Facebook Advertising
Convert More With Facebook Ads
Our Facebook Ad experts, alongside our highly talented creative teams ensure B2B and B2C business clients reach their ideal audience faster and more profitably. Whether you need campaign set up, or on-going ad management, we consistently exceed expectations.
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Let us take the heavy lifting, working alongside your teams to empower them to harness the best that digital marketing can offer.
The Power of Facebook Advertising For Your Business
If you read our thoughts on Social Media Marketing, you will by now have clearer ideas about how social media advertising works. Now, too with Facebook, recently rebranding as ‘Meta’, with Instagram and WhatsApp joining the family, you’ll see why Facebook is such a powerful advertising platform and a sales channel for your business.
Recently, we were speaking with a client about Facebook, who was shocked to find out that we’re still using Facebook. In his own very words: “Really? Do you still use Facebook?” He seemed shocked that people are still using that platform.
What he did not know was that, in fact, to this very day, Facebook remains the most used social media platform and it still leads the market, with nearly 3 Billion users who daily stay immersed there for around 33 minutes, according to research.
As of January 2021, 4.2 billion people were using social media globally; 2.80 billion of these digital socialites are active Facebook users. The recent report by eMarketer shows that Facebook is still the leader in terms of the number of minutes spent on social media both in the UK and the US, followed by TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram consecutively. Your takeaway here, don’t assume Facebook has had its day. Billions of people are still hooked in and giving up their data on how they use that platform, what their interests are and who they are connected with.
Our point here is that you don’t want to disregard such a powerful sales channel altogether, just because you personally might not use it, or think that other people don’t either! It’s a great place to start when putting your toe in the water. Our client was really surprised with the results we helped them get, once we started experimenting and running Facebook ads in collaboration with them.
In fact, in many of the advertising campaigns that AdsRunner runs with you, not only do Facebook ads have a lower cost per click (CPC) for those organisations investing their marketing budgets here, they also have a higher ‘conversion rate’ than Instagram. That being said, from experience, using both in combination is a really good idea whenever your advertising budget permits.
Facebook Advertising
As the longest-standing social media platform, unsurprisingly, Facebook’s ad network leads the market. Facebook offers a range of advertising services on their Facebook Ads platform. We will work with you openly to demonstrate where you can achieve clear returns on your Ad investment.
Instagram’s has a broad user base, offering value for many businesses, particularly where visual impact advertising is possible. Coherently combined cross-channel branding builds loyal returning customers. As your partner, we identify opportunities and build optimisation across your entire sales funnel.
Audience Targeting
Reaching audiences most likely to convert is easier with tools to reach people with similar demographic profiles. Users most likely to buy from you will be similar to previous buyers. Audience mirroring, enables you to identify warmer prospects sharing characteristics of existing customers to then appropriately display adverts.
Remarketing
Display your adverts to previous visitors to your website or app. Custom ads will show for products or services they have already viewed, to keep you uppermost in their mind for when they are ready to buy. Reduce shopping-cart abandonments with compelling ads, persuading prospects with time-limited offers.
Dynamic Product Ads
Dynamic Product Ads are a powerful E-Commerce technique to increase their ROAS. Capture sales when your prospects view your product elsewhere, then jump to their Facebook page without purchasing. These hot prospects can be immediately shown that or similar products via your personalised Dynamic Product Ad.
Coherent Integration
Facebook is often one channel in multi-channel marketing. We ensure that your target audience is exposed to consistency of messaging across your brand platforms. Building confidence in your professionalism makes customers more likely to convert. Whether re-orienting budgets, or setting up, reduce risk with our free audit.
Sophisticated Tools For
Laser-Targeting
Select your ideal customer according to their interests, demographics, location, behaviour and more. Once converted, improve your customer loyalty to generate more cost-effective repeat sales.
We work closely with you to analyse your existing data, then combine our market intel to maximise your potential returns on Facebook ad investment.
Frequently Asked Questions About Facebook Advertising
How To Setup And Run Facebook Ads?
- Facebook Business Manager
First things first, before you get started you have to set up your business manager. This Facebook tool helps you organise and manage your business, as the name suggests. ‘Business Manager’ allows you to create ads in more detail and gives you essential analytics to help you better understand what is working and what is not working, so that over time you waste less of your advertising budget on random, money wasting efforts.
2. Facebook’s Pixel
Once you your business manager is set up, next you will need to install ‘Pixel’, another tool which helps you optimise your Facebook ads. Pixel has to be installed on your website or application, which is pretty simple. All this is simply an instruction, in the form of a piece of coding that you place on your website or app, following Facebook’s guide.
The beauty of Pixel is that it lets Facebook collect insightful and useful data, such as how many conversions you achieve, or significant visitor events, including numbers of page visits, lead form submissions, how many people add your products to their shopping carts; it also captures when visitors initiate checkouts and purchase products.
