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You’ve heard about brands that turn to Facebook to increase their audience, sales, and site traffic. Businesses have praised Facebook’s approach to advertising for its simplicity, diverse amount of options, and strong results.
But is Facebook really worth using to advertise in 2021, or is it too good to be true?
We’re here to report some good news: Yes, Facebook ads do really work. The social networking site truly is the opportunity to grow your brand that you’ve been waiting for. Read below to learn about why and how Facebook ads work, and what you can do to maximize your success on the platform.
How Social Media is Correlated to Business Success
Social media has never been more vital for businesses. There are plenty of reasons you should give your brand an advertising presence on social networking sites like Facebook, if you haven’t already.
Here are a few stats that should convince you:
Facebook has more than 7 billion monthly users – that’s a huge pool of people to advertise to.
30% of online shoppers say they would likely buy from a social networking website
Facebook is a particularly popular social network for shoppers: 85% of all sales on social media come from Facebook, according to Shopify
Worried that your business is too small or niche-driven to make an impact on Facebook? Think again. Facebook reports that two-thirds of its users visit a small business’ page at least once a week.
It’s clear that Facebook is extremely popular for brands, whether you run a local shop or a massive retailer.
The Purpose of Advertising on Facebook
No matter what your objective is, there’s a way to advertise on Facebook that sends you towards achieving your goals at rocket speed. In fact, Facebook allows you to select an objective at the beginning of your ad campaign, and it tailors your options towards what you’re looking for. Here are three goals that might be on your mind.
Raise Awareness and Interest
Hoping to make a name for your brand? Want everyone in your target audience to become familiar with your business? Facebook’s set of Awareness objectives can help.
Raise Consumer Consideration of Your Product/Service
You can stroke Facebook users’ curiosity and encourage them to learn more about your business. Whether you want to increase traffic, engagement, or a few other specific user actions, Facebook’s set of Consideration objectives has it covered.
Conversions
If you want to take things to the next step by turning followers into buyers or loyal customers, Facebook’s set of Conversion objectives are for you.
What Level of Commitment and Know-How are Required to Advertise on Facebook?
You don’t have to be an advertising expert to find success on Facebook. Luckily, Facebook has plenty of easy-to-use tools and techniques for optimizing your ads – and you can learn more about them here.
How to Know If Your Facebook Ads are Working
Metrics Involving User Actions
Ads Manager offers more metrics than you can count. It’s up to you to decide which metrics you consider important, but three in particular can indicate whether or not your money is being well spent.
Click Through Rating (CTR) is typically represented as the percentage of people who clicked on your ad out of everyone who saw it. In other words, it is the ad’s link clicks divided by the ad’s impressions. On its own, this metric is used to determine how effectively your ad drives traffic to your page or website.
Cost Per Action (CPA) is a useful payment setting that ensures that you will only pay for the actions that viewers actually take on your ad. This is one of many settings that Facebook allows you to choose from when determining how much you will contribute to your ad in the ad auction. This setting can also be used as a metric to help you understand how much you are paying for each action.
Cost Per Click (CPC) is a metric that shows you, on average, how much you are paying each time a user clicks on a link. Specifically, it is the total amount spent divided by the number of link clicks.
You can use these metrics in conjunction with each other to learn more about the effectiveness of your campaign. Consider your CPC and CTR numbers. If your CPC is a high dollar amount, but your CTR shows that few people are clicking on your ad, you’re spending a lot of money on something that isn’t working. Ultimately, all three of these numbers are worth paying attention to.
Ad Relevance Diagnostics
What makes an ad relevant? You want your ad to perform well, but it can be hard to determine why it produces the results that it does. That’s where the Ad Relevance Diagnostics feature comes in. This tool can “diagnose” an ad in three ways, allowing you to determine specifically why an ad might be underperforming, if at all.
Specifically, the three rankings your ad is given are:
Conversion Rate Ranking – This ranking compares your ad’s conversion results to other ads with the same objective and target audience. Conversion rate refers to the rate at which the audience completes a particular task determined by your objective: for example, clicking on a link or making a purchase.
Engagement Rate Ranking – This ranking compares your ad’s engagement rate to other ads with the same audience. Engagement includes clicks, reactions, comments, and more.
Quality Ranking – This ranking compares the quality of your ad compared to ads with the same audience. Quality refers to a combination of factors including feedback from Facebook users, and automatic assessments that look for language or baiting techniques.
These three rankings can give you a sense of why your ad is performing the way it is. Facebook has created a chart that determines a recommended route of action depending on how an ad ranks across these categories, and you can read it here.
It’s possible for an ad that is performing well to rank low in these diagnostics. Remember that your ads should be crafted to meet your objectives rather than for the purpose of ranking high among these categories.
Easy Ways to Create Effective Facebook Ads
When you create your ads, you’ll want to consider the factors that make an ad resonate with Facebook users. Luckily, plenty of market research points to key factors that create great ads, and we’ve assembled a list of essentials below.
Facebook ads have the best chance at success if:
They Target a Specific Audience
Facebook has more than 2 billion users, and you can’t possibly target all of them. That’s why targeting the right audience is important. Facebook’s audience-targeting tools are extremely useful, and offer a few different ways to define your audience. You can select demographics that are important to you, find Facebook users who have previously interacted with your business off the platform, and even find users who are similar to your existing customers.
They Are Relevant To That Audience
According to Hootsuite, the Average Facebook user commented five times, liked 12 posts, shared one post, and liked one page in October 2020. What this means is that most users don’t actually engage with that much content, so you can conclude that they’re most likely to engage with content that is actually relevant to them.
Figuring out what makes content relevant isn’t always easy. Check out our section of ad relevance diagnostics above to learn how you can fine-tune your ads to increase their relevance.
There Are Strong Visuals
Avoid focusing too much on the copy of your ad. Studies show that social media users are drawn to strong visuals. That’s probably why Facebook suggested that including a photo in your ad could drive up your traffic by 75%.
Read more about Facebook’s recommended practices for photo ads.
The Visuals and Copy Support Each Other
What’s the point of having strong visuals and a strong written component if they aren’t related? Make sure that these elements flow from one to another. If you’re not sure how to do this, think of how these elements combine to tell a story and illustrate your visitors’ satisfaction. In fact, this is always a good practice: one study suggests that ad campaigns are more likely to turn a viewer into a paying customer if they tell a story before pointing the viewer to a CTA.
Make sure you don’t overpower your image with text. Facebook can find text within your images, and when it detects that there is a lot of it, it will show your ad to fewer users.
The Ad Provides Enticing Value Proposition
Value proposition refers to the aspect of your advertisement that identifies how your product or service will directly benefit your customer. In other words, it is your main selling point. A 30% discount code, free gift for new sign-ups, or feature that customers can only get from your business are all solid examples.
It’s important to work this thinking into your ad campaign, and emphasize your value proposition. After all, one study reports that 4 out of 5 readers will only look at the headline. That’s a massive subset of Facebook users – make sure they’re left with your strongest selling point.
There is a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
CTAs are easy to customize, and they’re a must for any successful web campaign. In fact, adding a CTA to your Facebook page can increase your click-through rate by a whopping 285%.
The Takeaway
Now that you’ve learned how Facebook ads can transform your brand’s success, it’s time to launch your first ad campaign on the platform. Consider our tips above for ads that make an impact, and you’ll question why you ever doubted the social media giant.
The word “here” should be hyperlinked to the not-yet-published TRND article with Tools and Techniques for optimization on FB
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