Best Practices for Running Facebook Ads in 2021

Optimize your Facebook ads for a higher ROI

Facebook continues to be one of the best places to market your business through social media, especially with its robust advertising system. This social media platform has managed to become the fourth-most visited website in the world, outranked only by Wikipedia, Youtube, and Amazon.

Facebook also has 2.75 billion monthly active users, an increase of 12% year-over-year from September 2019. Its statistics like this show why incorporating Facebook as part of your marketing strategy is crucial. There’s just no other platform that offers you this kind of advertising reach.

With that said, understanding which practices are best is crucial for making the best decision when it comes to advertising your business. Every year, new strategies are made or improved upon when it comes to marketing strategies. The practices you may have implemented a year or two back may have become outdated or need some fine-tuning.

That is why, for this article, we’ll be going over some of the best practices for running Facebook ads in 2021.

Choosing the proper type of ads

While businesses these days have endless choices for ad targeting, they are spoiled for decisions when it comes to choosing the types of ads they generate. Take the time to consider the three different types of goals related to your strategy for Facebook advertising. There are three different types of goals you need to think about when it comes to your Facebook advertising strategy.

Awareness: Extending your reach and introducing your business to potential customers through Facebook ads.

Consideration: Encourage interaction between the prospect and your marketing messages.

Conversions: Taking those potential customers and convincing them to become full-fledged customers

These goals will eventually dictate the direction you are taking with your ads, including the creatives and ad types you’ve selected. However, some brands may be discouraged on Facebook as of late, as there is no denying the new ad features they have introduced as of late. For instance, collection ads are flourishing at the moment.

A revised twist on high-performing carousel ads, these eye-catching messages give brands the chance to show off multiple products all at once. As stated, remarketing ads can be a successful way to bring former customers back into your circle by serving as a sort of realization in their Facebook feeds. Plenty of brands have managed to take full advantage of Facebook stories and have been successful with full-screen Stories ads, compelling people to click on them.

You can also combine Facebook stories with Instagram stories ads to maximize your results. With the number of choices being offered, it’s crucial to familiarize yourself with Facebook’s ads spec and newly added features.

Use Automatic Placement

When setting up your advertising on Facebook, there are several various placements to select. A placement will usually refer to where your ad shall be displayed. However, not every one of these placement options is made equally.

Some placements will receive far better results than others. Facebook themselves has recommended that users choose Automatic Placements when creating their Facebook ad campaigns, which is something I advise you follow.

If you plan to run a campaign using the conversion goal, automatic placements will usually offer the best possible results. The reason for this is that Facebook will optimize your campaign to develop the highest number of conversions, and that includes placing your ads in locations where people are most likely to convert. If you are planning to use a non-conversion based goal, then it’s best to start with the feeds and stories placement instead.

Placement is crucial for Facebook advertising’s success, but another aspect that is even more important is targeting the correct interest groups, which we will be covering later in this article.

Video ads

Video advertising has always been very useful in the advertising world. Video ads on Facebook are no exception to this rule, and they are known to outperform most of the other ads, including regular image ads. Some exceptions exist for this practice, but most brands out there consider video content to be king.

It is especially true for service-based businesses. Educating your potential customers as a service provider can be useful for establishing yourself as an industry expert and attracting clients. These are not the only applications for video ads either.

Another type of video format you can try are customer testimonial videos, which work quite well in a wide variety of industries. Product demonstrations are also great, especially if the item is something new and innovative. Showing off how it works will gain the interest of many people and make them consider your products. Entertaining your target audience with these videos will offer you lots of value.

There are two things you should keep in mind when creating a video ad. First, don’t overthink the production quality of the video ad.

The videos you develop for your Facebook ads will not require a high production value and need to look similar to commercials you see aired on TV. As a matter of fact, videos recorded by your smartphone can be super-effective since they’ll more closely resemble the content people usually see in the feed. The key to video ads is offering your customers high-value content.

The second piece of important information is to keep your videos short. Some businesses become intimidated by the idea of creating videos, thinking they will need to make a lengthy scripted code that is clean and professional.

To make this process much easier, merely create short videos. Most people underestimate the amount of content they can fit into a 20 or 30-second video and how useful it can be for their ads.

Using AIs

Artificial Intelligence has managed to come a long way in the past decade. When it comes to AI, we all tend to automatically think of robots and talking computers right?

Well, AI is actually way more than that. Modern AI can be applied to almost anything and this includes running Facebook and Instagram ads. Leveraging AI in your Facebook ads will help you supercharge your advertising results.

When it comes to best practices for running Facebook ads, AIs are resourceful tools to rely upon. Facebook themselves has implemented their own AI system that benefits all businesses using their advertising platform. It’s known that Facebook manages to deliver tailored ads to the best audiences, but how do they manage to achieve this?

Having a team of people going through each ad auction and deciding on which to deliver would take far too much time and resources. Two aspects decide which ads will appear at given moments.

• Audience targeting
• Ad auction

As the advertiser, you are the one in charge of choosing your target audience, and you want to narrow down the options to reduce the likelihood of ineffectual placements. For instance, we do not want to sell cosmetics to people who have no interest in beauty products. Besides, why waste time advertising pet services to non-pet owners?

