fair that you optimize your images correctly. To begin, you want to make sure that you follow the Facebook Ads Guideline. In most cases, the recommended image size is 1,200 x 628 pixels, but that can vary depending on how you’re using the image. If the image is too large or small, it will be automatically resized to fit – which could distort your image.
Once you have the correct size, you want to test out a couple of different images. Keep the ads identical, but switch the images to see which one has higher engagement and clicks. And, don’t forget to include that call-to-action in the image as well.
Finally, make sure that you image is placed in the correct place. Here’s a couple of suggestions on where to place your ads:
- Desktop Newsfeed: Better for engagement and generating sales & leads.
- Desktop Right Column: Suited for retargeting. It’s not as effective, but cheaper.
- Mobile Newsfeed: Good choice for engagement & Mobile app installs
It wouldn’t hurt to rotate your ads either. Your audience may get tired of seeing the same ad in the same place every week.
8. Test Bidding Strategies
There are numerous bidding strategies for Facebook Ads. The idea is to find the one, or even several, that work best for you. Instead of picking and staying with just one strategy, try out some of the following bidding strategies until you find the one that is most effective.
- Optimized for Objective: Facebook determines the objective of your campaign, such as page likes or local awareness.
- Optimized for Impressions (CPM): If you select this, Facebook will display your ad to your target audience as much as possible. That’s what you’re going for, right?
- Optimized for Clicks (CPC): Facebook will show you ads to the people who are most likely going to click on it.
- Optimized for Daily Unique Reach: Very similar to CPM, but only once a day.
