- Is Facebook advertising dead?
(thunder crackles)
The answer to that question is a resounding no.
And that's all I had to say,
so I'll see you guys in the next video.
I'm playing.
Facebook Ads are still around
and they're more powerful than ever,
but the game has changed.
So to make sure you stay on top of things in 2023,
I've got some excellent and savvy tips for you.
And if you check the description below,
I've got something that you can use
to help plan your campaigns so you never veer off course.
So quick refresher.
Obviously everyone knows what Facebook or Meta is.
Facebook Ads are great because they serve tailored marketing
to the platform's 2.963 billion, with a B, active users.
It's an enormous audience,
which means a huge potential opportunity
for those who get it right.
So let's talk about cost first.
Ads are priced by CPC, cost per click,
and here's the great news.
Facebook Ads have become very affordable,
especially compared to other popular ad platforms
like Google Ads.
Now, exact numbers across industries
always, of course, differ.
But as a rough guide, the average ad has a CPC of 94 cents
and we've seen them get as cheap as 15 cents on Facebook.
Now, compare that to the average Google Ad,
which has a conservative CPC of $2.69.
Often they can be three to $5,
but we've also seen them creep up
to as high as 15 to $25 per click.
That's a lot of dollars per click.
That means you have a lot more
wiggle room with Facebook Ads,
and they can suit any budget,
making them perfect for small businesses.
Another reason why Facebook Ads are awesome,
they come with super strong targeting, courtesy of Meta.
You can target users based on their interests,
behaviors, demographics,
even their past interactions with your brand.
Some top targeting options you need to be aware of
include interest targeting,
which means targeting users who have expressed
an interest in topics related to your brand.
Behavioral targeting, which targets users
based on their past behavior on Facebook,
such as their purchase history
or their interactions with similar businesses.
And lookalike targeting, which targets users
who are similar to your existing customers.
And that targeting is part of the reason
why Facebook Ads are so interesting.
That targeting helps you find no-intent audiences
and I'll touch more on that in just a second.
So yeah, audience intent.
Now, the best way for me to demonstrate this
is with an example between a high intent audience,
like the ones that Google targets,
and the no/low intent audiences that Facebook targets.
Google Ads are pretty straightforward.
They focus on active intent from the audience.
So you go searching for something like green boots,
Google displays related ads
at the top of its search results.
So if you're searching for a pair of green boots,
you'll see a bunch of ads for,
you guessed it, green boots,
increasing the likelihood of a sale happening.
Facebook Ads, on the other hand,
don't lean into this active intent.
Facebook Ads arguably are a bit more clever
and that's because they help folks find things
they didn't even know they wanted or needed.
They've incepted their audience.
Unlike Google, users don't have to be searching
for your product or service to discover it.
(speaking foreign language)
Imagine you're sitting, scrolling through your feed.
You're not actually looking
for a specific product or service.
But if you happen to see an ad for a boot company,
something you're generally interested in,
you might take note of that company
and actively seek it out
when you're actually in the market to buy.
Honestly, if you're mindlessly scrolling,
a standout relevant ad may result in active browsing,
a click-through, a site search for green boots
followed by a purchase.
Takeaway is Facebook Ads are a worthwhile investment,
especially if you're testing out campaigns
or want to build some brand awareness
and get some eyes on your website.
Next, let's take a look at the ad formats.
Facebook has a lot of options
depending on what you wanna showcase.
There are loads of different formats, 13 right now,
and the most popular are image ads featuring a single image.
These are great for driving traffic to your website.
Video ads, which are ideal
for showcasing your brand's story.
Can also be used to drive engagement and conversions.
Carousel ads featuring multiple images or videos.
They can be used to showcase a range of products
or services with a different CTA per slide.
Collection ads which allow users
to browse multiple products within Facebook.
These are fantastic for driving conversions,
but there are also others
such as instant experience ads, event ads,
messenger ads, stories ads, even augmented reality ads.
And of course all those are good for different things.
For example, if you're selling something physical like,
I don't know, I'm not gonna say green boots again,
so I'm gonna say words, shirts,
you'd probably get a lot of use out of carousel ads,
instant experience ads,
and of course, collection ads
versus if you're a travel agent or insurance provider.
