In part one of my Advanced Facebook Advertising in a Nutshell blog series I wrote about the vast amount of targeting options within Facebook’s Power Editor. To run a successful Facebook campaign you will need more than a highly targeted audience. You will want to make sure you’re A/B testing your ads, using the appropriate bidding strategy and measuring the performance of your campaign. Interested? Please keep reading.
Visuals and Copy
Your ad creative (visuals and copy) needs to knock it out of the park as well. While you’re still very much in control of your ad creative using the Boost Post button, you won’t be able to perform any A/B testing (or at least not in a very effective way). A/B testing is more important than most Facebook page managers think. I recommend testing your ad with at least two to three variations. Usually you’ll have a clear favorite after you’ve created your ads. Sometimes you might be torn between which ad you like best. But in the end it’s not about which ad you like best. It’s about which of your ads performs the best based on the goals you’re trying to accomplish.
With Power Editor you can also create multi-product ads. Multi-product ads let you display three to five images per ad. Think about it as a slideshow within your ad. The idea is to showcase several products with separate destination URL’s (landing pages) and headlines within the same ad, but it’s not only limited to products. You can choose any destination URL and image you’d like. You can showcase multiple blog posts, services, or any other form of online content.
More Flexible Bidding Strategies
Using a bidding strategy that fits your needs and your campaign goals is important and can improve the return on investment (ROI) on your advertising budget. Power Editor gives you several bidding options. Do you want to reach as many users and as often as possible? Do you want to reach as many users as possible but each user only once a day? Do you want to only show your ads to users Facebook determines likely to take a desired action? Do you only want to pay Facebook when a user clicks on your ad instead of paying for impressions? (Watch out! Clicking on your ad doesn’t necessarily mean this user is clicking through to your website.) You want to make sure to put some thought into which bidding strategy is the best fit for your current objective.
Goals and Conversion Tracking
Tracking your ad’s performance is imperative. How else would you know if your campaign was successful? Before you launch your campaign, you need to find out what your goals are and how to measure them.
Goals could be as simple as increasing your audience on Facebook (increasing fan count) or to get more exposure to your (new) target audience and increase engagement. As these are valid goals worth measuring (depending on your objective), there is no clear monetary value of new fan, a like, a comment or a share. Therefore, it’s tricky to calculate the real ROI on your ad.
It gets a lot easier to calculate ROI when you’re driving traffic to your website. Goals which a user completes on your website could be newsletter sign-ups, whitepaper downloads, online form submissions, or product purchases, just to name the most obvious. Facebook lets you create so called conversions pixels. Conversion pixels are snippets of code you add to specific pages of your website. As soon as a user, coming from a Facebook ad, visits the specific page and triggers the pixel, Facebook will record this action and add it to its performance report. You can even add a monetary value to each conversion pixel to easier calculate ROI on your advertising efforts.
Conclusion
If you want to get the most out of your Facebook advertising campaign, you’ll need to move on from the Boost Post button. Spend the time to learn the ins-and-outs of Power Editor or hire someone who truly knows how to run a Facebook advertising campaign. It will be worth the investment.
