As of April 2017, 5 million advertisers used Facebook’s paid ads, according to KlientBoost. More than 93% of marketers use Facebook Ads regularly. Chances are that you are doing it too.
Creating a Facebook ad campaign is easy; making it work to get you a positive ROI is harder than it seems.
Since Facebook tries to make it really easy to set up ads, more businesses and marketers than ever are using the platform.
Facebook ads can be a monstrosity as far as platform complexity is concerned.
Yet, the closer you get to what you want your Facebook Ads to do, the easier it gets to make your campaigns perform better for your business.
Since Facebook Ads has plenty of features, various objective types, and several options within campaign setup and management, here are a few Facebook Ads tips to put you on the right path with your campaigns:
1. Say “No” to stock photos (Facebook or other sources)
As you begin to set up your ad campaign, Facebook will ask you to upload images to complete your ads (along with adding copy and links).
Do yourself a favor and don’t choose any of the images available inside Facebook’s inventory of stock photos. If you are looking for images on other sites like Pexels, DepositPhotos, for instance, be choosy about what you pick.
From experience, we know that images of a particular kind always work better than others as far as Facebook ads are concerned:
- Photos of actual people in them, front and center (with some contrast to make those pictures stand out).
- Images of the actual products you sell
- Illustrations or custom graphics
You can take parts of stock photos or just use better photo depositories such as Unsplash for your Facebook ads.
In fact, anything will do better than a cheesy stock photo with three suits and a hand-held banner.
2. Exclude irrelevant audiences
Just by excluding audiences that don’t make sense to your Facebook Ad campaigns, you’ll save several hundred or even thousands of dollars. A few excluded audiences from your campaigns could be:
- Audiences that signed up for your offers from previous campaigns
- Your existing customers
- Your existing free trial users
- Groups of audiences with low potential to convert
- Your email subscribers
It’s worth spending more time on defining your audiences than anything else you do for your Facebook campaigns. Think through your audience sets carefully to decide what to include and exclude.
3. Use instant experiences
If you are skipping the “Use Instant Experience” option while creating your ad with your Facebook Ad Manager, you are missing the boat.
Instant experiences within Facebook are all about using visuals to persuade, invoke an action, and to give your ads some life.
When you create an Instant experience, you are essentially creating a full-page, mobile experience for those that click on your ad.
This allows you to add more information, visuals, context, and push your audiences to click through.
Use Instant Experiences to acquire new customers, establish your brand (and warm up your audiences), or directly sell your products by showcasing them. Facebook provides templates for you to start with. Alternatively, you could create a custom Instant Eperience.
While it’s perfectly fine to use a single image ad and nothing else to make your campaigns work, it’ll help when you test a single image (or video) advertisement with instant experiences.
Video can help, but if you don’t have one, it’s alright. Instant experiences will work even if you had a couple of images.
Note: Facebook now allows you to not only use Instant Experiences but also their Lead Generation forms (see below).
4. Lead generation campaigns & forms
If you are generating leads, use Lead Generation Ads with Facebook ’s native “forms”.
Creating landing pages, trying to push Facebook’s audience to click through and get to another page, and having them fill up their information to sign up as a lead — these are all extra steps for a potential customer to go through.
Instead, you could use lead generation campaigns with a form that opens instantly and the forms are instantly pre-filled with information that people have shared with Facebook.
5. Always edit Facebook ad placements
Facebook, by default, will automatically place your ad across their network (including audience network, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and on Facebook itself).
For most advertisers, you don’t need that kind of exposure.
Audience network could be hard to manage or to extract a positive ROI from, and the effectiveness of placing ads on the Facebook Marketplace is still unknown.
Instagram is a totally different platform with a different set of users compared to Facebook (while there could be an overlap). Also, Instagram is on mobile devices.
It’s much simpler and easier to “edit” placements instead of opting for “automatic” placements and tighten up your Facebook ad spend by gaining control.
6. Use custom scheduling to save money
Image Credits: Adespresso
While your website — and your existing strategy to generate leads off your website — can work round the clock, as far as ads are concerned not all businesses need to be open 24×7. Local businesses, for instance, don’t need to have Facebook ad campaigns running all the time.
If you are on a tight budget and if you’d like to save some of your cash, use custom scheduling and set your ads to run during your business hours. You could skip the weekends and all the extra hours each day when you think it doesn’t suit your business.
Need help with your Facebook Ad Campaigns? Want to see your campaigns fly off and get you the results you seek for your business? Get on a call with us now.