6 Things You Should Not Miss While Running Facebook Ads

Facebook is the most highly used social medium and the best way to get the word out on your Facebook page, is Facebook Ads. There are a lot of gimmicks in the advertising world, but to get attention from potential customers in one vast platform is Facebook which has more than 1.15+ Billion users as of Social Media 2013.

Every time a prospect customer or client goes to Facebook, he or she will see your ad with this you are targeting brand recognition, shares and leads. The new tweaks have enabled Facebook to show what a Facebook user’s friends recently liked giving brands a bit of coverage every time their pages get a thumbs-up.

For businesses, this is vital because it builds a brand’s reputation. With so many companies now advertising products and services, people rely on brands that they trust. By extension, when a friend of theirs likes a certain brand, a Facebook user will likely remember this particular brand. Basically, visibility on Facebook will help promote your brand. Here are few important points to take care of while running Facebook ads.

1. Use News Feed To Enlarge Your Exposure and Leads

The number of users accessing Facebook on mobile devices has shot up since the past year by 51 percent, this year 819 million users have accessed Facebook through their phones. These are some serious numbers for advertisers because when users access Facebook via mobile, there is no right-hand column – which means you can’t afford not to focus at least some of your advertising on News Feed placements. The biggest chunk of revenue came from Advertising of 1.6 billion and from that 41 percent came from mobile users. To get your Facebook ads into the News Feed (specifically Page Post ads, Page Like ads and Sponsored Stories), you have to use the Power Editor.

Here is a quick guide to start with Facebook Power Editor. The main thing you’ll want to pay attention to is the “Placements” feature, which enables you to take any ad and select whether you want it to go to your users’ Desktop News Feeds, Mobile-Only News Feeds, or both. When you choose one or both of these options, your ad will only be seen in the News Feed and not in the right-column. But as a brand you are looking for maximum engagement through your ads, thus choose both Desktop news feed and Mobile news feed to gain maximum exposure and leads.

2. Take A Leap With Lead Generation Through Offers

With creating offers to fans and non fans it gives a brand a chance to build their customer database through mailing lists. Ads provide a way to incentivize and track new customers by providing an offer. When users claim the offer, it creates a story that can publish into their friends’ Newsfeeds. Facebook offers 2 types of advertising: The Facebook ads and Promoted posts. With Facebook ads offer you can reach a wider audience and gain more exposure, promoted posts offers are mainly for targeting users who like your brand page! So it is important to use both mediums to gain lead generation through offers.

With the Facebook ads offer create an Offer to sell a big product or promote new products, when selling a holiday package, the best way to get clicks is by a FREE giveaway in exchange for users’ email addresses it can be providing additional discount on a merchandise. So with this you gain a personal way to email offers to them and that many chances to entice them thus leading to sales. Set up a landing page for your giveaway that requires an email and a name, and then create an Offer that links up to the landing page. And then pin up a promoted post to your fans to get an extra push, publish additional discounts or giveaways with a purchase!

Although both options have their advantages and work equally well, it all comes down to the environment and what you’re trying to do. If you have minimal likes, start off with Facebook ads offers to develop likes and get targeted followers. Once you’ve got a fan base going, start to use your Promoted Posts to show off your events, promotional offers, news and given you have targeted followers, these readers will be inclined to read the post and even share it across their network.

3. Target your Custom Audience for sales

Sometimes, the conversion goal for an advertising campaign is simple: sell more. In that case, it makes the most sense to target people who are already leads – like your email list. With the addition of the “custom audiences” feature – now you can upload your email list directly to Facebook, so that when you set up an ad, you can select them as a “custom audience” in the targeting section of the ads dashboard.

Let’s say your brand sells pram for babies. You’ve created a list of over 60,000 people that have subscribed to your blog, talked to a salesperson, or given you their email address, and you want to target these people on Facebook to remind them about your business. Custom Audiences would be an excellent way to target this particular list of 60,000 people who have shown interest in your products, and potentially convert them into customers!

