Facebook is now one of the most popular marketing platforms on the planet. As the social giant has grown to more than 2.7 billion active users, it’s also expanded its advertising network to suit a wide range of businesses.
Now a ton of the benefits of advertising on Facebook are obvious, but paid advertising does come with a lot of complexities. It’s important to understand what Facebook offers businesses and how its paid ad network is built to offer a bunch of advertising options before you can see how it might help you reach new audiences.
Compared to other similar social media sites, users are more likely to click ads they see in their Facebook feed, making it a highly beneficial place to invest your advertising budget. By 2020 Facebook as driving more than 80% of all U.S. social referrals to eCommerce sites, and its dominance means that by itself Facebook now accounts for 40% of annual digital display ad revenue – more than even Google PPC.
One of the benefits of advertising on Facebook for your business is that you’re not limited to certain ad types and aren’t locked into plain text ads (like you are with search engine PPC). In fact these ad types cater better to branding since they give marketers the ability to create visual, creative, graphic-styles ads with multi-media elements: video, photo, text etc.
Like a lot of pay-per-click style advertising platforms, Facebook Ads are freely available to all businesses – and the Ads Manager tool is free as well. The only cost is the cost associate with supplying a budget and running ads.
The cost of running ads on Facebook is determine by a lot of factors (your budget, your ad types, industry, etc.) but generally marketers should expect to pay anywhere from a few cents to a couple dollars per click.
Facebook business ads are ideal for brands that are looking to run both short-term and long-term digital marketing strategies – since they can start providing revenue/conversion as soon as they go live. But they’re best for fast results.
Once ad campaigns are set up in the Ads Manager, are reviewed by Facebook, and once they go live, they start working immediately and begin showing your brand/products to potentially thousands of people instantly. Ads are normally approved within 24 hours, so the Facebook advertising benefits come from giving businesses a way to start getting sales within a couple days.
Marketers can also choose from a range of “advertising objectives” that suit their business goals. This is great for businesses that want to prioritize different results for their ads. For example ads can be designed to drive more: post engagement/interaction, more site traffic, lead generation, etc.
With more than 2.7 billion active users, the Facebook ads platform gives businesses access to one of the single largest digital ad networks. But that’s not all, since its acquisition of Instagram in 2012, the social media giant has built out its ad network to give easy access to both platforms.
Facebook’s Ads Manager gives business a wide range of performance insights and aggregate data. Each ad you create can be measured through their ad tools.
Ad measurement gives insight into ad performance including ad demographics with anonymized information on users, multi-channel data comparisons (like with TV ads), and also negative advertising data (here Facebook gives advertisers control to make sure there ads don’t show up in areas where they don’t want it to).
Another benefit of Facebook advertising includes testing tools for your businesses to improve ad results. Namely A/B testing where marketers can display near-identical ads (with minor differences) to see which adjustments perform better over time, with data.
Facebook’s ad platform gives business the options to use splitting testing in order to test and display ad variants. Plus split test ads can be set up: for time periods (1-30 days), with specific budgets, and with custom audiences.
Facebook advertising is available to basically all businesses and entrepreneurs. And the entire ad system exists within Facebook, all that’s needed is a Facebook page or an “advertisers” role for an existing page.
To take advantage of Facebook advertising, that’s all that’s needed to get started. From there marketers can set up goals, ad campaigns, find audiences and more, using the inhouse tools.
“Block lists” can be set up in an ads campaign to prevent your business ads from showing to URLs where you don’t want to appear. You can prevent your pages from showing in in certain apps, certain pages in the Audience Network, in-stream videos, and in Facebook Instant Articles. By utilizing these tools businesses can improve their ad efficiency, improve ROAS, and get more bang-for-their buck. Doing this is an important strategy for saving money by not advertising to ineffective audiences.
There’s another big benefit of advertising on Facebook’s ad network: forecasting. With ads that have enough data, they can make estimates about how many people can be reached, and how many results can be gained per day (with a full ad budget).
This strategy works using the “Facebook pixel” – a small snippet of code that you post in your site to help target customers and visitors. It tracks people, along with the types of actions they take on your site like any Facebook ads they viewed before visiting, pages they visit, add-to-cart actions, and more. Plus Facebook advertising benefits businesses by giving them the option to include “dynamic ads” that they can create to specifically target remarketed shoppers.
One of the biggest advantages of Facebook ads compared to other platforms – especially search PPC – is its Sponsored Message feature. Sponsored messages give businesses the ability to send offers, promotions, and updates directly to people who communicate with them on the Facebook messaging platform.
This is another reason why advertising on Facebook is worthwhile. Because businesses will reach more people than with just their organic social media marketing. And they’ll be able to expand the reach of their existing content both on-platform and off.
Facebook ads can help a business get more visibility for their Facebook content and boost traffic to their core website content – whether it’s cornerstone site content, simple ad copy, or blogs. Facebook ads can be set up to target greater site traffic, more impressions, and even click-through-rate (CTR).
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