Every business or enterprise, whether it has a virtual or physical presence or both, requires digital marketing to make itself known. One of the most widely used tools for this purpose is Facebook Ads, a tool that can be used both on Facebook and Instagram for marketing.
What is Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is Facebook’s paid media system with which you can promote your store on Facebook, Instagram, your own website, your app and even through events you have created. It consists of display ads within Facebook and Instagram, and offers several tools to help you create campaigns. The ads can be created in text, video, graphic and image formats, and allow you to promote products, online stores, services and, in short, refer the social network user to your company’s link. You only pay for the clicks received.
Facebook Ads allows a greater ability to interact with your potential customers, and is -today- very important for your marketing strategy, as it helps you to better understand the behavior of your current and potential customers, allowing you to attract them and / or loyalty effectively.
Although Facebook has an algorithm known as Edge Rank that analyzes and determines the most relevant content for each user based on their searches and behavior on the social network, it is not enough to count on organic reach. It is also necessary to invest in ads, even if the investment is not high. The ads created with this tool appear in the middle of the Facebook or Instagram feed and blend in among the other posts, causing more people to click on the ads.
Among the main advantages we can mention:
- Since FB has such a huge database, the probabilities that our ideal clients are in it are very high. It allows you to reach a target audience with greater precision than other mass media.
- You can segment in detail. It even has options such as using data from visitors to our website to find them on Facebook thanks to the pixel*, or making targeted ads to people on our list of subscribers.
- You can track your campaigns in real time and make adjustments based on the results. For this reason it allows you to get good results in relatively short times.
- It has very powerful statistics (insights). Thanks to this data we can establish metrics, analyze and interpret results and optimize campaigns in real time.
- It implies much lower costs compared to traditional advertising. Also, the CPC** is cheaper than in other types of digital advertising, which makes it accessible to almost anyone.
- You have control over your budget.
- It allows you to evaluate the immediate return on investment.
- You can have high interaction with users.
- Increase of followers independent of the objective of your campaign.
Some disadvantages include:
- If you don’t optimize your campaign correctly it can be costly.
- It cannot be programmed to first reach the entire target audience before showing them an ad again.
How Facebook Ads works
The platform offers a wide range of possibilities for use. Although later on (in a new article) we will explain in detail how this tool works, in general terms we can say the following:
It has a structure made up of 3 levels: Campaign / Ad set / Ads. Each level has its functions and allows you to do different things.
Campaign
The first thing we must do to create a Facebook Ads campaign is to define an objective, this way you will be able to reach the goal you set. This point is essential, because if it is wrongly selected you will not get the results you expect because the Facebook algorithm optimizes the delivery of results according to the selected objective.
Ad set
Ad sets allow you to define the following aspects:
- Daily budget.
- Different segmentations.
- Placement.
- Calendar of publications.
Here lies a potential for your campaigns, as you can create different sets of ads targeting different audiences, whether new or personalized. Although it is also true that it is currently being recommended to let the algorithm itself establish how it can optimize your marketing campaign. As it is at an advanced stage of development, it is often recommended to let the algorithm do it by itself.
Ads
Ads are the visual elements that the user will see on the screen. Here it is important to evaluate the different components and test various formats so that you can optimize them according to their performance (we will call this testing the ads). It is not only important to ensure the quality of the images, but also other elements such as good copywriting.
As indicated above, ads can be created in the form of text, graphics and videos, and can appear either in the Facebook news feed, in the column located on the right side of the screen, or in the news section. Once the ad is published, it must be updated and monitored daily to optimize and generate better results.
Audience statistics
The demographic information of Facebook Audience Insights allows you to better understand the people who see the content you publish and are followers of your pages, and contains various metrics that will help you get an idea of their behavior. Remember that the more data you have about your buyer persona, the more likely you are to succeed, since you will know how to better direct the communication of your campaign.
This is just a glimpse of what Facebook Ads has to offer. We remain convinced from our own experience that digital marketing is a great opportunity to achieve good results without necessarily involving large investments.
As you can see, this tool is very useful to achieve conversions (sales, subscriptions, budget requests, etc.), and it is also available to anyone with internet access and a computer or cell phone. And not to overwhelm you with the sea of information available regarding digital marketing, later we will be explaining in more detail how to make a Facebook Ads campaign to promote your products or services.
Footnotes
* The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you place on your website and allows you to measure the effectiveness of your digital advertising by interpreting the actions that people take on your website. This action can be performed by your website administrator.
** CPC stands for “cost per click”, and consists of the final amount charged to a customer for a click in a digital marketing campaign. It is used as a metric to estimate bids on platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, and is also used to calculate ROI (return on investment) for paid campaigns.