Top 5 Facebook Advertising Tips for eCommerce

Advertising in social networks has been at the top of the ratings of the most effective ways to promote a product or service for more than a year now. Such advertising really works, particularly on Facebook. Among all the largest social media platforms in the world, Facebook offers the most extensive advertising opportunities. 

The business owner is offered a range of advertising solutions that allow effective interaction with the audience. However, there is hardly a specialist in the world who can predict with 100% accuracy the effect of the use of a particular advertising format. Reliable data on what works best for a particular company and niche, you can only get in practice.

The advertising campaign here is based on targeting based on specific user characteristics, which allows you to target your ads as precisely as possible to your target audience. As well as remarketing based on data that is collected by embedding a special code on the site, and e-mail addresses of users.

Facebook allows companies to place ads targeting specific audiences in users’ news feeds, the right column of the account, to show them in the mobile app, to promote videos and offers many other options, which we will discuss in detail later in the article.

You’ll learn about what these are and how to set everything up in such a way as to attract the maximum number of customers in this article.

Advertising on Facebook

A Facebook advertising campaign is considered one of the most effective in terms of attracting customers. Users like and comment on posts and publications, put geolocation tags under photos, and use their profile as a login to third-party services. This data is the basis upon which adverts are subsequently displayed on the page and news feed.

Once a group of ads has been created, Facebook’s self-learning algorithm will begin to search for the most converting audience to display ads. This happens from the last change and lasts until 50 conversions have been made. This period is very important because on its basis will be formed a strategy for the effective operation of your advertising campaign.

What Tasks Are Solved

Before setting up an ad it is important to rely on recognition and leads. Brand recognition of the product or service should have maximum reach. Conversion motivates potential customers to take action, the ad will direct people to download the app or click on a link.

Placement Formats

Popular formats for advertising on Facebook are:

• Single image (static or GIF animation, at the moderator’s discretion when submitting for review, no exact information available);
• Photo gallery;
• Slideshow – automatically scrolling through images;
• Video;
• Circular gallery of images;
• A selection of products with individual cards.
• Take into account the specifics of placement, so you don’t waste time setting it up. 

Common posting errors described by moderators include:

• Overspamming text on the image, it is better to keep the ratio “90% image to 10% text”;
• Incorrect URL of the link. If the link does not correspond to the subject or contains irrelevant content, in addition to the refusal to post, you can get the entire account blocked;
• Forbidden topics – Facebook actively ensures that no one can post inappropriate content, such as *******, ********, ***, etc;
• Cheeky clickbait – in case the characterization of a product or service is grossly overstated. It is better to carefully work out the main content and avoid “shouty” headlines;
• Foul language and insults – this prohibition is established solely for the care of users, including minors;
• Political advertising aimed at, among other things, participation in uncoordinated events.

Facebook Advertising Benefits

One of the main advertising advantages of this social network. Ads that show next to posts from friends, family and communities look much more natural to users than, say, a banner ad on a website.

Facebook knows just about everything about its users, allowing you to customize your ads based on very fine-tuned settings such as city, marital status, interests, hobbies, and more. In addition, all of these factors can be randomly combined with each other in search of the most successful combinations. Provided you have enough budget for that 🙂 Facebook, long ago learned to use internal algorithms to select the right target audience. It is enough to specify everything correctly in the parameters before publishing, and your ads will be seen by more potential customers.

You can set any daily budget, starting from just $5, and start/stop campaigns at any time of your choice or specify an automatic end ****. In other words, even for a newbie the risks are minimized. The system provides detailed documentation on how to set up both the business pages and all the stages of work with the features of the advertising cabinet. By studying the help in the process, you can gradually learn all the nuances.

In addition to Facebook, users are very likely to see your publications in Instagram, because both services belong to the same owner. 

Practice shows that outreach campaigns on Facebook are much cheaper because you can set up an audience interested in your products/services.

• Detailed statistical data download

Just give the system permission to optimize your impressions and costs on its own, and your results will be available in full and it will be easier for you to study everything thoroughly. Besides, you should indicate the daily and monthly advertising expenses and Facebook will automatically redirect the flows and turn off the irrelevant settings.

It has already been confirmed more than once that this way of promotion is effective. Targeted advertising on Facebook is a powerful generator of user traffic. In the beginning, it will be difficult to figure out on your own, but then you can sharpen your skills and make the campaigns more effective in less time, and receive a quality growth of visitors in return.

How to Advertise on Facebook – 5 Easy Steps

To understand in detail all the specifics of working with Facebook from scratch, you may have to spend some time. Fortunately, the detailed official help and tips that will appear along the way will make this process much easier.

We won’t dwell on describing the basic features of working with the company page, so as not to duplicate the information that is available in the system itself. Instead, we will share with you a general algorithm, adhering to which you can greatly simplify for yourself the task of creating and managing advertising in this social network. Here are a few steps to help you do that.

You can advertise your site even without creating a page, but if you’re going to make full use of the various ad formats, you’ll need one. Go to facebook.com/pages/create and, after specifying your business category, follow the on-screen instructions. When the process is complete, you will need to:

• fill out detailed information about your page;
• upload a profile and cover photo;
• add one or more of your first publications.
• activate your advertising account.
• after logging in under your credentials, click on the arrow in the upper right corner and select “Create Ads” from the menu.

If you don’t already have an advertising account, Facebook will prompt you to create one again in a step-by-step wizard mode, which is easy even for an untrained person. You’ll need to specify basic account settings such as payment currency, country and time zone, and then attach your bank card to this advertising account, which will be used to make payments for the campaign (once a month):

Each ad on Facebook must have a specific goal, which the advertiser can specify at the setup stage. You can read more information about each goal on the help pages.

