Facebook Advertising … Ten things everyone should know about Facebook advertising
1 Facebook is Huge …

Let’s face it Facebook is huge. According to the latest financial returns for the first quarter of 2018, Facebook is now claiming 1.4 billion daily average users (DAUs) and 2.2 billion monthly average users. (MAUs)

Advertising revenues in the first quarter were $12 billion dollars. For the latest twelve month period, revenues were almost $45 billion dollars. Facebook is the dominant on line advertising platform.

2 Facebook is not just about B2C …

We used to think of Facebook as predominantly an advertising tool for the B2C market. No longer is this the case. More business pages and more business owners identified (and profiled) as Facebook users means that Facebook is now an important B2B advertising option.

3 Facebook Advertising is easy to set up …

Setting up an ad campaign with Facebook is easy. Using the FB Ad manager or Hootsuite’s AdExpresso it is relatively straightforward to set up a campaign. Facebook is designed to make spending your ad money so easy and it is.

4 The Rules of FB ads, are pretty straightforward …

The four guiding principles of Facebook advertising are straight forward …

Visual … Attention
The ads must offer a highly engaging photo, copy light with no more than a 20% word density. Facebook is looking for an attractive content flow across the page. Ad visuals with too many words across the shot will be rejected.

Valuable … Interest
The ad promise should be valuable to the target audience, identifying the “What’s in it for me” proposition and ensure it is delivered.

Relevant … Desire
The ads must be relevant to the audience. The key is the product offer and the audience definition using the detailed and specific FB features on socio-demographics, location and interest groups.

Clear Call to Action … Action
The ads must offer a clear call to action. Specific and well defined. Using a “Button” option to boost traffic to a page, web site or event.

5 Marketing Principles Apply …
FB may offer a new platform but the old rules of advertising still apply. The ads should be part of an integrated marketing campaign. Make sure your FB page or company page is well designed and up to date as part of that campaign.

Make sure you know who you are trying to reach.
What is your specific audience? Where are they located geographically? Can you define by location, age, family relationships, hobbies, interests and type of business. FB makes it so easy to set up a specific audience campaign. You can also import an email data base for example to create a mirrored or look a like audience as part of the campaign development.

What is it you are trying to achieve …?
Make sure you know, what it is you are trying to achieve. Is it traffic to a business page, a Facebook page, a web site page, an app or an event? Do you simply want to develop brand or product awareness as part of a wider influence campaign?

What is the action outcome you seek to achieve …?
What is the action outcome you would seek to secure from the campaign? Is it likes, engagement, ticket sales or revenue. FB is great to identify cost of acquisition and ROI the return on investment for any goal set. Make sure you know what it is you are trying to achieve and measure the performance (Your KPIS and ROIs.)

6 Budget …?
Identify how much you are prepared to spend and over what period. FB will give guidelines on the size of audience defined and the coverage that may be achieved over the campaign period.

7 How much should you spend. …?
We measure our campaigns in terms of coverage and frequency. Don’t try to hit too large an audience with your campaign plans, unless you have huge budgets.

Working with a segmented audience of say 100,000 is better that targeting the near 40 million FB users in the UK with your first campaign. Quantify the audience and work out what kind of performance you would like to achieve.

8 Measure your campaign impact!
This bit is a little geeky but is the most important of all …
Track the performance of Reach, Impressions and Frequency identified in the FaceBook campaign overview. Understand the mechanics of the process.

Reach divided by audience size is a measure of the campaign coverage of your target audience.

Impressions is a measure of the OTS or Opportunities To See the “reached audience” have had to see the ad..

Impressions divided by reach is the measure of frequency. ie the number of times the “reached audience” have seen the ad.

Measure the campaign impact. Frequency times coverage is a measure of the campaign impact achieved during the campaign.

Using a carefully segmented audience, we are able to achieve an 80% coverage with a 5 times OTS. This gives us a campaign impact of 400 Gross Rating Points. That is a bog campaign weight over a four week period. How do we do that?

9 Want to know more …?
Join us at the Big Social Media Conference on the 6th July. Our experts are on hand to ensure you get the most out of your Facebook Advertising Campaigns.

10 There’s always more to learn …

JKA