In that case, video ads or story ads
might perform best for you.
The key is to identify
what you want to achieve with your ad
and decide which format will serve you best.
On a similar note,
you'll also need to consider your ad objectives.
Now, this is basically a guide for Facebook
on what you want to achieve with your ad.
Meta's algorithm delivers your ads
to people who are most likely
to complete the objective you select.
So you really need to think about
what outcome you want from your campaign.
If you pick traffic when you really need sales,
you won't get the results you want.
So the question is what should you pick?
Before I go into that, let me explain the interface quickly.
Now, the older version of Ads Manager,
which you may have seen before,
had 11 objectives in total split across three groups,
Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.
If you wanted to grow your company's presence
in a new market, you'd choose a top of funnel objective.
If you wanted to bring in more revenue,
you'd choose a bottom of funnel objective.
Want people to enter your sales funnel and consider you,
you guessed it, that would be Consideration,
which means you probably want to go for lead generation.
The newer version of Ads Manager
rolled out in the last year or so
focuses on outcome-driven ad experiences, ODAX,
and it comes with a simplified list of objectives,
Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads,
App Promotion, and Sales.
It doesn't have the same clustering
but you can choose your objective in a similar way.
Top of funnel objectives sit at the top of the list
while bottom of funnel ones sit lower down.
Pretty straightforward.
You'll also want to pay attention
to the optimization options in the ad set.
The dropdown list offers you options
to fine tune the results you want.
For example, if you choose the Traffic objective
for your ad set, it can then be further optimized
to deliver link clicks or landing page views.
What would the difference be?
In theory, the first should result
in a higher click-through rate, CTR,
but visitors may not interact with your page.
The second may have a lower CTR,
but visitors may be more likely
to load and interact with your page,
the duality of man.
Also, if you choose an objective
that supports Instagram when you create your ad,
your placements will automatically include Instagram.
You may have noticed that the objectives
that the Instagram ads correlate to
are the ones from the expanded list
that came from the old Ads Manager.
So I guess we'll all need to keep an eye out
to see how that changes in the future.
Now, you can deselect Instagram if you want to,
but it can be a good idea to run ads
on both Facebook and Instagram
as ads that perform well on Facebook
tend to do well on Instagram too.
Also, the user base differs enough
that you'll likely find new audiences by doing so.
You may need to adjust your creative
to fit Instagram specs though, so bear that in mind.
Personally, I think if you want help with all this,
check out our Facebook checklist
down in the description below.
It's free, it's gonna walk you through everything.
We're just giving away (blows kisses)
the nectar of the Gods,
manna from heaven, to be honest with you.
But instead it's manna from HubSpot.
You're welcome.
Moving on.
So tips for your ads to stand out.
My first piece of advice is crowdsource opinions.
Draft up a bunch of options for ads, then somebody,
preferably somebody with good taste,
down and, you know, show them all the ads one by one.
At the end get their opinion, ask what stood out.
If they remember an ad after seeing it briefly,
that's probably a good sign
that your target audience will as well.
Similarly, get feedback from colleagues
about copy and design.
You won't have to take it all, of course.
But sometimes an outsider eye
can spot things you wouldn't, like a typo
or hard to understand sentences or off-putting designs.
If you want, you can make the process more structured
by picking some metrics
and then asking questions with a relevant scale.
So you could ask, for example,
how appealing is the ad?
Where the answers range from extremely appealing
to not appealing at all.
This can help you quantify responses
and get a view of majority opinion.
And if you have some demographic data
about the people you ask,
you could also get a rough insight
into audiences with a similar demographic.
If the Gen Zers on your team love one ad
but the Gen Xers don't,
you can probably assume that there's something
in the ad that's polarizing,
such as terminology, humor, tone, et cetera.
And then you can tweak your ad to be more inclusive
if you so desire.
Or you can go the opposite direction
and get more granular about your audience targeting
and match ads to the people who are most likely to get them.
This pre-testing is a handy way
to get a small snapshot of the population
without actually going live with your ads.
Another tip, think hard about your CTA.
I know there's probably a lot you want your audience to do.