3. How Pixel Helps You Achieve Your Ad Goals
Let’s say you wanted to buy a pair of running shoes. You browsed for a while and chose a product you liked, so you added it to your basket. Timing was tight though as you were running late for work, so you didn’t have time to finish your purchase. Well, in simple terms, now Facebook knows that you have a high likelihood of making a purchase because you started the process, their tools allows the seller to directly identify and target you using a custom audience to make sure you will come back and finish your purchase.
If you are just starting out in Facebook marketing, it might take a bit of time to build up your saved and custom audiences and for Facebook to finish its training phase. This automated machine learning would typically require approximately 50 conversion events within 7 days to work optimally. It is very important to install Pixel correctly, which may take some attention, but it isn’t rocket science. On the other hand, if dealing with codes makes you nervous, just get in touch with us to take over set up! You do want to make sure your Facebook’s business account is capturing insights into events that are pertinent to your business objectives and values.
Just be aware that Facebook highlights the fact that since introducing the IOS 14.5 upgrade, Pixel functionality was significantly impacted. When Aggregated Event Measurement is setup correctly, this will allow you to prioritise up to 8 conversion events to help improve conversion optimisation. You will also need to verify your website domain.
4. Your Facebook Product Catalogue and Shiny Shop Front
If you are a direct to consumer (‘D2C’) business, selling your products on your website or app, it is important to connect your catalogue feed through the commerce manager in Facebook .
Setting up Catalogues can be easy if you have one of these select e-commerce platforms that have plugins:
If you are not a user of any of the above e-commerce platforms, Facebook allows you to create a catalogue manually.. Facebook provides a form into which you input your inventory, item by item, or if you already have this set up in a database, because you have many products, we recommend uploading your products in bulk using a ‘data feed’.
Without a ready-made inventory, you will have to do some time-consuming preparation. A product data feed is much faster. Facebook allows the inputting of item details from a variety of formats, , i.e.: CSV, TSV or XLM up-loadable formats.
Another consideration considering the benefits of creating your product feed using a feed management tool, which saves you a lot of time and helps you keep a clean and up to date data feed for your catalogues. This is important as if visitors visit your shop or catalogue and experience ‘out of stock’ too often, they will seek somewhere else where they can get what they want more consistently and quickly.
What Marketing Goals And Campaign Types Are Available On Facebook Ads?
Once you have everything setup for selling and marketing on Facebook, you can begin to launch your campaigns, deploying ad sets and ads according to strategic priorities. Let’s have a quick look at some of those options you have. Be aware that you will find that some of these are limited to certain campaign types; neither are all options always available for all of your various campaign structures and objectives.
Campaign objectives can be divided into the three types listed below:
‘Awareness’: Brand Awareness amongst your chosen audience or Reach maximum number of people.
‘Consideration’: Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, Messages.
‘Conversions’: Conversions into sales or new leads who become subscribers to newsletters and longer term sales funnel fillers, Catalogue Sales, Store Traffic.
Which Facebook Campaign Objective to Choose?
Top of the Funnel (ToFu): Awareness – Cold Audiences
Awareness raising sits at the very top – or beginning – of the sales funnel. Imagine a wide trumpet shape, sucking in a wide audience here. In principle, you will launch campaigns to reach as many people as possible, who have no awareness of your offering; at this point, reach and brand awareness are key objectives. At this stage, you are prospecting for people who may warm to your ads and building awareness for your brand and products with exposure.
In theory, you go out there and try to make a good first impression on customers, by showcasing your products and services to as many people as you think might be interested, knowing at the same time, that the majority of them have never heard of you. We call this group the ‘cold’ audience, who you want to warm to you.
Middle of the Funnel (MoFu): Consideration – Warm Audience
Once you have established some awareness, have gained some credibility and trust, you have a warmer audience, whom you can target for ‘Consideration’ , you have their attention now so you want to address their needs with more highly targeted campaigns. This section of the funnel is narrowing, as selected prospects move further towards you.
At this stage, depending on your strategy, you have a few campaign objectives to choose from, such as: Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation and Messages. The key here is that you want to educate this semi-interested audience about your product and services, by pushing them to visit your website, to subscribe to your mailing list, install your app, or send you a message to enquire further about your products and services.
Bottom of the Funnel: (BoFu): Conversions – Hot Audience
This narrowest part of the funnel, closest in thinking to yours, is where the magic happens! Facebook allows you to choose from different conversion campaign objectives, such as: Conversions, Catalogue Sales, Store Traffic.
Of course, every business defines conversion differently and at different times in your marketing calendar, you may also define conversions in a variety of ways. For most D2C E-commerce businesses, however, ‘conversion’ simply means when a warm customer makes their purchase. For some campaigns, the objective might be getting warm prospects signing up to an app, filling in an enquiry form, requesting a quotation, or even visiting your physical store.
