Will Facebook Ads Limit Marketing Efforts of Small Business in 2021?
This past June at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced a product and policy change that will impact data sharing across iOS. This new policy limits its places on advertising online and on Facebook.
These new changes will limit your ability to effectively reach, understand, and engage with people on mobile devices and on the web. It will impact a small business's ability to understand ad performance, control who sees your ads, and make better decisions about your ads and budgets.
Over time as these changes take effect, you may see an overall decrease in your ad performance and an increase in cost per action.
What Does All This Mean for Your Facebook Ads?
· You may not be able to deliver ads to people based on engagement with your Facebook page.
· The relevancy and frequency may not be correct for your ads.
· The ability to predict the cost per action of your ads will also be diminished.
· Make it harder for small businesses to target their audience.
· Bottom Line: It may cost you more to do fewer effective ads on Facebook.
Is Facebook Making This Up or Threatening to Fight Apple?
Facebook took out full-page ads in newspapers. Yes, you read that right! The social networking giant argued that a change in Apple’s mobile operating system would decimate family-run enterprises by preventing them from targeting people with online ads.
Hmm, that’s a hard pill to swallow for some. The targeting options can be entangled with privacy issues.
According to BuzzFeed, In the last six months of 2020, the company had more than 12.6 million monthly active paying advertisers, up from 11.9 million in the first half of this year, while the weekly value of its ads grew 26% to $2.3 billion.
Furthermore, Apple’s plan to require iPhone owners to opt into being tracked across apps and the web would reduce the amount of data Facebook collects, potentially resulting in less effective ads and less revenue.
That change comes during a time when the social networking giant is facing an unprecedented threat to its business as state and federal regulators have threatened to break up the company with a series of antitrust lawsuits.
So, is this threat more to Facebook’s ad revenues or to small businesses trying to make a living from using Facebook ads? I think time will tell on this one as we move into 2021.
Can Your Facebook Page Survive Without Ads?
So, you have a Facebook page for your small business. What happens if you do not use any ads for your Facebook page? Your page won’t reach as many people.
But you could try to use your page in a group for more attention and reach.
The key point is you would have to spend much more time promoting your own Facebook page. You would have to get creative and tag other people effectively to have them come to your page.
And always remember, time is money!
Facebook Ads in the Future
Facebook ads work well for many small businesses but just as many also complain of the wasted dollar on Facebook ads.
One thing I can tell you from experience is that not all Facebook ads are alike. Remember too that Facebook post boosts are not considered truly ads though they do cost money.
Getting Facebook ads to work takes time and money. You cannot just run one ad for one day and expect results. It takes time along with refining ads based on data and a decent ad budget.
If you don’t know what you are doing with Facebook ads it can be a waste of money. Facebook ads need to be adjusted as they are running, something that many small business owners don’t have the time or patience to deal with.
Not only that but one must know how to use the Facebook Business Manager. Not an easy feat to do in one day!
