With 22% of the world’s population having an account with Facebook and 76% of them visiting the site daily, it doesn’t take rocket science to understand why Facebook advertising should be integral to the marketing strategy of your business. In fact, more than 2 million businesses are already using Facebook for advertising and 96% of social media marketers consider Facebook as the most effective digital advertising platform with respect to ROI.
Why should your business be left behind? Now, if you are wondering how to start advertising on Facebook, here is what you should know.
Table of Contents
1. Audience Creation
In order to market your business effectively on Facebook, you need to define your target audience profile. Facebook can help you to create granular Custom Audience, depending on their location, age, gender, interests, brand connections, education, job titles and groups they follow. You can even upload your email list to be more specific in defining the audience.
However, you can also create Lookalike Audience, which comprises users that have similar profile as that of the Customer Audience pool.
2. Campaign Objective and Types of Ads
Facebook can run different types of ads, however, you need to select the one which best suits your campaign objectives:
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- App Installs: get people to install your app.
- Brand awareness: reach out to people whom you want to know about your brand.
- Conversions: optimize your ad to get people to take specific actions on your website, such as buying a product, participate in an event, or signing up for a newsletter.
- Engagement: boost your ad to engage audience through likes, comments, shares and photo views.
- Lead Generation: collect information on potential customers.
- Reach: reach out to people near your business.
- Store-visits: drive customers to your physical shop.
- Traffic: drive people to particular sections of your website.
- Video Views: Advertise your story through a video.
3. Ad Placement
While you can leave it to Facebook to automatically choose the placement of your ad, it is recommended that you do it manually. So, whether you want people to see your ads in mobile phone newsfeed, desktop newsfeed, Instagram or audience network, right column, videos or messenger, you can select everything on your own.
4. Budget
Based on the total marketing budget can you afford to allocate to Facebook advertising, you can set a daily or lifetime budget for the ad/campaign, along with their start and end date. This way, you can ensure that you are spending wisely and also track the expenditure effectively.
5. Tracking Ad Effectiveness Through Pixels
Pixel is the most powerful feature of Facebook, which lets you know how your ads are performing and whether they are fulfilling desired objectives. It is basically a snippet of code, which after installing on our website, can help you track users and their behavior. Without it, it would be impossible to measure your ads!
Earlier, Facebook offered two types of pixels:
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- Conversion Tracking Pixel tracked visitors that visited your website and let you know what actions they are taking/how they are converting – if they buying a product or subscribing to your newsletter. The actual conversions gave an idea of ROI and success of the ad.
- Website Custom Audience Pixel records all Facebook IDs of all users that visited your website and allow you to retarget/remarket to them later.
However, both these pixels were quite confusing to understand for Facebook marketers. So, in 2015, Facebook replaced both pixels with one single feature called Facebook Pixel. Now, you no longer required to implement both Conversion Tracking and Website Custom Audience Pixel
The new Facebook Pixel has conversion tracking, optimization, and remarketing, all rolled into one. Facebook explains the new Pixel very appropriately:
“When someone visits your website and takes an action…the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. This way, you’ll know when a customer took an action after seeing your Facebook ad. You’ll also be able to reach this customer again by using a Custom Audience. When more and more conversions happen on your website, Facebook gets better at delivering your ads to people who are more likely to take certain actions. This is called conversion optimization.”
Let’s now understand the primary features of the new Facebook Pixel.
6. Build Website Custom Audience
Wouldn’t you want to bring back the customers who visited your website, but left without completing an action? Facebook Pixel does exactly that by retargeting customers who abandoned the shopping cart, didn’t sign up for the newsletter or didn’t fill the contact form.
However, instead of targeting individual users (which becomes impossible if the number is in the thousands!), it populates a group of users that fall into a common group, and share common profile or behavior based on the pages they visited or didn’t on your website. These customers are your Website Custom Audience.
For instance, users who visited the product page in the last one week, or users who have not visited your website in the last three months.
You can create multiple Website Custom Audiences, and advertise to them accordingly.
Facebook Pixel also lets you create Lookalike Audience to get more value out of new customer acquisition campaigns.
7. Use Custom Conversion
If you want to track several pages using the same standard event, you can use Facebook Pixel to create Custom Conversions for each page with the help of URLs. This way, you would be able to view the performance of each page individually without changing the pixel code on each page.
You can select a completion page which could be something like ‘Thank you for subscribing to our email list’ or ‘Thank you for your order’, and then, name the conversion. Now, you can easily test the effectiveness of different campaigns and create campaigns that target different groups. In fact, you can develop Custom Conversions independently of ads and put them to use at a later date. Another beauty of Custom Conversions is that once you create them, they will be tracked for all your ads, irrespective of the fact whether you choose to optimize them or not.
There are various categories to choose from in Custom Conversions – lead, purchase, search, view content, add to cart, complete registration, add to wishlist, initiate checkout and add payment info.
8. Standard Events
Now, while Custom Conversions are a great feature, there are two major limitations. It allows to create only 40 Custom Conversions and can’t be used with dynamic product ads. So, when you want to overcome these drawbacks, the nine Standard Events can come to your rescue. The only thing is that you will have to do a bit of editing of the website’s code. However, since Standard Events fire only when the event takes place, it is lesser prone to errors.
Click here for Facebook Pixel Implementation Guide.