We call this actively engaged Audience ‘hot prospects’ based on previous evidence of a high level of engagement they’ve had with your ad campaign and business ‘touch points’. These hot prospects will have been indicating in some way that they have a higher likelihood of purchase because of their activities which you can track. Now is your final chance to address any doubts remaining in their minds about sharing their contact details with you or paying money for your products. By actively addressing their possible questions or concerns head on, you pave the way for the customer to take your desired conversion action.
This stage of marketing can cause anxieties for the new advertiser, but be assured that if a person have questions, they are giving you serious consideration; expressing doubts and questions can be a buying signal, which if handled confidently will convert into sales!
It’s no surprise that as your prospects move down the funnel towards the point of purchase, the average CPC and cost per impression (CPM) ad costs increase. Understandably, the cost of advertising to warmer prospects increases as your audience becomes more valuable, because of their higher likelihood to convert into a paying customer or a sales lead.
Skipping or Reversing the Funnel
Let’s put it out there: what suits Facebook is not always best for you!
Although Facebook encourages the top to bottom of the sales funnel approach, which takes your prospects through intensifying stages of awareness, consideration, and conversions, arguably, this campaign objective hierarchy no longer really works.
Of course, using a variety of objectives could prove to be beneficial and rewarding for brands with much larger advertising budgets, who may not necessarily look for a direct return on every pound spent, (e.g. coco-cola). However, for a lot of smaller brands out there who must make a certain profit and return on ad spent, this would lead to a lot of wasted ads budget and, in turn, short-term loss.
Why? It’s simple, Facbook’s AI has one job, namely, to optimise for what you are asking it. Let’s say, for instance, that you might want to reach a larger audience in an awareness campaign, or alternatively, you wish to generate much higher traffic to your website in a consideration campaign. Either way, there could be serious questions about the quality of those visitors and their likelihood of conversion over a shorter period of time.
Even if you are in the stage of advertising to achieve conversions, so optimising for page views and AddToCarts activity, you are simply telling Facebook to get you as many page viewers and AddToCarts as it can get for your budget, Remember, however, that Facebook knows, based on its own historical data, which audiences are best for each type of interaction and action. Hence, if you are after maximising customer purchases, app installs or generating leads, you want to make sure you optimise for your goal from the very beginning.
Should I Choose Auction Or Reach & Frequency Campaign?
Auction campaigns are the default buying type for Facebook ads. In this situation, you will be bidding against other advertisers on the platform to reach your audience. Reach and Frequency, however, allows you to pre-select a specific number of people you want to reach and for your ad to be seen by at a certain guaranteed price that suits your budget. This advertising strategy could be great for awareness campaigns, when you want to reach as many people out there as possible.
What Is The Difference Between Normal And Accelerated Delivery?
If budget control is a primary concern for you then, take a look at ’Standard Delivery’ which sets a pace for budget spend, rather than splurging to reach as many people as possible as fast as possible, (i.e. ‘Accelerated Delivery’). Pacing protects your budget and helps you to review results at a pace that suits you for learning what works. This is the recommended and preferred option for most advertisers.
‘Accelerated Delivery’ can lead to your budget being spent quickly, for instance where you need to get time-sensitive promotions out there. For getting your ads displayed quicker in this way, you will, however, need to set a bid cap. When it is gone, it is gone, but you have gone out to audiences hard, allowing for faster conversions at scale.
When starting out, it can be difficult to judge how much coverage you want to achieve in any given time period. Like everything here, it’s a test and test again situation. ‘Standard delivery’ will use pacing to suit your campaigns where you need to control your spend, so gets you started within more of a ‘comfort zone’. Pacing keeps you from over-exuberance and blowing your budget. Starting to reach out to customers is exciting, because after all your hard ground work behind the scenes, now you can finally get your products out there to earn back your investment. It’s easy to be hasty; going steady is not only recommended, but often the way to go for many Facebook advertisers, whilst ‘testing the gears’.
Accelerated delivery is for harder hitting campaigns, when you need to get your products out there pronto, because they are becoming obsolete, or you are approaching peak buying season, or even to beat a competitor in launching an innovation. This option is invaluable for such time-sensitive promotions. You will need to set a bid cap when choosing accelerated delivery.
In the main, you will want to stick with Standard Delivery, as accelerated delivery can be quite costly pretty quickly. Work through the pro’s and cons when rolling out Reach & Frequency in campaigns. How fast do you want to reach audiences? How important is it to your business? You may want to switch it up, depending on what is happening in your market, or depending upon business objectives.
What Are Special Ad Categories?
Depending on the nature of your business and the country where you wish to advertise, FB requires you to declare if your ads are about potentially sensitive or controversial topics. If your products fall into any of the following categories: credit, employment, housing, social issues, elections or politics, you will have to notify Facebook.
