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Beginner's guide to advertising on Facebook

Guide to Facebook advertising

With its enormous user base and extensive targeting options, Facebook is perhaps the best option when it comes to attracting qualified leads to your page or site. In this blog post we’ll look at the basics of a successful advertising campaign on Facebook.

With over 1 billion active daily users, advertising on Facebook is big business. In 2010, the social media giant generated $1.974 billion in advertising revenue. By 2014, that number had increased to $12.466 billion.

The reason for this is that Facebook is an advertiser’s dream. Users volunteer all kinds of useful information, from interests and hobbies to demographic data, allowing marketers to seek out only the most qualified prospects with their adverts.

It’s a powerful tool but having so many options can be overwhelming. With that in mind, here are the basic features to consider when advertising on Facebook.

Goal

The first question you’ll be asked to consider when setting up Facebook ads is the objective of your campaign. As well as obvious goals like promoting your page and directing people to your website, marketers are also able to:

  • Increase conversions on your website
  • Get installs of your app
  • Raise attendance of your event
  • Get people to claim your offer
  • Collect leads for your business

On an e-commerce site, for example, your best bet for a simple campaign is to send people directly to your website. However, it is possible to improve the performance of your campaign if your objective is to increase sales by selecting Increase conversions on your website.

Selecting this option requires you to include some JavaScript code on your website – the Facebook pixel – to allow for better tracking of visitors from Facebook. If you don’t want to do this, you can simply select Send people to your website and use your own analytics tools to determine conversion rates and ROI.

For most B2B marketers, Collect leads for your business is likely to be a more attractive goal than direct conversions from Facebook. Selecting this option allows you to include a CTA in your advert where users can provide answers to customisable questions.

advertising-on-facebook-lead-form-example

These kinds of ads are great for attracting new subscribers to your blog, getting prospects to sign up for your event, or getting them to download an ebook or white paper.

Targeting

This is the big one and the main selling point of Facebook advertising: the ability to target highly specific groups of users.

advertising-on-facebook-targeting-example

As well as targeting users based on geographic location, age, gender and the language they speak, Facebook also allows for more detailed targeting. Put simply, this covers:

  • Demographics
  • Interests
  • Behaviours
  • More categories

The range of options and sub-options included in these targeting categories is very extensive.

Under demographics, for example, you can select people based on financial factors such as income or net worth. You can even select based on generation: baby boomers, generation X and millenials.

The options for targeting based on interests are equally comprehensive. Not only can you select an audience who are interested in fitness and wellness, for example, you can be even more specific. The sub-options in this category include but are not limited to:

  • Bodybuilding
  • Meditation
  • Nutrition
  • Running
  • Yoga
  • Zumba

Facebook's extensive database of information allows targeting to be very specific. Information even extends to user behaviours and Facebook has buyer profiles ranging from DIYers to fashionistas. Now that Facebook reactions are available, it probably won't be long before you can target users based on personality and temperament too.

The sheer range of options means this is likely to be one of the most time-consuming aspects of your advertising campaign. Be sure to tweak and experiment with these options to improve the ROI of your campaign.

Advert types

Once you've decided on your target audience and the goal of your campaign, it's time to create the advert itself.

There are two main types of adverts on Facebook: single image and multi-image (carousel).

Single image ads are pretty self explanatory. Multi-image adverts allow you to include 3-5 images, videos, headlines and links that cycle through in a single advert space. They don't cost any more than single image ads and are great for showcasing multiple products or the variety of features of a single product.

The specifications for adverts are as follows:

  • Single image ads
    • Text: 90 characters
    • Link title: 25 characters
    • Image ratio: 1.91:1
    • Image size: 1200 pixels x 627 pixels
  • Multi-image ads
    • Recommended image size: 600 x 600 pixels
    • Image ratio: 1:1
    • Text: 90 characters
    • Headline: 40 characters
    • Link description: 20 characters
    • Your image may not include more than 20% text

Placement

As for where your ads are placed, the main options are featuring it in the main news feed or in the right hand column.

Since the right-hand column isn't available on mobile, specifying that your advert is featured here means it won't feature on these devices. And with 934 million users accessing Facebook on mobile devices daily, you'll be missing out on a large number of potential impressions by opting for adverts in the right-hand column rather than News Feed. What's more, News Feed adverts see higher engagement and better click-through rates than adverts in the right-hand column.

advertising-on-facebook-placements-example

You can also specify that your advert be included on Instagram via Facebook, something definitely worth considering.

If you want to extend the reach of your adverts further, selecting Audience Network will mean your ads are featured in compatible mobile apps outside of Facebook.

Budget

Once you've covered these areas, you're almost good to go live!

Finally, you can specify either a daily budget for your campaign or a lifetime budget. A daily budget will ensure that Facebook caps your advert spending per day. A lifetime budget means that Facebook will pace your budget over the time period you set the advert to run for.

That's it! Like with any marketing campaign, be sure to test, tweak and improve the features of it to get the most out of advertising on Facebook.

LexisClick is a provider of inbound marketing and social media management services based in Bournemouth. If you’re looking to use Facebook to achieve your marketing goals, please get in touch on 01202 788333 or marketing@lexisclick.com.

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