7 Facebook Ads Tips to Help You Avoid Wasting Advertising Dollars
If you run Facebook Ads campaigns, here are some tips that will help you stop losing money due to wrong campaign setup, bad targeting, and non-optimized bidding.
Before I start, I’d like to say that this blog post is not going to be any kind of a “Facebook ads beginners guide.” If you are not familiar at all with Facebook Ads, I strongly recommend reading a couple of these guides before you continue reading my blog post.
Jon Loomer is world’s No. 1 expert of Facebook Advertising Platform who doesn’t work at Facebook.
Facebook Ads Tip No.1
Use Power Editor
Facebook has 2 main ad platforms — the Ads Manager and the Power Editor. I strongly recommend adjusting yourself to the Power Editor platform as it will usually have more features for targeting and pricing that will help you create better ads.
Facebook Ads Tip No. 2
Choose Campaign Objectives Based on Your Short Term and Specific Advertising Goals
There are 6 main campaign objectives on Facebook: Clicks to Website, Page Post Engagement, Website Conversion, Page Likes, Video Views.
Facebook also has 7 other types of campaign objectives that are being used for mobile apps promotion, product catalog promotion and events responses. Those usually require more IT integration and might be less relevant for small hotel advertising.
But for you, the main 3 types of campaign objectives that you are going to use the majority of the time are: Clicks to Website, Page Post Engagement, and Website Conversion.
The campaign objectives mission is to “tell” Facebook Ads’ engine how to serve the ads and to whom to show your ads.
Clicks to Website: this objective will show your ad to Facebook users that are more likely to click on the ad. It will result in lower eCPC (effective Cost Per Ad Click) and usually Higher CTR (click through rate).
Use this objective when your goal is to drive as much traffic a possible to your website at the lowest possible price.
Website Conversions: Choosing this objective will result in your ad being shown to users who are more likely to complete this kind of flow (from click to conversion) on your website. Using this campaign objective requires embedding a conversion pixel on your website, usually on the thank you page of your registration form or sales page (here is a guide https://www.facebook.com/business/help/435189689870514)
Use this objective if your campaign’s goal is to drive conversions such as Website/Club registrations, Lead Generation, Online Booking or any other form of ACTION you expect your user to do on your website.
Page Post Engagement: Not all of your Facebook publications or posts should be Right Hooks; another recommendation is to share content with your Facebook fans to increase their engagement. Studies show that users who are more engaged with a brand are more likely to be converted to higher-paying customers (article — http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/study-engaged-facebook-fans-make-for-higher-paying-consumers/301010)
With this campaign objective, your ads will be seen by Facebook users who are more likely to engage with your post (engagement by Facebook might be: post like, post comment, post share, post click, and also photo/video view).
Use this objective when you want to engage your audience inside Facebook with content that may be valuable to them (e.g., escapism, entertainment or educational).
This is very important: Before you choose an objective, think about your short-term goals.
Ask yourself — What Is the One Action That I Really Need the User to Do after Seeing the Ad?
Facebook Ads Tip No. 3 (Targeting Tip 1)
Always Use Demographic and Geographic Targeting
You should be accurate regarding the demographics and the geographic location of your audience. As it might be okay sometimes to run a campaign for an entire country, it is never okay to target all ages and all genders. The minimum Geo/Demo audience targeting should look like this:
Men age 25–34, living in California, College graduates.
Otherwise, it’s going to be very difficult to conduct a proper ad with a creative and effective marketing message.
Facebook Ads Tip No.4 (Targeting Tip 2)
Understand the differences between Interest Targeting and Behavior Targeting
Facebook’s definitions state:
Interests — Facebook can help you reach specific audiences by looking at their interests, activities, the Pages they have liked and closely related topics.
Behavior — Reach people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. Some behavior data is available for U.S. audiences only.
In other words:
Behavior is what you do. Interest is what you are.
Facebook Ads Tip No. 5
The Size of Your Potential Audience Is Based on Your Campaign Goals
This one is essential. Logically and practically the size of your potential reach audience should be smaller as your ad asks the user for a deeper engagement with your brand, e.g., if you want a user to engage with your page post within facebook.com, go broader than if you want the user to book a room/flight. I have experiences running campaigns for a potential audience reach of 400 people as well as for 100K and even more. Everything is predicated on your business goals (do you want to drive sales, or do you want to get brand exposure?). The deeper engagement you want from your user, the more narrow your targeting should be. The more narrow you go, the less reach you get and vice versa. This is the loop of Facebook audience targeting.
Facebook Ads Tip No. 6
Always Run Separate Campaigns For Every Placement
Facebook has 3 main placements inside of Facebook that are: Desktop news feed, Mobile news feed, and Desktop right column. There is also a 4th placement that is the Facebook mobile ad network (apps approved by Facebook to present Facebook ads), but since I personally don’t use this placement, I won’t write about it.
I’ll put this in a very simple way — Do Not Run More Than 1 Placement Per Ad Group. If that’s a mobile? Make a mobile-only ad group, a mobile ad creative, a mobile oriented audience and a mobile bidding. You have to be able to optimize the campaigns as they run by device and adjust suitable bidding and creative for every placement separately.
Facebook Ads Tip No. 7
Use optimized bidding only if you target more than 10K users
Facebook optimization engine needs a large potential audience (and also a big enough spend budget to cover that) in order to complete its learning and to be able to serve ads for optimized users. There is no official statement from Facebook about the minimum number of audience to have a successful optimized bidding; unofficial sources have claimed several times that this number is 10,000.
As I will always want to narrow the potential reach to a very small audience (less than 10K, sometimes less than 1,000), I also want to test it and see how this entire audience performs. I will set a high CPM bid higher than Facebook recommended (if you are promoting mobile app downloads or a clicks to website campaign objective, set a CPC bid), in order to outbid every single competitor, reach my entire potential audience and see for myself how it responds. For example, if I have a 1,000 audience, and I am bidding $8 CPM it will cost me around $8 to target this entire audience and to know if it has any opportunities for me; if it does, I go a little broader with different demographics or adding interests and then scale. I prefer this approach rather than letting Facebook optimize a large audience where I will never be sure about why it worked or didn’t work for me.
Your Turn:
How many of those tips are already part of your strategy?
Well that’s all for this time…
Cheers
