If you’ve ever thought about advertising on Facebook, you’ve come to the right place. With Covid-19 pushing more retailers into e-commerce and services into online consultations or bookings, Facebook ads has never been more important.
As of 2020, 74% of Australians have bought something online in the past month and social media use has increased up to 33% during the pandemic, with 32% using social media to research brands and products (ad news). What this means is, if you aren’t on social, you’re missing out on a huge segment of the population who want to buy your product or service.
By using Facebook Ads, this allows you to find a new audience for your products or services, send them to your website and nurture them through remarketing. Let me show you how.
The Facebook Ads Funnel
Facebook Ads performs at its best when using a funnel. What does this mean?
Well, in marketing terms, the funnel describes the customer’s journey with your business. It means we serve ads to people who have never been exposed to your product before (or at least, who haven’t visited your website) and then we change our messages and creative based on how they interact with your offer. All the way from awareness to consideration, conversion and remarketing. But, how do we know what users are doing?
Well, that’s where the Pixel comes in. By using the Facebook Pixel, we can track user behaviour on your website to not only report results back, but also to ensure we have the right audiences and the right messages to best sell your product or service.
The Pixel
To run any successful Facebook Ads campaign, it is very important that you install the Pixel on your site – whether manually or by using Google Tag Manager to connect it. This will allow you to see any results coming from the Facebook Ads campaign and will also allow Facebook to gather data for you to build out custom audiences. Pretty cool, huh?
Setting Goals
Once you have the Pixel installed, you can begin setting conversion goals. For Facebook Ads, this works best in Google Tag Manager as it links directly to the ads platform, but you can also set up goals in Google Analytics. As an agency, we’ll usually do both, to ensure we have all bases covered when we are doing marketing across multiple channels.
The most used default conversion goals for Facebook Ads are Leads, View Content, Add to Cart and Purchase, but there are many other standard events available. If you have conversions outside of that – maybe you have different types of leads or different types of course enrolments you want to track, then you can set these up as custom conversions manually. It’s a little trickier, but worthwhile for that accurate data.
By doing this, you can also tell Facebook to optimise the delivery of your ads based on certain goals or objectives you want to achieve.
Audience Selection and Segmentation
If you’re happy with your goals, you can now work on your audiences. This is something you will do within the Facebook Ads platform. At the awareness phase of your funnel, we suggest including audiences based on Facebook demographics and interests and as you get more data, including lookalikes of key actions on your website, such as purchases, website visitors or social media engagers. Lookalikes are users on Facebook which have similar characteristics or interests to users who have made the key actions you want to target. You can choose for them to be from 1% (most similar) to 10% similarity (least similar).
At consideration, or the middle of the funnel, you want to be targeting people who have already shown an interest in your product or service (such as website visitors), but who haven’t yet made a purchase or aren’t yet a lead. The best way to do this is to set up general audiences with website visitors or social engagers and then exclude users who have made a purchase or become a lead.
When it comes to conversion and remarketing (either to prior purchasers or people who have added to cart) you want to be using audiences who are very close to converting. Recent website visitors or your top 25% website visitors can be good for this, but ultimately, your sweet spot will depend on your product or service, the lead time and understanding how your customer goes through their journey. The more you know about who is purchasing your product or service, the better you can use the Facebook Ads algorithm and audiences to your advantage.
Learning and Optimising
As with all digital marketing activities, the magic is in the data and being able to continually learn and optimise your ads to get the best results. Every day you run a Facebook Ads campaign is a new day of insights from your target audience. Unlike traditional marketing, it is easy to pivot, make new creative, test new ad copy, switch out or update audiences or adjust Facebook’s conversion targeting to improve your results.
Usually every campaign or ad set will have one or two winning creatives – those ads that just bring in 70% of your conversions. But you never want to just run one ad, because then you wouldn’t know who was the winner. For every ad set (audience) we run, we like to have 3 ads competing against each other, so we can see which creative and ad copy users respond to and make new ads based on their preferences. We can then also see which audiences respond to which messages. This can be particularly important if you are a business with multiple segments or offerings for different markets.
All very interesting but a little too much to handle on your own? Not to worry, Salt & Fuessel run successful Facebook Ads campaigns for a number of our clients and would be happy to help you with yours. Get in touch!
