Some people have claimed the Facebook Ads platform is too complex, with too many options which eventually becomes off-putting. While it is true that there is a huge amount of customisation available on the platform, this also makes it enormously powerful, and hence, it is worth the time and effort to get it right!
Like anything, you soon get used to the Facebook Ads platform and once you have mastered it, you have great creative control to really target the market you want to. So let’s look at the basics of the Facebook Ads platform.
Main advantage
The main benefit of Facebook Ads is that you can target customers and put yourself in front of them, you are not waiting for them to find you. You can also run the same ad campaign on both Facebook and Instagram, potentially doubling your audience.
Think about strategy
Who are you targeting? Will they be receptive to your product/service and the way you are promoting it? Targeted ads can sometimes put people off so its important you research and test audiences.
Set objectives
What are your objectives? This could be direct sales, leads, site traffic or just brand awareness, but your ad campaign needs to be tailored accordingly. Facebook starts the process by asking you to choose an objective to help optimise where your ad is placed. This is often split into three categories: awareness, consideration and conversion.
Audience customisation
You have thought vaguely about your target audience but now you can really drill down into the demographics and locations, with lots of options for customising who you are targeting. Adding user interests can be a good test here to see what does and does not work.
Placement
Next you can choose where your ad is placed, which should be tailored according to how you expect your audience will view it – It is important to bear in mind the creatives here.
Schedule
Here you can set the frequency, time and start/end dates for your ad campaign. This, in turn, updates a budget calculation so you can always see exactly how much the ad campaign will cost you. Again, there are lots of options to create a detailed customisation which exactly meets your needs.
Type of ad
This can be a single image, a video or maybe a carousel of images? There are many ways you can display your ad and each has its own benefits, so you can choose the format that suits the audience engagement you want.
Once your ad is live you can monitor its performance in Facebook’s Ads Manager. You can also opt to run a ‘split test’, which allows you to create two ad campaigns to run simultaneously so you can monitor which one performs the best.
Undoubtedly, the power of customisation is a great tool and makes Facebook Ads an excellent platform to suit whatever business objectives you might have. Even if you get it wrong the first time it is easy to see where you can make changes to improve your ad performance.
Implementing Facebook tracking onto your website is also a good recommendation – helping you work out a cost per lead/sale.
Need help devising and implementing a new Facebook advertising strategy? Talk to Aspiring Digital Solutions today for a free no-obligation quote.