Facebook

 

This past week, Facebook announced that it now has 3 million advertisers. That number increased 50% in the past year, meaning there is twice the amount of advertisers on Facebook compared to a year ago. While this is good news for Facebook, the same cannot be said for Facebook advertisers. Competition is now abundant within the platform and the ability to create campaigns that stand out, has never been more of priority. Check out our 3 best tips for making sure you’re campaigns perform well amongst the clutter.

 

1. Utilize The Different Ad Types (Including Instagram)

Over the course of the past year, Facebook has released multiple new ad variations for advertisers, including Instagram ads (Facebook owned – still counts), lead ads, carousel ads, canvas ads, and dynamic product ads. While the last two options might be for more advanced advertisers with teams of designers or developers, the first four options are more simple but still  underutilized by all advertisers. Let’s take Instagram for example. It’s a wildly popular social platform with over 400 Million users that has overtaken Twitter as the second most popular social platform in the U.S. At the moment, Instagram only has 200,000 advertisers.  We crunched the numbers and found that there is one advertiser for every 755 users on Facebook and only one advertiser for every 2,000 users on Instagram. But this recommendation is not rooted solely on those numbers. We’ve tested Insta ads (many times) at our agency and found that while we never reach as many users on Instagram, the ad serve is consistently cheaper across the board. We are paying more on Facebook to reach 60,000 people than we are on Instagram. Because the ad serve is cheaper, it significantly lowers our cost per lead, even if we target the same audiences for both.

Lead ads and carousel ads are also solid, underutilized options. Lead ads are simple because they never make the user leave Facebook. If all you need is 2-4 pieces of information from your leads,  lead ads are an effective way(especially on mobile) to acquire that information, while making life a little bit easier for users looking to sign up. Carousel ads are effective because of how interactive they are for users. When they are well designed and eye-catching, it’s hard for users to not be curious as to what the rest of the ad says. The single biggest reason you should be testing these different ad formats is because other advertisers are not using them to the degree they are using traditional Facebook ads making these formats an easy way to stand out in the crowd.

2. Use Lookalike Audiences

Lookalikes audiences are the single most effective cold-traffic targeting option available on Facebook. Facebook takes whatever source audience you give it (email lists, buyer lists, website traffic) and then finds you 1 million to 10 million people who look just like your audience. The larger your source audience is, the better Facebook will be able to narrow down who you’re looking for.

We can only recommend using lookalikes based on lists, as we’ve had limited success creating effective lookalikes from website traffic. Nevertheless, once you create a Lookalike Audience that performs well, say hello to your new best friend. The single best thing about these audiences is how Facebook continually optimizes them. We have lookalikes running in current campaigns that were created over a year ago. Why? Because they continue to convert and because these audiences rarely ever show fatigue. Another huge plus is that you’re not competing as much with other advertisers over the same old interest targets. Your audience is completely unique to your source list, which is perfect for narrowing the competition.

 

2. Set Up Remarketing Back To Your Offer

You get 1,000 clicks to your website but only 50 people sign up for your offer. Hey, that’s a 5% conversion rate…not bad! But what are you doing to follow up with the other 950 users that showed interest by clicking on your ad? If you’re not running remarketing and capturing the users who clicked into website-traffic audiences, you’re missing the boat. One of the single most effective things you can do as an advertiser on Facebook is set up remarketing audiences. Why? Because the users who make up these audiences have clicked on your ads and (or) been to your website. They know who you are and they’ll recognize you the next time one of your ads pops up on their feed.  We refer to this as warm-traffic and at the end of the day, warm traffic performs exponentially better than cold traffic. A majority of your warm-traffic audiences are interested in what you have to offer. Maybe the timing was wrong the first time they visited your website. Maybe they weren’t connected to wi-fi and didn’t want to use data to surf the internet. Whatever the reason, they still saw your message and clicked, and trust us when we say that it’s likely they’ll click on your ads again. A great click-through-rate for cold-traffic is around 1-2%, but with warm-traffic a solid CTR can range from 4-6%. Oh and one other thing, most Facebook advertisers aren’t doing it! Don’t miss out on capturing users who show intent and set up remarketing audiences – they’re the easiest win on Facebook.