Facebook Ads: Attract New Followers and Make More Sales
The fact that it’s free to make and maintain a Facebook page attracts a lot of businesses to the social platform, but when it comes to selling your products or services, you need to put a little money behind your posts to stay relevant in users’ feeds. In this article, we’ll outline what types of ads you should be using and why, how to create an ad and how to measure the success of your advertising campaigns.
Why You Need to Be Using Ads
We could go on and on about Facebook’s algorithm, but the truth of the matter is Facebook promotes posts from users’ friends and groups to the top of their feed and pushes posts from pages they’ve liked to the bottom. This means that unless a user is engaging with your content frequently, they won’t see very much of it very often. The best way to counter this is to run ads. If you’ve spent any time on Facebook recently, you know how often ads appear in your newsfeed, so why aren’t you taking advantage of this valuable virtual real estate?
Different Types of Ads
Facebook offers a simplified way to set the goal of an ad. During the ad creation process, you’ll be prompted to choose what the goal of the ad is. Here are the options you can choose from:
Get More Bookings – Drive traffic to a landing page where customers can book sessions.
Get More Calls – Enable a click-to-call button on your ad.
Get More Leads – Collect customer information so you can contact them.
Get More Messages – Connect users to your Messenger.
Get More Website Visitors – Drive traffic to a link.
Promote Your Business Locally – Set your audience to your local area.
Promote Your Page – Increase page likes.
Boosts v. Ads
Boosts are simply ads that appear as both regular posts in your page’s timeline and as a traditional ad in users’ feeds. Boosting a post is easy and saves time when you need to curate content for your page and create an ad schedule. There are a few ways to boost a post, but the easiest is by going to your page and clicking the “Boost Post” button on the post you wish to promote.
How to Make an Ad
Facebook makes the process of creating an ad pretty easy. Although it may seem overwhelming, creating engaging promoted content will soon seem secondhand.
To create an ad, follow these steps.
Go to your page.
Click “Ad Center” under the Manage Page menu on the left side of your screen.
Click “Create Ad” on the top of the righthand column.
Choose a goal for your ad.
Build how your ad will look, who your audience is, and how long your ad will run.
Click “Promote Now” in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
That’s it! You’ve just published your first Facebook ad.
What A Successful Campaign Looks Like
After your ad has completed running, or for a longer campaign, if it’s been running for a few days, go to Ad Center and see how well it’s been performing. Depending on the goal of your campaign, you’ll be looking at different data to determine its success. Although, for any campaign, engagement rate is extremely important. Engagement rate is calculated by taking the amount of engagement on a post or ad (reactions, comments, shares, clicks, etc.) and dividing that number by reach. When you’re just starting out, the best way to decide if an ad had great engagement is to compare its engagement rate to that of your regular posts.
For some campaigns, you’ll have to look outside of Facebook to measure success. For example, if your goal was to get more bookings, see if you had more sessions booked during the time the ad was running. Similarly, an ad promoted to your local area was probably effective if you’ve been counting more foot traffic in your store. Even a campaign to get more web traffic could see success off Facebook if you’re seeing more online sales.
In the ever-changing world of social media, one thing you can bet on is that these platforms will always want to make money. Having effective social advertising strategies will ensure that your page continues to have high visibility to your relevant audience.