5 Tips For Getting The Most Out Of Your Facebook Ads

Despite what you think you know about Facebook, one thing is for certain: Mark Zuckerberg isn’t afraid to mix things up and try new strategies. That is especially true when it comes to advertising. If you don’t follow social networks closely, it’s easy to miss the newest advertising tools, tips, and changes (and trust us, they are ALWAYS changing).

The ever-changing strategies and tools of social media advertising are one of the things that make it so difficult and frustrating to business owners. You may be familiar with Facebook getting in trouble for their data collection. Ever since this investigation, Facebook has been forced to change many of it’s targeting and reporting options, and it seems as if they change something almost every week. While there are a number of things to do to help you get the most out of your Facebook ads, there are some basic changes that can be made today, to help your ad campaigns perform better today.1`

Let’s take a quick look at six things you can do to get more out of your Facebook campaign right now:

1. Don’t Let Facebook Do Your Bidding

No matter which type of Facebook ad you decide to run (page likes, awareness, conversions, event, app installs, etc.) you should pay close attention to the bidding rules. Facebook does a good job of disguising the manual budget and bids and may lead you to believe the only option is to let Facebook optimize your ad on a CPM basis. But this is not true. If you look closely and read the fine print, you’ll see that you can also select other bidding options, which is what experienced Facebook advertisers should be doing. The advanced model allows you to not only set your own CPM bids, but also to switch over to CPC, cost per landing page, cost per conversion, and other pricing models. In other words, Facebook is giving you the option; don’t let them do your bidding.

While the tool is very useful for almost all types of businesses, Facebook sells ad space to make money. While letting Facebook automate your bidding can be useful in saving time, if you don’t know what you are doing, you could be losing out on money. Having an experienced advertiser running your ads will help you to achieve the lowest cost per desired result and is recommending over machine automation.

If you’ve got an app, and you’re advertising on Facebook, you should be taking advantage of Mobile App Install Ads. Facebook ads show a great click-through rate and return on certain placements that only Facebook offers, such as Sponsored Stories . By using these placements, you are increasing the chances that users interact with your ads, as these placements tend to come off as more organic. By running sponsored ads that appear organic, rather than sales-y, businesses see a high return on their ad spend, especially on mobile devices.  And if you can get those clicks on mobile, it only makes sense to get users to download your app. E-commerce pros know that when users download a retailer’s app, it usually leads to a lot more spending.

If you don’t know by now, you should. It is extremely important to test different creative, creative types, copy, headlines, and landing pages to determine what is most effective. But never stop with just two versions of your creative. Just because one creative beat another in an A/B test doesn’t’ mean you’ve optimized your campaign. The best practice with any advertising campaign is to use at least three different ads for the same campaign. And don’t’ assume you’re done at that point. You’ve got to take the time to look over the data every day and then to test the best performing ad against a new set of creatives. Real optimizing takes real work, but it always pays off.

Fairly recently, Facebook took a page out of Google’s advertising book. One of the biggest developments in display advertising came when Facebook rolled out the Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX). In most ways, FBX operates like a traditional exchange with marketers bidding in real-time to serve impressions to individual users based on their online behavior. Early reports suggest that campaign running on FBX are producing extremely high ROIs.

One of the biggest drawbacks, though, to Facebook is not being able to use their data. To take advantage of FBX, you have to come to the table with your own data and work with the DSPs that Facebook has integrated into FBX. Although, once you’ve found a vendor, extending your current remarking audiences to the FBX can drive significantly more results.

Just because Facebook isn’t supplying the amount or exact data that you want (remember, they were investigated by the US government for their data policies which had led to subpar reporting), that doesn’t mean you can target your campaigns with precision. Sometimes, Facebook campaigns just require a quick workaround. There are a number of tools that exist on the market today that provide workarounds for some of the more frustrating limitations of Facebook advertising. There are tools that help to provide better reporting that Facebook will allow, tools that help to discover interest targeting that are not readily available to everybody, tools to help gauge how successful your creative is and more. Some of the tools are free and some of them are incredibly expensive, so knowing what you want and what you need it for is very important.

By following these tips you’ll be on your way to a great Facebook campaign. But once you’re up and running, don’t relax for too long. It’s only a matter of time until Facebook changes things again. That’s why we are here. We here at Oamii are one of the top social media marketing companies in Florida. Contact us today if you are looking for social media marketing in West Palm Beach or the surrounding areas.