What Are Facebook Ads?
Well, Facebook ads are exactly what they sound like – ads that appear on Facebook. These appear in the news feed or in the right column regardless of the device you’re using, whether it be mobile or desktop. If you’re using the social media network on a desktop computer, ads will appear both in the news feed and on the right column.
As for what the ads are, they are nearly anything you can dream or scheme up for your business. Creating ads for Facebook is akin to creating ads for any other platform. Though they have character limits for text, Facebook ads can be built using stock or original images and whatever text copy you create.
Why Have They Become So Important?
There are many reasons why Facebook ads have become important. To start, paid online searches help guide prospective customers to your business while paying for social media reach helps you find customers. The key behind this is targeting specific audiences. But everything starts with deciding on your campaign objective or what you want the ads to really accomplish.
The decline of organic reach has also shifted the focus to paying for ads. Since October 2013, Facebook has put a near stranglehold on organic reach. Instead, marketers tactics have been shifted to ‘pay to play’ though the official company stance is not the case. The decline in organic reach can mostly be attributed to the sheer increase in the volume of content being published and continuous changes to the algorithms behind what you see on your news feed.
Boasting a global audience of 1.5 billion people, the global reach and audience size for Facebook have made ads important. The platform continually aligns with changing media consumption habits and consumer technology habits such as the shift to mobile. In its 2015 third quarter earnings report, Facebook said the number of daily active users using mobile increased 27 percent year over year.
How Does a Campaign Work?
A campaign is a broad word encompassing everything you’ll have or need when using Facebook ads. Before you begin, you’ll want to have a predetermined objective or end goal before starting the campaign. Do you have a new product or product line you’re looking to expose and promote? Or maybe your website has had a complete remodel and your business would like to hold a virtual open house for your customers. Facebook offers several ad options such as page likes, click to website, offers, and local awareness. Without an objective or goal, the campaign will be for naught.
When it comes time to set your audience, this is where your buyer personas could come in handy. However, it’s not a requirement to use your buyer personas, especially if you’re trying to build awareness and exposure for your business. If you do use a custom or targeted group, Facebook will allow you to save these for future campaigns.
Facebook does take into consideration most companies work within budget limitations and offers two options – daily and lifetime. Daily is used for ad sets that run continuously through each day of the campaign, with Facebook setting the pace for spending each day. The second option, lifetime, allows Facebook to dole out the set budget amount over the ‘lifetime’ of the campaign.
For creating the ad, its final look will depend on what your overall objective is. Single image ads are called ‘links’ while multi-image ads are ‘carousels’ as the chosen images scroll automatically. Before publishing the ads, you’ll get a preview of how it will look on the three ad locations. This will let you adjust or tweak anything from the text to the image being used until you’re satisfied with it.
With so many options and abilities to create successful ad campaigns, Facebook would be remiss if they didn’t provide a way to gauge and follow your work. The ad manager gives a person or business an overview of each campaign they are or have ran. Reach, frequency, and cost are the most commonly sorted metrics from campaigns. Frequency means the average number of times a user sees your ad and is also equal to impressions.
Why Should My Business Consider Using Facebook Ads?
Well, above all, it just works. Think of the amount of time you spend on social media, even if you’re an anomaly who doesn’t spend an average of 1.72 hours on social media each day, according to Inc. Facebook earns, on average, 40 minutes of that time each day. Then, there’s the fact that organic reach has been reduced to nearly nothing on Facebook.
Pay to play has become the near norm for getting your business or product in front of your Facebook audience. In a January 2016 article on Facebook ads, Inc. found that less than .5 percent of your Facebook fans will see your updates organically. That’s half of a percent. As of the writing of this blog, we at Elevare have 1,421 fans for our Facebook page. Using the calculator on a cell phone and reaching back to a long gone math class, 1,421 multiplied by .005 is 7.1 people who see updates regularly through organic reach. While we are very appreciative of those 7.1 people, we also know reaching less than 10 people about our business won’t work very well or long for growth.
With everyone’s nose seemingly buried in a smart phone or device, take advantage of the fact we conduct so much of our lives from our hands. Using a call now button on a Facebook ad removes fumbling between screens or with a phone to manually enter a business’s number to call. Facebook ads also allow for easy A/B testing. You’ve already determined what audience you want to target for your campaign, but feel like they could really respond to one ad over another. Enter A/B testing. Though you’ll create two ads, you can split the two among the chosen audience and see which engages more.
Elevare Can Help
It doesn’t matter if you’re considering using Facebook ads for the first or fourteenth time, Elevare can give you a helping hand. With so many ways to tailor an ad or an entire campaign, we can assist you from start to finish, and celebrate alongside as the results start pouring in. Along with creating ad campaigns, Elevare offers social media management for businesses of all sizes. Contact us to get a winning campaign for your business going!
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