Love it or hate it, there’s just no other platform that is as effective as Facebook for advertising.
I used to do a lot of Facebook advertising some years ago and I recently came back to it to try with a diverse range of projects. These included an online retail store for clothing, a safety training store and an aged care centre. I was just getting comfortably started, when Whamo!! Facebook suspended my advertising account without warning or reason. I of course appealed, but heard nothing. So I went out to find out where else I could successfully advertise.
I tried Linkedin, Snap Chat and Pinterest, but found to my dismay, that none of them had the targeting power of Facebook. It’s just a fact of life. Nobody captures people’s personal data like Facebook and although we resent that as a user, it’s a godsend to advertisers.
Then just as suddenly as they suspended it, Facebook reactivated my account, so I started advertising again, with caution.
Then Facebook contacted me, asking if I would like a session with a marketing expert. I reluctantly accepted, suspecting it would be more promotional than educational, but I was wrong. I wound up having two very productive sessions in two days, which resolved a lot of questions I had about Facebook advertising and allowed me to take a much more informed approach.
So here are some takeaways I’d like to share with you, in case you are thinking of advertising on Facebook in 2020. Some are from my consultation and some are personal observation.
7 Powerful Facebook Advertising Tips for 2020
- Do not confuse post likes with conversions. They may relate to sales in the long term, but paying for post likes is a convoluted and expensive way of getting conversions.
- Run your ads from the advertising console and not directly from your page. It is harder to navigate, but much more powerful.
- Use Facebook’s pixel on any website you are likely to promote. It gathers data on all visitors and it will give you the ability to create ‘Lookalike’ audiences that are much more likely to respond to your product or service. This, of course, results in a lower bid price. Install the pixel in your website as soon as you make a decision to advertise with the platform. It takes time to capture data.
- Do not optimize ads for conversion until you have enough traffic to ‘retarget’, Facebook’s staff recommend starting conversion ads when you have around 1,000 visitors to your website per week. Begin with campaigns which are optimized for page views.
- Put time into refining your audience and your creative before you start running the ads. Set up a number of different creative and audience alternatives.
- Do not touch your ads for at least four days after the launch. Facebook does have sophisticated algorithms that find the optimum time and optimum device for your audience. It takes at least four days for the system to complete this optimization and any change will start the process again resulting in a higher bid rate for a longer period.
- If you want to build page likes for credibility, offer to put people into a draw for a free product or service in exchange for page likes. The product should be something you sell to ensure the likes you get are from people who are part of your target market. If it’s a big-ticket item, you can give people additional entries for shares.
I hope this helps you with your online advertising in 2020. You may not like Facebook, I personally don’t, but there is no other platform which allows you such powerful targeting and it does work with all kinds of audiences.
Like all your advertising, your objective should be to get people onto a mailing list so you own the communication with them and don’t rely on the goodwill of any platform to be able to keep in touch. And after all, email marketing still gives you the highest ROI of anything out there.
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