At the same time, of these 60,000 people, some may already be customers who you don’t want to advertise to. That would be a total waste of money. To avoid advertising to people that are already customers, create a file of all the email addresses of your current customers from your customer relationship manager system (CRM). Upload this list into your Facebook Custom Audiences, as you did before. Use this list as an “Excluded Audience” when setting up the ad targeting in your Facebook ad campaign. Now, your ads are only shown to the people you’re trying to convert into customers, while avoiding advertising to people who have already purchased. Cool feature don’t you think?

4. Take care of Image sizes

When you talk to advertisers about what’s most important when it comes to creating Facebook Ads everybody says the same thing. The image is what can make or break the ad, as it draws attention to the ad. Without having images which are attention grabbers, as a brand it will be tough to get clicks. So when choosing images for Facebook ads lay extra emphasis on it. As it will have a huge impact on end result, and in a way even decide the fate of whether the ad will be successful or not.

Below are some technical specifications you might find very handy on Facebook-

Following these rules is important, because if you choose an image without keeping in mind these rules. The software will re-size the image and it may look strange or cut out some part. Facebook has provided in detail regarding what the size of the images should be for various platforms used. So it’s important to play by Facebooks rule.

5. Creative Landing Pages

Facebook allows advertisers to create a custom page where clicks from their promotional content will lead to. A landing page ensures that your customer finds a more focused and targeted message. The more focused the advertising, the better the chances of converting leads to sales. Your landing page should contain the following practices:

• Message Match – The message on your advertisement should match with the one on your brands landing page
• Image match
• Big call to action- Having a big call to action above the fold is self explanatory. In almost all cases you don’t want the visitor to hunt for conversion, or scroll up or down the page. It should be big, bold and visible.

Check these 6 Kickass tools to create custom Tabs for your Facebook Pages

Example- Even though the movies and books have come to an end, the legacy of Harry Potter and its fans lives on. The animated landing page app presents a book to the fans from which they can choose from a wide range of Harry Potter merchandise. The graphics are great and there is an instant call-to-action. What more could a Potter fan want? Except, perhaps a wand of course!

6. Spend Smartly

The cost of your ads on Facebook is up to you. You can choose between a daily or a lifetime budget, as well as a cost per thousand impressions bid (CPM) or cost per click bid (CPC). You’ll only pay for the clicks or impressions you receive, up to the amount you set for your budget, and can view the cost of your ads in real time from your ads manager. You can break down your budget according the areas you want to concentrate on as follows:

• Bid: Facebook ads are unique in that way they work in a bidding system. As a brand you are competing with other advertisers, thus Facebook will suggest you a bidding range. And then for a Max bid, but its recommended to bid within the suggested bidding range of Facebook.
• Click Through Rate: CTR refers to the amount of times viewers click on your ad, divided by the number of impressions (Number of times your ad is shown). So if your ad is shown 200 times and is clicked on 10 times, your CTR is 0.05% or 5 %
• Cost per Click (CPC) and Cost per thousand Impressions (CPM): with CPC you pay for every time some clicks on your ad, it’s the way to go for to get new customers. CPM is based on the number of times people view your ad, but this is only to spread awareness of your brand.
• Daily spend limit: this is like your credit card limit, it’s the most money Facebook will allow you to spend in one day. And your limit will increase as per your successful payments. This is a good way to keep a tab on the spending.
• Ads Manager: Ads manager provides real time stats. It shows how many clicks, views your ads got. Compares different ads in a line graph and tracks which type of users are taking action on your ad, lets you pause and restart your ads, and more. This helps providing vital information for creating effective ads and tweaking existing ones to get a better response.

Your turn

There are more than 1 million active advertisers on Facebook, and in 2013 they made revenue of 1.6 billion from advertising on Facebook. Have you found other ticks and tips to maximize spend with Facebook ads? Share your secrets with us in the comment section below.

image courtesy: biobm.com

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