You can only narrow down the target audience by location, behaviors, age, gender interest, and other categories. One of the advantages of paying for ads on Facebook is that you can take an email list and generate a Custom Audience or Lookalike.

Although, this is only a part of the equation. Just because you want to target ads to young males located in California interested in football, this does not mean you will win every single opportunity. Instead, Facebook shall decide which ads to show based on an auction. Every one of the ads with similar targeting settings suggesting that this would be the best fit will bid against each other to win the position.

Generally, Facebook decides on which ads to show to specific people based on their total value score. Meaning, they use a formula developed by combining ad quality and advertiser value. Advertiser value is a separate calculation where the estimated action rate is multiplied by the bidding amount.

Simply put, your ads will appear after a sturdy bid, a high estimated action rate, and massive ad quality. If any of these areas are lacking, you’ll most likely lose the majority of bids to competitors.

External AIs

While Facebook AI is implemented by the social media giant, some external AIs can be implemented by ourselves. AI tools have made their way to the scene and are capable of assisting you on your paid ads journey. Depending on the AI you have chosen, there are plenty of things you could potentially pull off with them to help you achieve better results.

Over here at Lighting AI, our goal is to provide you with a tool to help you achieve better Facebook results using AI. Our tool is capable of finding and testing new groups by testing out your current data by tapping into your audience, interest groups, and keywords on both Google Adwords and Facebook.

Our tool will match your best-performing targeting groups with its data to find new groups to test.

So how does this exactly work and what can you expect?

Our tool first examines your current data — audiences, interests groups and keywords on Facebook and Google AdWords. Our tool then matches your best-performing targeting groups with our data to find new groups to test. That means you’ll wake up in the morning with new tests already running — you don’t have to lift a finger, or press a button.

With this, you’ll be able to save time and resources while still being able to narrow down your target groups. This works in the background and over time the data will get more precise, providing you with better advertising results on autopilot. In addition to that, Lightning AI automatically changes bids and budgets within Facebook and Google AdWords to make sure that you are always paying the right price.

We’ll handle all the testing, so you don’t need to worry about the type of bid or changing the numbers. All hands off!

To supercharge your testing even more, you can use Marpipe in combination with our tool to test different ad creatives to see which one will bring you the best results.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences

By not tapping into the Facebook lookalike system, the ad platform would be far less useful for you. A lookalike audience is composed of a group of people that are similar to another group of people. It is excellent for Facebook advertising because you can take a list of leads or a list of customers, upload it to Facebook and use it to generate a lookalike audience.

It’s proven to be incredibly useful to advertise to people who are similar to your existing customers. To pull this off, you will need at minimum 100 people in your source audience to create a lookalike audience. Once you have managed to create one, make sure to include a lookalike audience in your Facebook ad campaigns.

Don’t get frustrated if you are struggling to decide which targeting options you should be utilizing on Facebook. The best cold audience targeting option is usually always a lookalike audience, which you can begin targeting as soon as you have acquired 100 conversions.

With a decent enough budget, this should not take too long to pull off. If the cost per conversion is too high before you begin targeting lookalike audiences, it won’t have much of an effect on the long term profitability of your Facebook ad campaign.

Use Facebook Pixels

Facebook Pixel is capable of tracking the actions people take while on your website, and you can use this to retarget website visitors. Facebook Pixels has become incredibly popular with most businesses, and they are fully utilizing it to their advantage.

The installation for this program is simple to do, so you won’t have to worry about going through hoops to have it on your site. However, most businesses have only installed the base code for Facebook Pixel. While it’s a great start and does provide some astonishingly valuable data, it’s not accurately determining critical KPIs such as cost per purchase and cost per lead.

To get this kind of crucial information, you will want to add the event code.

The event code should be implemented to the thank you pages that people are taken to after they have conducted specific action. If someone inquiries through your website then, the thank you page should contain a lead event code. Thus, leads will be recorded inside your Facebook ad account. That allows you to instantly determine your cost per lead and see which campaigns, targeting options, ads, and so on, deliver the best possible results. Eventually, it will lead to you making seamless optimization for your ad campaign and getting more out of your advertising budget.

Casual Imagery

We talked about video advertising previously, so now it’s time to talk about static imagery used for Facebook ads. Similar to video, your static images do not have to look like they were taken professionally. What often works best on Facebook, or any other social media platform, are pictures that feel authentic and casual.

For this part, you should consider relaxing the imagery of your ads by a little bit. That way, you can see what kind of impact it will have on your advertising efforts.

Conclusion

Facebook continues to be one of the most crucial platforms out there for businesses to advertise their products and services. This social media giant doesn’t seem to be stopping its growth any time soon and will continue to improve each year. It is crucial to remain on top of any new updates Facebook has made to its platform.

Each update provides a chance for you to improve or implement new advertising strategies. These practices will surely help you remain on top of the game and stay ahead of the competition. So make sure to take advantage of each feature provided by Facebook and get your business rolling.

Have questions? Feel free to shoot Colette (Founder of Lightning AI) an email or comment on this article! Email: colette@lightningai.com