Digital savvy businesses understand that the game of increasing online exposure often means businesses must “pay to play.” Many companies with a strong online presence typically also have a solid digital advertising campaign backing it.
While SEO and organic social media engagement should always be part of your digital marketing mix, we like to think of those elements as your long game. The short game is all about digital advertising. And Facebook ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to get targeted, timely and trackable results.
Every day, the Fly Pages crack team of digital ad specialists leap into action, delivering Facebook ads that get our clients noticed. In this month’s blog post, we chat with Stefanie Clynes, one of our ad experts, and get her insight into some of our most frequently asked questions about advertising on Facebook.
Q: How do you choose a Facebook ad campaign objective?
A: It all depends on your goal. Facebook has 1.79 billion daily users, which gives companies plenty of opportunities to create ads on the platform that will get impressions, drive traffic, create leads and so much more.
Traffic and conversions are some of the most common objectives. If we want to send people to a landing page, for example, our objective would be traffic. For lead generation, there is actually a form you can create directly on Facebook. A campaign objective for conversions will get people to take specific action, but be aware that you have to set up custom conversions on the website you’re sending people to in order to gather the data.
Q: When would you use the Campaign Budget Optimization option?
A: Campaign budget optimization is great if you’re creating multiple ad sets within a campaign that are all running at the same time. Say you have multiple images – one photo with people and one without. You can test which one is performing better, and then Facebook will automatically put more budget into the ad set with higher performance.
Q: Should you choose a daily budget or one that will run the lifetime of the Facebook ad?
A: Again, everything depends on your goals, but I like the lifetime budget. A daily budget is capped. But there are days when users will be on the platform more than others. Say, there’s a day when a lot is going on in the news and a more people are logging on. If you have a lifetime budget, Facebook automatically allocates the budget to those times when more users are on. If you have a daily budget, you don’t get that benefit.
Q: How do you choose a target audience for a Facebook ad?
A: There are a lot of options here. You can upload a list or create a look-alike audience of a list. But typically, people use locations by setting a radius around their zip code or city. Then you adjust the age and gender of your desired audience.
You can also drill down into more detailed demographics by adding interests around the people you’re targeting. Take a really good look at the little pop-up description and be careful that you don’t choose a description that is listed as a job. A good example of this is in the fitness industry.
Say a gym or health club wants to target people who are interested in their personal training services. Make sure that the description is focused on people who have expressed interest in pages about personal training and not about personal trainer jobs. Facebook has specific rules around ads for jobs and choosing that option can throw off your campaign.
Pro tip: Once you create the audience, save it and name it. That way, in the future, you can reuse it or easily edit it to tweak for a new audience.
Q: What is the Dynamic Ad Creative and why would a business need it?
A: It allows you to test up to five different primary texts, headlines, descriptions, CTAs, images and videos. It’s a great option so you can easily test everything without having to individually create all the different ad options. Then Facebook optimizes it for you. So whichever ones are performing better get more of the budget. It offers up a ton of great insight for businesses into their audience and the ads that are more likely to have impact on them.
If you have more questions about Facebook ads or need help setting up a campaign, reach out to the team at Fly Pages today.
