With 2.74 billion monthly active users and counting, Facebook still holds its most significant advantage: Scale.
It’s the world’s third most visited website, only beaten by Google and Youtube. If somebody is online, the chances are, they’ll visit Facebook. If they don’t, they’ll probably visit Instagram, owned by, you guessed it, Facebook.
The reach Facebook gives advertisers are still unparalleled, and it’ll likely stay this way for a long time.
To reach this massive audience, advertisers use placements. Placements are where your ads will show, and Facebook has A LOT of them on offer.
Here are all of the ad placements Facebook offers.
- Feeds
These ads appear as people scroll through their Facebook or Instagram feeds and inboxes on both mobile and desktop.
- Stories ads
Ads appear as full-screen vertical ads in between people’s stories.
- In-Stream ads
These appear while users consume video content on Facebook and Instagram.
- Search ads
These ads are shown alongside search results on Facebook and Marketplace.
- Message ads
These show as sponsored messages via Messenger
- In-article ads
These appear in Instant Articles within Facebook’s mobile app.
- Apps ads
These ads appear as native or video ads across apps on the Audience Network.
The list is pretty exhausting, with countless variations within each type of ad. It’s why we recommend using Automatic Placements. This displays your ads across all placements simultaneously for the same cost, optimising your budget.
Save yourself a lot of hassle with Automatic placements.
1. Targeting options
Facebook’s most potent benefit is perhaps the detailed targeting it offers you. Targeting allows you to efficiently spend your ad budget by breaking an audience down with factors such as demographics like age or location, ads they’ve clicked on, pages they engage with and even the mobile device that they use.
Using this data, you can pinpoint who to show your ads to. And, equally as necessary, who you DON’T want to see your ads. By targeting the right people, you’ll get higher conversions and more qualified leads.
With targeting, you can send specific ads to customers at different stages of the marketing funnel. For example, advertising a whitepaper or blog post to people who are likely to be at the top of the funnel. Then, as they go further down the funnel, you can advertise offers and products directly with much more success.
2. Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences lets you target people on Facebook who already know about your business. To create a Custom Audience, upload your first-party data, such as an email marketing list or a selection of previous customers.
Here are the sources you can use to build your Custom Audience:
Using your data, you can target specific segments within your existing audience, for example, customers who have purchased once but haven’t purchased again. Another option could be targeting customers with a high average order value with specific offers that they’re likely to want.
You can also use Custom Audiences to expand your custom by building Lookalike Audiences.
3. Lookalike audiences
Lookalike Audiences is a tool for finding a new audience that is very similar to your existing customers. By taking insight from your current audience, Facebook targets new audiences who are very likely to become customers.
Once you’ve built a custom audience, you can make a lookalike audience from it. For our Facebook ad campaigns, we start by targeting 1-3% of lookalikes. As these campaigns scale, we up the Lookalikes to 10%. This maximises the audience pool size and allows us to take advantage of Facebook’s machine learning to target the right audience pockets within that pool.
4. Robust Analytics
As the famed management consultant Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”.
As campaigns are a process with lots of variables at play, analysing what’s working and what isn’t is vital. Facebook clearly lays out all the metrics relating to your campaign’s performance in Ads Manager to help you with this. The insight gained from this in-depth analysis is invaluable to an effective Facebook marketing campaign.
These metrics include post engagement, conversion rates, sales and so much more. Using this analysis, you can refine your ads and focus on what works to boost your return on ad spend.
5. Reach more people with paid
In 2021, organic reach isn’t as effective as it once was. It’s actively on the decline thanks to changes in Facebook’s algorithms.
Facebook is a pay to win system. For potential customers to know about your business and consume your content, you must use ads. And if you know how to target the right people and create the content they want to see, you’ll stand out amongst your competitors and squeeze a tremendous amount of value from your ad spend.
By using paid ads, your content will reach more people than you ever could organically. Paid ads also allow you to scale your marketing efforts with ease.
