Overview | Facebook Advertising
What is Facebook Advertising?
Facebook, like many other social media platforms, has a plethora of advertising solutions for the marketing expert. In this deep dive series, we will discuss the various options available, and advantages to each form of advertisement.
Overview
Advertising and boosting are not the same thing. Boosting (as discussed more in-depth later) has less options than advertising, however has a place within the marketing toolkit. For example let’s say there’s a major news update that gets posted on the company’s Facebook profile and you’d like to get more eyeballs on that post. Boosting is ideal here due to the fact that very little extra work is required and it is quick and expedient. Advertising on the other hand is for when you have a piece of a campaign that needs to be specifically targeted or requires additional customization.
Advertising on Facebook comes with many benefits as well as drawbacks. An advantage to utilizing Facebook for advertising is that the cost is relatively cheap compared to other platforms. When comparing the cost-per-click (CPC) for certain key terms like “insurance” will be roughly $3.77 vs a $50 CPC metric from Google. Facebook advertising also takes into account the plethora of information given to the platform to allow for what’s known as “microtargeting” which is discussed later on in this article. Facebook also allows you to advertise across the Facebook network, which includes platforms such as Instagram, Whatsapp, and Messenger.
One drawback is that Facebook is changing its algorithm. These changes have led to a reduction in organic reach making Facebook more pay-to-play with whoever pays the most coming out on top. Another drawback is that Facebook has fallen out of favor with some, which can lead to lower conversion rates.
Formats
First it is key to know what options are available, Facebook currently offers the following ad formats.
All of these formats have a coinciding writeup on the individual benefits and costs to the format that can be explored further.
Content
Quality content is important for any ad to generate the desired result. Research has shown that 52% of people have said that a Facebook ad has influenced their purchasing decisions in the past. Put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, what advertising would you like to see?
Objective
Once you have a format selected for the given message one must select the objective. Ad objectives can be anything from video views to link clicks, and will be what Facebook attempts to get the viewer to do. Matching the objectives here is crucial as this will be what Facebook uses the budget to get someone to do.
Targeting
Targeting your audience effectively is the next important step in the advertising process. Facebook allows you to create an audience profile from location, age, and employment status, to gender, annual income, marital status and hobbies. This level of targeting can allow you to create a targeted ad for each optimal buyer persona.
Expectations & Results
Next it is paramount to know the success rate of Facebook Advertising as to accurately forecast results as well as determine whether there is value in advertising on the platform. Results vary from bidding type and amount to the industry the ad is based in.
The average cost-per-click on the news feed (as found by AdStage in Q1 2020) is $.78. Also noted was an average cpm of $8.71 with an average clickthrough rate of 1.11%. Taking into account these numbers, one can make rough predictions on how well an advertising strategy on Facebook may work.
Facebook does allow for A/B testing, which we will cover in more detail later, however it is recommended that before a campaign is ran that some A/B testing is conducted to see which ad will perform better in the campaign.
