Tips For Optimizing Your Facebook Ads

Facebook ads, unlike traditional PPC ads, might seem to be tricky to optimize. While PPC ads are in the domain of pull advertising, and banner ads are mainly pushing your message or brand, Facebook adverts are something like a mix between the two. Facebook pricing model resembles PPC, where you pay per click, and thus you’d need to make your ads interesting and engaging enough to entice the clicks. Quite similar to what you would do in PPC if your goal is to increase CTR of your ads. Targeting, however, is more like display campaigns targeting – you need to carefully select your audience to be successful. But on top of that, Facebook offers a very unique twist – a power of social sharing, peer exposure and possibility to use a “domino effect”.

Having in mind the similarities and differences of Facebook advertising to traditional search marketing and display advertising, you can start building a strategy for successful optimization of your Facebook ads.

• Find inspiration for your Facebook ad targeting in your search campaigns – i.e. you assumably would like to serve to the same core potential clients or customers, that you are trying to reach with your PPC campaigns

 

• Analyse your top converting PPC keywords – and use those as the basis for Likes and Interests targeting

 

• Consider the negative keywords you have in your PPC campaigns – sometimes the word X means Y in combination with the word Z – looking at the words meanings you will make sure that you increase the relevancy of your ads

 

• Find the right trade-off between going too broad and being too specific: with the former, you risk to incur unnecessary costs; with the latter, you will not reach all the potential clients you would like to reach. Use therefore a top-down approach – start with a broader terms when targeting interests and go deeper with more specific ones (for instance, “Yoga” and then “Yoga retreats” and  “Ashtanga”)

 

• Do not forget about demographic targeting

 

• Use your competitors brand names when targeting Likes and Interests

 

• Use images in your ads rather than text only – remember that a picture is worth a thousand words

 

• Separate the campaigns where you drive traffic to your website – and to your Facebook page. Your primary goal with the website is likely to get conversions or increase sales. The goal of driving the traffic to Facebook page, however, is likely to create brand awareness and form a community. Different goals require different optimization strategies.

 

• Test copy in your ads – try different “calls to action” and different wording

 

• Test images in your ads – don’t just assume something will work because you like it. Others might not

 

• Make sure you don’t promote again the same message to the users whom you already got a “Like” from

 

Related articles

• Here’s How To Make Your Facebook Ad Campaigns Work (businessinsider.com)
• How To Make a Profitable Facebook Ad Campaign (johnchow.com)

18 Phrases That Should Be Prohibited in Business Communications

Excuses. The most unproductive and irritating thing you can imagine. When you wonder why a certain task was not done, or was not done in time, or was done incorrectly, the last thing you want to hear is the lame excuse. You are not interested in who’s to blame. You are interested in getting the damn things done.  And quite often you just don’t have time to listen to those excuses. I stumbled upon a below picture somewhere online, that’s a list of phrases prohibited from using in some Russian military unit. Now, I think it’s applicable for almost any business team and I find it fun, precise, and worth translating. Moreover, I believe it even worth using as a basis of communication policy in business teams. Enjoy!

1. “It is a first time I hear about it.”

2. “I called, but I could not get through.”

3. “I tried to catch you, but you were not in the office.”

4. “I was looking for it, but I could not find it.”

5. “But I thought….”

6. “It was before I started working here.”

7. “But I reported about it…”

8. “I think it is a bug of the system.”

9.  “But nobody told me about it!”

10. “But why me?”

11. “I haven’t heard about it.”

12. “I don’t know.”

13. “I did not receive this information.”

14. “But I wanted to make it better!”

15. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

16. “I wanted to report about it, but you were not available.”

17. “I told him, but he didn’t do it.”

18. “I was not there at that time, I think I was sick (on vacation).”