With almost 2 billion users, it’s easy to say Facebook has A LOT of data collected in its archive. This is what drives the world’s largest social network to be the most powerful platform to advertise on.
Haven’t you ever wondered how Facebook knows you’ve been recently looking into getting a new laptop or looking for the best Italian restaurant in your city? Not only does it track users based on the information they voluntarily give by engaging with posts but Facebook also tracks your social media footprint and activity outside of its own platform.
By simply going to the “Ads” function under Settings, users can actually see the various categories Facebook has them under, as seen in the image below.
As its ability to track users is a bit scary, its precise targeting capabilities serve a huge advantage for advertisers that are looking to target specific audiences based on various factors like demographics, interests, and behavior.
A Gold Mine for Advertisers
Why does Facebook focus so heavily on tracking user data? Simply put, it’s what attracts advertisers and brings revenue dollars in. However, Facebook is indeed a gold mine for advertisers that don’t want to drain their ad budgets so it’s a win-win situation for both parties.
Interested in Facebook advertising? Here are some simple tips to ensure you approach it the right way.
1. Build a Solid Strategy
Your strategy is what builds your Facebook advertising success from the ground up. This means establishing clear-cut goals for your campaign that are understood by you and your team if you have one. With end goals in place, this will direct you in the path of choosing the right objective. Objectives sit under three main categories – awareness, consideration, and conversion. Whether your campaign’s end goal is to drive traffic to your website or increase brand awareness, choosing the right objective is crucial in the success of your advertising campaign.
The success of your campaign also depends on targeting the right audience. Don’t waste your ad spend targeting the wrong audience – there’s no point if you’re targeting the wrong users. Are you targeting a cold audience or retargeting users who have visited your page? Do you want to target an audience of 500 or 3,000 users? Are you placing your ad on desktop or mobile? These are all questions you need to ask yourself.
It’s important to analyze your current consumers to get a good understanding of their personas and behaviors to properly target users that will find your ads relevant. You can use Audience Insights to make sure you reach the right users. Facebook’s extensive targeting capabilities and the amount of user data are what drive Facebook to be the most powerful advertising platform. Brands can target precise audiences based on gender, income, interests, age, location, and education. The targeting options are infinite but don’t go overboard by making your audience too specific – you want to make sure your ad reaches enough people!
2. Split Test Your Ads
How will you know if an image of a serene beach will drive better results than a video of cute puppies? Or if your audience of college students in the U.S. will perform better than your audience of men in the city of Seattle that enjoy golfing? You won’t know until you test them out!
With money on the line, it’s better to take the extra effort to split test different images, copy, audiences, and placement than to play the guessing game. Test and optimize your ads. They’re going up against a sea of content on users’ feeds, so it needs to be a thumb stopper! This meaning it has to catch the attention of users and make them take action. Run parallel ads testing different versions on various platforms and evaluate the performance on them to see which ones are performing exceptionally well. You might be surprised by the results!
3. Properly Install Facebook Pixel
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code advertisers can install into their websites to help measure, optimize, and build audiences. Implementing a Pixel is essential when tracking the users that leave Facebook and the actions they take on your landing page.
Always make sure the pixel is installed correctly on your website or you will lose valuable insights! Tools like the Facebook Pixel Helper will help you ensure it’s working properly. The pixel will help you better measure cross-device conversions, create lookalike audiences, and retarget users who have taken a certain action on your site.
4. Track Results
What keeps a good campaign running is close monitoring of the progress and results. If you see that your ad isn’t bringing in any results, there’s simply no point in wasting your money on it. Whether it be the copy or the audience you’re targeting, you know something isn’t working and that there’s room for improvement.
Tracking the results of your campaign is especially important when you first start off advertising on Facebook. It can be overwhelming but once you get a good idea of what type of ad works and who to target, you will begin seeing great results and can start scaling up your campaign.
Conclusion
Facebook is a gold mine for advertisers, and if done right, brings in significant return over a short period of time. It all starts with a good strategy that’s goal-oriented and watchful eyes to ensure it’s performing the way you want it to. Test out different approaches when you first start advertising on Facebook and you can then increase your budget and spend once you know which one is right for your brand.
All Facebook advertising agencies recognize the importance of proper implementation and execution of a good advertising strategy. Don’t hesitate, start generating leads in a matter of days with Facebook!