This post originally posted August 19th, 2013 on Tweetsicles.

Depending on your social media experience, you may or may not be familiar with Facebook Ads and what they can do for your business’ presence online.

In August of 2012 we were contacted by a client about leading and managing a new campaign to boost their social reach and increase overall membership on their Facebook Page.

Given the nature of our client’s industry and their social potential, we recommended and developed a Facebook Ad campaign that was aligned with the release of one of their new products.

The Campaign’s Goals

1. Increase LIKES & Overall Reach

When client’s tell us they want to increase the LIKES on their Facebook page, we like to take a step back and explain that the true value of your social network is having quality customers that are loyal and support your brand. You’ve heard it said before and it’s true for your social footprint, especially at a local level: QUALITY > QUANTITY.

2. Generate Traffic to Online Store

We got as granular as we could with the targeting of their ads for each and every product that they offered, including their newest release that was to be the highlight of the campaign. By being extremely targeted, we were able to pin point which ads and age groups were performing better and resulting in conversions on the website. We definitely recommend that you are implementing a form of tracking both conversions and ads that you’re displaying — if you can isolate the ads that are performing best, you can really boost your ROI and cut the ads that aren’t.

The Campaign’s Results

Initial Campaign Duration: 5 Months

An increase of 30,000+ Facebook Fans

900% ROI on Ad Spend through Online Sale

$100k in Revenue

Optimization & Best Practice Tips

There are a two important things (among many others) that go into a successful Facebook Ads campaign:

1. Segmented Targeting
2. CTR Optimization

I’ll go into a little more detail to define what each means as well as give you some top level tips on executing.

Segmented Targeting

The biggest asset in utilizing Facebook’s platform for advertising is the information that they allow you to use to target your ads to your specific audience.

Demographics include: Age, Gender, Location, Interests, and Members of Pages to name a few.

Although you may have a certain target market for your business, you’re going to want to begin implementing your ads across a variety of markets and actually test your assumptions. Whenever we create a new campaign, we start by creating ads for each age group, with a span of 5 years except for the first.

On Facebook when potential purchases are on the line, we begin at 18 years old and go from there. For example, the age group break down for each ad would be 18–25, 26–30, and on up.

Once you’ve identified your ads that are performing best for that age demographic, you can begin getting more granular and break it down one year at a time.

This can seem very tedious, and it is but split testing the details can make a huge difference in losing money, breaking even and creating a major profit.

CTR Optimization

ABT — A — Always, B — Be, T -Testing.

What does CTR stand for and how do you calculate it? CTR stands for Click Through Rate and it’s the number of times your ad is clicked divided by the number of impressions that ad received multiplied by 100 to get the percentage.

I touched upon CTR optimization a little above and it’s all performance based. Regardless of how the ad looks to you, it’s the performance aspect of it that is going to make the campaign successful so we test hundreds and sometimes thousands of variations.

Your CTR directly impacts the CPC so the higher your CTR is, the lower your CPC (Cost Per Click) will be. This is such a large focus for us because if we start a campaign at $0.60 / click and can reduce it to $0.10 / click — we can collect 6x more data and generate a much better ROI.

What should you test?

1. Title
2. Main Copy
3. Image
4. Landing Page / Tab / Destination
5. Age / Personalized Demographics (as mentioned above)

There are a lot of different variables to test so make sure that you’re descriptive in your ad copy names so you can accurately isolate the ones you’re looking to duplicate or delete.

You might be asking, what is a good CTR to aim for? Well, if you’re doing .10%+ you’re on your way to becoming relevant. The highest CTR that we’ve achieved with one of our client’s ads is 1.74%.

Originally published at www.tweetsicles.com.