Facebook Advertising: Forced Upon Us, But it Works

They say 2014 will be the year of social media advertising, especially as Facebook decreases organic exposure for business pages while they continually refine and improve their advertising and targeting options. This is frustrating to those who’ve worked so hard to grow their page organically, but on the other hand, Facebook ads are driving real results.

Why Facebook Advertising?

• You won’t reach enough people without it. Unless you have millions of fans already, any small business is going to have a tough time making Facebook work as a marketing medium without paying*.
• In terms of exposure, it’s a lot more inexpensive than some other online advertising forms, like pay-per-click (Adwords).
• Facebook has a huge database with more personal information than users are probably comfortable with. But for marketers, it means your advertising can be that much more targeted.
• While Adwords works on a “search keyword” basis (for the most part), social media is all about demographics. So if you’re target market is middle-aged females who live in Ottawa and are interested in sports and active living, targeting them specifically is no problem.
• Cross-device and mobile support is a huge one. Social media usage is one of the main ways people use a mobile device, so placing your ad where their eyes are the most is incredibly relevant.
• Because of Facebook’s huge user base, it’s very likely your target market is here. It’s just a matter of finding out the best way of targeting them.

*Last year, the ‘organic exposure’ of a Facebook page was 16% (meaning that for any given post, on average 16% of fans would see it). This year it’s down to 6%.

This is unfortunate and frustrating news for those who have worked so hard to grow their Facebook presence organically, but that’s the choice Facebook has made in an effort to earn more advertising dollars. But in doing so, Facebook has also come a long way in making ads effective for advertisers. One of these improvements is configuring their advertising options not based on types, but objectives.

Facebook Advertising Options Objectives

• Clicks to Website – when you want to drive traffic to a website, this type of ad will be promoted through the news feed and will link off to your website when clicked.
• Get Page Likes – if your objective for now is just to grow your fan base, this option will show small image ads in the sidebar, optimized to get you more likes.
• Page Post Engagement –  you can pay to promote any particular post from your page so that more people see it. This post may be a photo, link, text, video, etc. And is designed to boost your Page’s engagement rate.
• Conversions – by placing a Facebook tracking code on your website, Facebook learns about your website conversions and automatically calculates the best bids to get you the most conversions at the best cost per conversion.
• Retargeting – by putting a special code on your website, once someone visits your site and then visits Facebook, they will be served ‘reminder ads’ from Facebook’s sidebar. It’s a great way to catch someone’s attention! This one isn’t actually done through Facebook’s ad system, but is through 3rd party vendors.
• Other – you can also create campaigns for the specific purpose of downloading apps, registering for events, claiming offers, etc.

Facebook Targeting Options

With Facebook ads, you can customize exactly who will see them through combinations of the following:

• Locations
• Demographics (age, sex, education, marital status, etc).
• Interests
• Behaviors (target mobile users, specific mobile devices, operating systems, travelers, etc).
• Your email lists*

Here is an example of demographic targeting where we might want to show an ad to educated baby boomers with a career in business. We’ve already selected people who fall under Education Level > College grad, and Industries > Management, with the ability to add further demographic targeting, such as Generation.

*Email lists can also be uploaded to the Facebook ad manager. So if you have a customer list you can upload it, wherein Facebook will match the emails to Facebook profiles, and will show ads specifically to people from your list! Even more so, you can create a ‘lookalike list’, where Facebook will find other people with similar profiles (locations, demographics, interests, and behaviours) as the people from your list, thus growing your target audience that easily!

Designing Facebook Ads

You can currently advertise any type of content on Facebook (text, image, video, website link, etc), but there are some guidelines, specifically for image ads…

Image ads can only contain 20% text.

Ad Placements

Furthermore, you can choose exactly where your ads are shown on Facebook:

Note the ability to only show the ad on mobile decides when connected using Wifi. If you’re advertising a video for instance, it’s reasonable to assume people are more likely to watch it if not using up their data.

Advertising Costs

Facebook works on a CPC (cost per click, whether website clicks, “likes”, etc) or CPM (cost per 1000 impressions/views), and cost per action. So you have the ability to control how you pay, plus there’s no minimum cost and you only pay for what you get.

The Results

The results you experience for your business will always depend on your target market, the nature of your business, and how effective your advertising and targeting is. That being said, we believe it’s always possible to make a Facebook ad campaign successful.

We’ve had success ourselves running Facebook ad campaigns for clients using the custom targeting by uploading email lists and creating ‘lookalike’ lists to essentially double or triple our target audience. When we asked the client where they were getting leads from that week, they said “Facebook, Facebook! Everyone is calling and saying they found us on Facebook.”

Interested in Facebook advertising, or other social media advertising? Get in touch.

Thanks for reading,

– Ryan