You may want them to make a purchase
or you may want them to check out your products
or explore your views.
These are all great options
but you shouldn't use the same ad for all of them.
Why? Because if you have multiple CTAs in the same ad,
you're more likely to confuse your audience,
which means you're more likely to have
people taking no action
rather than completing one high value action
you really want them to do.
So when making your ad campaign,
be clear about what you want people to do.
Choose one CTA.
Consider the ad your one golden opportunity
to prompt an action from your audience
and reiterate that CTA in the button,
ad copy and creative.
Now, once you do go live,
you'll want to think about metrics.
Facebook Analytics used to be the go-to
for understanding your audience's behavior,
but that was axed, ching, in 2021, big bummer.
However, the good news is that Facebook
still comes with built-in analytics options.
Now, while there are three options
for managing your analytics, Meta Business Suite,
Ads Manager and Events Manager,
the one you'll probably gravitate towards is Ads Manager.
Ads Manager lets you go deep on a number of metrics.
There are a lot of things to explore,
but some of the key ones to focus on are reach.
That's the number of people who viewed your ad,
AKA, how eye-catching is your ad really?
Impressions, the number of impressions
shows the number of times your ad appeared on user screens.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean
someone noticed your ad, it just means it was shown to them.
Relevance score.
This measures how relevant Facebook thinks your ad is
to your target audience.
Facebook uses the score to decide the cost
and placement of your ad campaigns.
And cost per result.
This tells you the average cost
of getting each result like a click or a conversion.
It helps you decide
whether your cost per result is justified
or whether you need to modify your campaign.
Even with just those,
you should be able to get a good snapshot
of how good your campaign is performing.
There's also another thing you might find interesting.
Now, something else that you really want to consider
is your CAC, cost of customer acquisition.
It's probably the best metric
for deciding whether an ad campaign is pulling its weight.
To calculate that, you'll want to take
the overall ad spend to date
and divide it by the number of customer leads
that have resulted from the campaign.
So say you spent $500 on ads
and got 10 customers from that,
that means your CAC is $50.
If you get 20 customers from the same ad spend,
then your CAC would be $25.
What do you do when you have all of that measurement data?
Just make stuff better, keep optimizing.
To do that, there are a variety of tactics you can use.
A few are ad scheduling,
bid optimization, retargeting strategies.
Now that might sound intimidating,
but essentially it's all about getting your ads
to the right people at the right time.
So if Life cereal hits me with a commercial
as I'm having my generic non-brand name oatmeal,
I might be a little bit more inclined
to go with Life cereal.
Ad scheduling is about limiting your ads
to only run on certain days at certain times.
It's a way of maximizing your ad spend
if you know when your audience
is most likely to be scrolling or tuning in.
And speaking of ad spend,
let's talk briefly about campaign budget optimization, CBO.
Using it can simplify your campaign setup
and improve results.
With it, you don't have to determine
budgets for every ad set.
You can instead assign a budget for the whole campaign
and then let Meta decide
how to split the budget across ad sets.
So if you aren't sure
how much you wanna spend on each ad set,
this option is ideal.
But if your campaign includes multiple ad sets
with different audience sizes,
you may inadvertently spend more on large ad sets
while neglecting smaller ad sets,
meaning some of your audience segments
will barely see your ads,
while others will see them far more often, not ideal.
Also, don't be afraid to A/B test different ad formats.
Variety is the spice of life.
Your audience's attention dwindles over time,
especially if they're subjected
to the same ads in the same formats.
But if you shake it up,
you're more likely to see sustained results.
Why? Because you minimize ad fatigue.
Ads Manager has an A/B test feature
which lets you test multiple creatives.
To use it, you just need to select the ad
you want to duplicate then click the A/B Test button
and make a copy of the ad.
For the variable, choose Creative, then run the test
and check to see which version is the most effective.
You can then adapt your future ads in a very similar way.
Whew, and that's pretty much it.
I know that was a long one.
But before you go, don't forget to download
that Facebook advertising checklist.
It's free, it's the nectar of the gods.
And as always, don't forget to drop a comment below
to let us know what you want us to work on next.
And if you like the video, like it, subscribe,
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