Posted on July 27, 2010 by According to recent stats, 1 in every 5 display ad is served within Facebook. That’s an incredible achievement for the social networking platform, which now boasts over 500m users.
There must be a reason why there’s so much advertising money pouring into Facebook, so if you want to find out what all the fuss is about, and would like to try it out, read on.
Set your expectations
Before you get going with Facebook, you need to set yourself some realistic expectations about the environment. If you’re from a search background, you need to radically downgrade your opinion of what a good Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate is.
With search, you’re giving people a product they’re actually looking for. Within Facebook, you’re catching them whilst they’re doing something else. They might fit your target market – and be potential buyers of your product – but they’re busy speaking to friends, looking at photos, spending some leisure time. So they’re much less receptive to your ad, and are less likely to be impressed by it. And they’re not in the environment to be ‘warmed up’ to your message.
So whilst your PPC search campaign may well achieve a CTR of 5% and a conversion rate of 5%, Facebook Ads are more likely to have a CTR of 0.05% and a conversion rate of nearer 1%.
Set some goals
There are plenty of ads within Facebook that have traditional goals. These ads lead to traditional websites, with a message and a call to action.
But some of the more successful Facebook advertising drives traffic towards a brand’s social media, be that another Facebook page, a group, or even an application.
Here the goal is more long term: the creation of a relationship between the brand and the individual, and the hope of some longer term sales. Marketers may well set their goal as a specific increase in the number of Fans or Follows.
For either method, you need to set your goal and relate it back to some financials. That’s easy for the traditional ad linking to a website – you should set a CPA and ROI value you want to hit. But for the latter, you need to place a value on having a fan, and what those fans do in terms of either buying from you or recommending you to others.
Set a CPC and a budget
Integral to defining your financials is setting a budget and maximum CPC. You should set the CPC much lower than the amount you are prepared to pay for a click from search, since the conversion rate will be lower. Once the system works out how many clicks your ad generates it may well push up the CPC you have to pay in order to get traffic.
As with AdWords, set the budget at a level that will not limit your exposure. A campaign that gets suspended because it hits a daily cap is not making efficient use of the platform.
Creative must-haves
This might be obvious, but ads with images get a much higher CTR than those without. Try to make the image intriguing – not just your logo – but at the same time it’s got to relate to your brand and product too.
Your message should follow similar rules to AdWords creative. Avoid excessive punctuation. Write clearly in correct English. Highlight benefits. And add urgency with your call to action.
Make sure you track your ad with a parameter. If you measure your campaigns with Google analytics just use the URL Builder. The chances are that you will be testing out a variety of creatives with a range of targeting options. Be sure to give each ad a unique tracking link to make optimisation much easier.
Reaching the right target market – demographics
Facebook lets you target your audience using some very precise targeting tools. You can choose from:
location
demographic
language
and you then get to delve into the keywords that people use to describe what they like.
Reaching the right target market – likes and interests
If your target market should be into fashion, it might be that they include words like ‘fashion’ and ‘clothes’ in their interests, so make sure you add them. But also try adding brand names too, even if they compete with your own. As you type your keywords, Facebook will make suggestions – so where relevant try to include those too.
Reaching the right market – Connections
Within Facebook, you can choose to target particular people who are only connected to a group or Facebook page that you look after, which means that you can actively reach out to your current audience.
Unless you’ve got a new product and want to get people back to your page or site, you might consider this a waste of money, so try excluding users with this connection.
Another option is to target ‘friends of connections’, so that your will be reaching out to those users who are connected to people that are already fans of your Facebook page. This is a really powerful feature: your users have probably mentioned you and your products in passing, which will have spiked their friend’s interest. When they see your ad, it acts to jog the memory and get them to your site. You’ve reached that user through word of mouth AND advertising, and they will be much more likely to buy.
Testing
The great thing about having so many targeting options is that you can test the performance of one audience against another. If you’re not sure whether you want to target web designers or web developers, then set up identical campaigns, creatives and targeting options but focus one around web designers and the other for web developers. Then measure the results you get from each.
This example is just a simple A/B, but the chances are that you have lots of different targeting options to test. Sketch out all the different options and go through testing each one.
This might seem laborious, but the prize is large: If you crack Facebook as an advertising platform, the potential to scale is huge.
Do you like my advertising?
You may have noticed that it’s possible for users to ‘like’ adverts without actually clicking on them. Aside from adding that advertiser to the list of likes within a users’ profile, it’s not completely clear what it means to an advertiser whose adverts are ‘liked’. Facebook themselves don’t say, but the chances are that if not already, it will have an impact on a ‘quality score’ that means your advert has a greater chance of being shown, and at a lower CPC.
Given this, ask your friends or followers to ‘like’ the ad if they see it – you may see the benefits later on.
That’s it
Facebook advertising can offer you the potential to reach a huge audience with some quite advanced targeting tools. Follow this guide to give you campaigns a good start. Think I’ve missed something? Leave us a comment below.
