Best practice for Facebook ads
Facebook ads are a great way to get the word out about your products and/or services.
Facebook offers PPC and CPM ads. A PPC campaign is a pay-per-click campaign that you only pay for when people click. CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions and means that you pay a set amount for views. Both are good ways to run ads, but you’ll see that using CPM is a little better and easier to control.
SET YOUR GOALS
Knowing why you’re running a Facebook advertisement is important. You need to know what you hope the results are. Do you want to build your email list, sell an actual product or service, or something else? I’ve recently run a very successful cost-effective campaign to build followers as I wanted to increase my organic reach on Facebook.
LEARN FACEBOOK’S POWER EDITOR
Facebook has a wonderful editor, Power Editor, so you don’t need to use any outside sources to create your ads. It allows you to manage many different variations of the same advertisement and is very useful. You do need to use Chrome to use the Power Editor, but it’s simple to use.
TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE CAREFULLY
When running any type of advertisement, it’s important to understand who your audience is and what they want. On Facebook ads you can target your audience down to the exact person you want to see the advertisement. This is a huge leap forward in marketing for any business. Even though you’re a small business, you can compete with bigger businesses due to these features.
SEGMENT YOUR AUDIENCE FOR DIFFERENT ADS
The Power Editor allows you to duplicate ads, and then edit them to change the demographics. Doing this serves a couple of purposes. It allows you to conduct an A/B test to see who responds better to your ad, but you can also change the images, headlines, and copy to fit each segment of your audience better. However, if you are A/B testing do only change one variable at a time so you see which performs best.
USE CUSTOM AUDIENCES
A custom audience allows you to reach people who have already been to your website but are now surfing on Facebook. This is called remarketing or retargeting, and it is a very powerful way to market to targeted people and get a high rate of return.
USE FACEBOOK’S OPITIMED CPM
This is a great feature because it makes it easier for you to get views for your advertisement. Facebook’s algorithm knows what’s best in terms of this set-up, so let Facebook choose for you. It will really work better and save you money too.
BUILD A RESPONSIVE WEBSITE
As of April 21, 2015 Google started ranking responsive websites higher than those that are not responsive. A responsive website is one that works on all mobile devices as well as PCs. It’s best that your websites are responsive. You don’t need one for mobile and one for PCs - you need one site that works regardless of the platform your audience uses.
USE PROFESSIONAL-LOOKING GRAPHICS
Don’t skimp on graphics but you don’t have to spend that much. You can do it yourself and have them look professional if you use Canva and add your own images. You can also use stock photography and Facebook does have some stock images build into its options when you set your ad up. The most important thing to remember is not to use too many words on your image as Facebook won’t show your ad as frequently as want to display images rather than words. If you’re feeling really adventurous you can make a video ad!
HIRE A COYWRITER
Writing content is different from writing copy. Copywriting is a specialised skill. Let a copywriter take what you’ve done and improve it. If they start with something you’ve written and then fix it to work better, you’ll save a little money on the copywriter. Overall you’ll save a lot of money on running the advertisement because you’ll get better results from professional copy.
Using Facebook to run ads is a great way to get involved in online advertising. Pay-per-click and CPM campaigns can be overwhelming, but Facebook has it set up so that you can do it without even being a professional. It’s a great way to put your toe into online advertising for your business.
BREAKING NEWS
Facebook rolled out Dynamic Creative, a new way for advertisers to automatically match what creative works best for a target audience or placements. This new system is “geared towards performance-driven marketers who use manual techniques to find the best performing ad creative to use for a target audience.”
Facebook introduced “more ways to help marketers better connect with their customers by re-engaging their offline audiences on Facebook.” These updates include the ability to build custom audiences from offline conversion event sets entirely comprised of people who have previously purchased offline and store visits reporting based on location service data from customers’ mobile phones.
Facebook Messenger Day now boasts over “70 million daily users posting and viewing photos and video slideshows six months after launch,” while the Messenger app now reaches “1.3 billion monthly users” globally.
In addition to a direct link between personal Facebook and Instagram accounts on mobile, Facebook also appears to be testing a dedicated shortcut to WhatsApp from the main Facebook app. This new feature has been spotted on Android devices in the main navigation menu of the Facebook app.
Twitter released a new Popular Articles tab that highlights the top news items currently being shared or engaged with by people you follow. This new feature shows the article’s link preview but excludes any comments about the stories.
With a new update rolled out this past week, multiple Twitter users can now share access to a single account via the social network’s iOS and Android apps without needing to share that account’s password. Twitter details how to set up the new teams feature and grant levels of access in a Twitter Help Center post.
Instagram is rolling out a new update that enables all video to autoplay with audio once the sound on one video is turned on. The app will still open with video autoplaying silently until the user taps to turn on one video’s sound. After that, all subsequent videos will autoplay with sound until the videos are muted again or the app is closed.
Instagram now allows Android users to pair their messages in Direct with a colourful background or a “disappearing” photo backdrop. Once users type a message, they now have the option to tap the camera to capture a photo or select a colourful background “to match [their] mood.”
Facebook is rolling out a direct link from the main navigation menu of its mobile app to the user’s Instagram account. TechCrunch reports that this shortcut can be found “just below the link to your personal profile in Facebook’s app and above the links to any Facebook Pages you may manage.”
The Ringer reports that “a number of Instagram users across the Web” have spotted the addition of a fourth column to the platform’s long-featured 3×3 grid of photos.
Instagram users have spotted a new alert that instantly indicates whether a particular user follows them on the platform. This alert appears beneath the user’s name and bio of the profile and currently seems to be available only on Android devices.
Pinterest launched a new ad product within the Pinterest Taste Graph that has the power to surface over 100 billion pins based on a pinner’s interests.
Pinterest has made it easier “to save and share Pins from your freshly updated iPad or iPhone” with several new shortcuts for the Pinterest app for iOS.
Snapchat is updating its Bitmoji-enabled World Lenses, a feature that allows users to overlay their Bitmoji characters onto their surroundings to make the animations look more realistic.
YouTube rolled out a new sponsorship program that allows gamers to earn money and connect with fans through their YouTube Gaming channel.