As an example, let’s choose “Raise Publications,” which we can use to promote to potential buyers a post from their page in their newsfeed that leads to a product card in the online store. After selecting a target post on the page, we click the “Customize audience and budget” button, in the settings you can specify the country, city, age, gender, language, interests and other characteristics of the target audience:

Then you can specify the budget and the schedule for showing the ad. Based on this, the system immediately builds and display relative to the approximate daily coverage of users:

A budget can be specified either daily or for the entire time. For example, $30 for three days or $5 per day continuously until you decide to stop the campaign.

• Choose your display location and set up your ad

There are three main places to show ads, each with different features and different levels of effectiveness:

• Computer Newsfeed. Ads will show in the user’s newsfeed along with content from friends and pages they are subscribed to.
• Mobile News Feed. Lots of users use Facebook on mobile devices, and leaving this active will attract them to the site.
• Right Column on PC. These ads appear in the right-hand column and are shown to desktop users.

If you’re not just promoting a feed entry, but rather a post link to a website, you’ll have the option to change the title and image used when creating your ad, as well as add a small captivating description and call to action button. You can read more about all of this in the relevant help section.

Once you’ve made all the necessary changes, simply click the “Place Order” button. And in about 15-20 minutes after the moderator checks the campaign will start working.

After the display is complete, you will be able to see detailed statistics for each of your ads, data on the activity of different audience segments, estimate the cost of action by users, the number of clicks, likes, reposts and other interesting statistics in your advertising cabinet:

How to measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads?

As you know, when creating an advertising campaign it is important to choose the right target, audience, as well as to make a high-quality and clear ad. Over time, it’s important to understand what worked in the end and what didn’t. To do this, there are metrics that allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising. Statistical metrics are plugged into settings and are mostly used by marketers to adjust strategy.

There are also indicative and non-indicative metrics that can be used to determine how users interact with the ad and content in the community being promoted. The metrics include:

• Coverage – the number of people who saw the publication.
• Clicks – clicks on the ad.
• Video views – an important metric for video content. Views count after 3 seconds of display. Keep in mind that it counts video impressions in automatic display in the newsfeed.
• Frequency of impressions is the average number of times a person watched an ad. This metric is important to monitor in order to avoid spamming the ad, otherwise you might lose sight of the target audience.
• CTR – The percentage ratio of clicks per link to impressions.
• Leads – the number of users who performed an action during the transition to the site – registered or left a request.

All indicators are taken into account by specialists in contextual advertising. On their basis, the client can improve the site as a whole or individual landing pages to improve the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

Tips for Remarketing on Facebook

At first glance, running a campaign on Facebook may seem like an easy task. But, as is always the case, beginners make a lot of mistakes, and most important questions can only be answered through constant practice. For your targeting ads on Facebook to be really effective, you should pay attention to a number of tips.

• Use “Pixel” for retargeting. “Pixel” Facebook is a special piece of code that, once installed on the pages of the site collects information about those of its visitors who are registered users of this social network. It is created quite easily, you need to click on the item “Pixels” in the menu “Tools” in your account, a fragment of code will be automatically generated and inserted into the code of the site, using the step by step instructions that will appear in the process.

• Create a customized audience. You may have been in the market for quite some time and already have a clear understanding of exactly who your target audience is. But this profile may give you an audience of 2 million users, and your budget will simply be “drained” to nothing. So use the data collected through the Facebook Pixel to create customized audiences that consist of people who have already visited your site. This way, you can target your ads to the most interested audience of users.

• Attractive images and calls to action. As with any other type of advertising, the advertiser’s main goal is to draw people’s attention to your message. Both the textual content and the visual component play an important role. Therefore, use attractive photos that are associated with your product or service and at the same time stand out from the others. And in the text, use calls to action, more on which you can read in one of our blog articles.

• Start with the needs of your customers. Your task is not just to sell, but to help the user solve a particular problem, to meet a need for something. Understanding this and the emphasis on the benefits of your product for the target audience can make the advertising appeal much more effective.

• Pay attention to geography. For some types of business, it makes sense to target the ad to only one city, district, which is part of the delivery area. For example, it could be pizza delivery, holiday events, training courses, furniture showroom, etc. In such cases, targeting a larger audience would simply waste the budget and have no effect in the form of sales/leads.

• Promote video. It gets a higher priority when shown to users than other types of content. One more thing – in most users’ profile settings, videos are enabled to automatically play in their feed, which further draws attention to them. An attractive video for use in an ad campaign can even be created with your smartphone. But if you can, of course, it’s better to use the services of professionals. Do not make them too long – a timing of 30 seconds to 2-3 minutes is enough. Social media users do not like too long videos.

• Analyze the results. The most effective advertising campaign can only be achieved by fine-tuning the various parameters of ads. To do this, it is important to regularly analyze the results of reports to understand what strategy in your case will be most profitable. It may turn out that simply changing the age of the target audience in your targeting settings is enough to increase the response from users by several times.

• The audience is most important! A social network is first and foremost a community of people with family and friendships, interests and preferences, and personal pages. Uninteresting, low-quality and annoying ads will be perceived by them as an attempt to invade their personal space, with the corresponding consequences in terms of attitude towards the brand. This is especially pronounced on Facebook, and how well you understand your audience, their interests and needs determines the effectiveness and results of your advertising campaign. So use all the tips we’ve listed and pay attention to important details so that your ads are truly effective for your business.

• Experimentation and a detailed study of the statistics on their results are very important moments for any kind of online advertising, and Facebook targeting advertising is absolutely no exception here.

Conclusion

To make your advertising in Facebook as effective as possible, don’t be afraid to use modern means of advertising, including Facebook – everything is based on a competent dialogue, the goal of which is long-term cooperation.

Viktoria is a content writer and sales development representative at Lira Management agency and she’s an avid SEO enthusiast.