What Is Facebook Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO)?
According to Facebook, set at the campaign level, their automated campaign budget optimisation (CBO) will distribute your budget across ad sets. This can deliver better results to learn what works, depending on your delivery optimisation choices and bid strategy. Alternatively, you can set and control spending on each ad set when you directly set your budget at the ads set level. CBO has improved consistently over time and has proven to be a very effective approach for many of the campaigns that we run. However, there are times when you will really need more control, at which times, using ad set budget is a better option. If you are unsure as to what Facebook strategy is best to deploy, outsource to get results faster and learn from experts.
How To Use Audience Targeting on Facebook?
At different stages in your sales cycles, you will have different objectives. Christmas products will differ from regular consumables, for instance. Product launches may be aimed at bringing in new types of customers, like generating interest from younger consumers. Or your company may redesign or reconfigure old offers to add value to existing customers. Whatever is going on in your business, the audiences you want to target will have a variety of considerations in terms of engagement and conversions.
With Facebook advertising, you can structure ad campaigns to include or exclude
selected groups of people. For this you will want to devote time to Saved and Custom Audience options that Facebook offers, differentiating the style and content of adverts according to categories such as: Age, Gender, Location, Interests, Behaviours, Languages or other demographic features.
What Are The Ad Placement Options on Facebook?
Facebook Ads Manager offer a choice of automatic ad placement or manual settings. This allows you some flexibility of how your ad shows up, such as appearing in a user’s feed, stories, reel and so on. This option also offers control of whether you want them to show only on particular Meta’s platforms, i.e. Messenger, Facebook or Instagram.
How To A/B or Split Test On Facebook?
Some refer to direct comparison of simultaneously run ad’s as A/B or split testing. You can set up A/B campaign testing between ad sets to see what works best, for the best budget. Simply look at the variables at play; add or prioritise a variable such as: creative, audience, placement or even a custom variable. Once your simultaneous ads are running, observe how your audiences respond to determine what might be the winning factor for your business. Take into account cost per click, cost per result or cost per impression tc..
Try different images, captions, audiences and play with what you put out there to see which one performs best for your business. While there are rules of thumb for certain industries and sectors, all businesses are different and audience tastes evolve.
At AdsRunner, we believe A/B testing is an important and useful tool to tweak and get marginal improvements over time which can make all the difference to the value of your marketing budget. However, it’s also not something to obsess over too much either. Use what works. Don’t be afraid to try something new; even if it doesn’t get the results at one time does not mean it’s not worth trying again under different circumstances.
What Are Facebook Attribution Settings?
The Facebook attribution window (or conversion window) is the period between when a user clicks or views an ad and when they actually take a meaningful action on your website. This is also a factor that Facebook’s algorithms might take into consideration when optimising your ad’s delivery. For instance. depending on your products and services being promoted, you might expect prospects to take action within 1 day of clicking or viewing your ads; this could also be a push in most cases; so where a user needs to get familiar with you and the advert, they may actually not respond immediately, only 7 days after clicking onto your ad do they feel confident or comfortable checking out more detail and actually buying in.
The Biggest Player In Paid Social
The sophisticated tools on this platform and powerful insights generated by Facebook data not only makes it game-changing for targeting new audiences, but you can be sure your competitors are exploiting this market-leading platform. Constantly innovating, you can consistently improve.
Almost any business you can imagine is working Facebook to generate profits. Talk to AdsRunner, as certified Facebook experts, about how Facebook engagement can help.
Our Facebook Ads Management Agency Services
At AdsRunner, we are fond of Facebook Marketing, because we understand how the mechanics work and how the artistry adds polish to get results.
As you will understand by now, although Facebook advertising is a powerful tool for marketing your brand and your products, with so many tools and strategic options to choose from, it can be difficult to setup the correct structure and not make too many mistakes, costing you in time and money.
Whether your aim is to increase awareness of your brand and increase following, find new customers, promote your application, generate leads or drive sales, Facebook advertising could be a great option for you, with the right deployment. AdsRunner have helped many starting out on this route to market, so we can help you utilise it for maximum benefits in the minimum time. We help you structure your campaigns efficiently to reach the outcome in a shorter period of time, thereby costing you less in the process.
If you already have been using Facebook to promote your products and services and are thinking of scaling your campaign, we know that challenge well and can help you build on your existing campaigns to maximise reach, increase conversions and keep a well-managed advertising budget.
Targeting the right people at the right time, in the right place, with the right set of creatives and message is the key to winning market share in the fastest time, for minimal cost.
If you are serious about your advertising campaigns and growing and scaling your business, but have been struggling to push things to the next level, get in touch with AdsRunner and let’s explore how we could scale your business from today.
How Can We Help?
Let us take the heavy lifting, working alongside your teams to empower them to harness the best that digital marketing can offer.