Did you know Facebook has over one billion mobile daily users? And it keeps on growing year over year, which is great news for businesses that use Facebook ads.
Unfortunately, organic reach on Facebook has been declining over the years while paid posts, aka Facebook ads, have been growing at a tremendous pace. According to a SEC filing, Facebook’s U.S. ad revenue will be larger than the biggest traditional media companies trailing only behind Google.
Although it is still essential to have that organic content (non-paid posts), let’s focus on the reason Facebook ads matter to your business.
What are Facebook Ads?
Many might think that a business creates an ad on Facebook and it is only served to users on the Facebook app or desktop, but there is so much more to it! While you can create an ad and reach people on Facebook, the ad-buying platform also allows you to reach people while they aren’t on Facebook. This is Facebook’s Audience Network and it’s awesome.
The Facebook Audience Network is a collection of mobile apps where you can serve ads to people using the same targeting tactics you use on Facebook. People are on their mobile devices now more than ever so this option allows you to reach your audience while they are on other mobile apps not just the Facebook app.
Instagram is another app where you can purchase ads utilizing the Facebook advertising platform. Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion even though the platform had no revenue at the time (talk about a big investment!). I’m sure Facebook knew it was going to open up Instagram to advertisers and now I bet they are sitting pretty while the cold hard cash is rolling in.
How can you be sure you’re reaching the right audience?
Now that you can reach people on multiple platforms, how do you target your customers? Fortunately, Facebook has a plethora of ways to target people. Here are some of the top tactics
- Detailed Targeting: When creating an ad, you can select the location you want to target and then you can go into the type of person you want to reach. It’s crazy how specific you can get with Facebook’s targeting. For example, if you wanted to, you could target mothers with high school kids who have a household income over $100,000 and are fans of the San Francisco Giants. The possibilities are endless!
- Custom Audience: Have an email list of all your customers? Perfect! You can import that list to Facebook and then Facebook will find those people on its platform so you can market to them. Or if you want to target prospective customers who visited your website recently, you can reach them with the Facebook pixel. The pixel is a piece of code that you place on the backend of your website. This allows you to retarget people who have visited certain pages of your website.
- Lookalike Audience: If you create a custom audience in Facebook, you can then create a lookalike audience from your source audience. Facebook identifies common qualities of the people in your group like demographics and interests and then it finds people who are similar to them. This is a great way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business!
What types of Facebook ads are there?
There are so many different types of Facebook ads for a business to utilize. The most basic form of a Facebook ad is a “Boosted Post” where you can boost a Facebook post from your page to your Facebook fans. But here at JP, we like to develop and use stronger types of Facebook ads where we target specific types of people.
A lot of the Facebook ads I create utilize images and videos. When it comes to images, you can have one image in a post, or you can use multiple images in a post. The latter is known as a Carousel ad and it features scrollable images or even videos.
Many ads will have a call to action button that takes the potential customer to the business’s website. But there are so many other types of Facebook ads. You could even have an offer ad where you create limited-time discounts and promotions that people can claim online or at your store!
How do you measure Facebook ad results?
The great thing about Facebook ads is that you can see results in real time. If you want to see how many people your ad reached so far, Facebook can show you that. If you need to see how many people clicked your ad and was taken to your website, Facebook can show you that too. Or maybe you just want to see how many impressions your ad resulted in, you bet Facebook shows you that as well.
Not only can you see how many people you reached, how many clicks to your website, and how many impressions the ad resulted in, you can look at the cost per result. If your goal is to get people to your website, that will be the objective for the Facebook ad and it will show you the cost per click to your website. Or if your goal is for your ad to be seen by as many people as possible, you can optimize for impressions and see the cost per thousand impressions.
Facebook has been adding new types of ads over the years and it is ever changing so we make sure to stay on top of the trends. If you want to reach your audience online, I highly encourage you to add Facebook to your marketing mix. If you need some help, contact us to see what we can do for you!
