Facebook Advertising

Audiences

You have a good chance that your audience will be on Facebook, given that it has roughly 2.9 billion monthly active users. In terms of demographics, 56.6% of Facebook users are male, and Facebook is the most popular social media network for men and women aged 35-44.

It entirely depends on who your audience is as to whether Facebook is the channel for you. If you look at Facebook targeting options, you can identify whether you are able to easily target the correct audience in their desktop or mobile news feeds or not.

For example, if you’re looking for a real niche sector of anti-money laundering professionals with 5+ years of experience who are in a decision-making role, you’re probably going to struggle on Facebook – but, LinkedIn would potentially be a goldmine. However, if your target audience is people aged 21-30 who shop at Zara, H&M, and ASOS, and are looking for a new dress, then Facebook advertising is probably your best bet.

To determine whether the platform works for you from a paid ads perspective is down to your paid social experts to determine. Based on their years of experience and knowledge, they’ll likely be able to tell you instantly if it’s possible or not.

As a general rule of thumb, if your audience is too broad, it’s unlikely to work well on Facebook. But similarly, if your audience is to niche, it won’t perform either.

Whether Facebook is a channel for you in general, away from an ads perspective, is an entirely different conversation. There are many companies and brands that would benefit from high-performing organic social media marketing, utilising groups, events, and Facebook Lives. Again, think about how your customers/users interact with your brand and think about the best way to engage them. It might not always be via this advertising strategy.

Business Objective

So, you’ve discovered that your audience is Facebook, which means that paid ads will work for you – right? Wrong!

There are a few questions that you need to ask yourself before deciding whether you should start running Facebook ads.

• What does success look like to you?
• How quickly do you need to see a return on your investment?
• How much are you willing to invest?

Real success with Facebook advertising comes from driving top-of-funnel traffic and making people aware of your brand. If you consider the Messy Middle, Facebook is fantastic at fulfilling the trigger, evaluation, and exploration stages.

The same can’t be said for purely driving bottom-of-funnel (BOF) conversions.

Now, Facebook can be incredible for BOF, and you’ll know people who make all their money through Facebook ads, but that only works if you allow time for the top of the funnel to build up and make data-driven decisions.

Therefore, if your success looks like ‘an immediate return on investment’, starting with a small advertising cost and increasing once you have proof of concept, you’re unlikely to succeed.

Interest-Based Targeting

Interest-based targeting is the bread and butter of Facebook & Instagram advertising. Utilising data collected by Facebook Pixels across thousands of websites combined with tracking each user’s activity across the platform itself, Facebook determines a couple of different criteria for each user.

Along with your basic location, age, and gender, these are:

Interests

‘Interests’ is where Facebook and Instagram utilise all their data sources and pull out some overall brands, hobbies, sports, TV shows, etc. that each user shows ‘interest’ in. Here, advertisers can build the personas of their target audience and reach them directly. There are hundreds of options available here, but they do sit in the following categories:

• Business and industry
• Entertainment
• Family and relationships
• Fitness and wellness
• Food and drink
• Hobbies and activities
• Shopping and fashion
• Sports and outdoors
• Technology

Behaviours

Rather than what you engage with on Facebook & Instagram, behaviours are based on how you engage. This includes:

• Digital activities: Facebook page admins, people who use Facebook gaming, operating system used, internet browsers used
• Expats: Lived in X country and moved to Y country, lived abroad, a family of those who lives abroad, friends of those who live abroad
• Mobile device user: A mobile device used
• Purchase Behaviour: Engaged shoppers (purchase frequently online)
• Travel: Commuters, frequent travellers, frequent international travellers, returned from travel one week ago, returned from travel two weeks ago

Demographics

As users provide a lot of their personal information to Facebook voluntarily, the platform also allows advertisers to target based on demographics. These demographics are collected into the following categories:

• Education: Education, the field of study, schools, years of study
• Financial: Income (US only)
• Life Events: Anniversary, away from family, away from hometown, birthday, friends of people with a birthday in a specific month, long-distance relationship, new job, new relationship, newly engaged, newlywed, recently moved
• Parents: New parents, toddlers, preteens, teenagers, adult children
• Relationship: Divorced, single, in a relationship, married, engaged
• Work: Employers, industries, job titles

Retargeting

‘Retargeting’ is one of the best features of Facebook & Instagram advertising.

Retargeting gives you the opportunity to target people, either in their mobile or desktop news feed that have previously engaged with you in some way.

• Customer Lists: With customer lists, you can upload the email address and names that you have previously collected (in a GDPR-compliant format). This could be a list of existing customers, an email list etc. Facebook will then match those lists to profiles and allow advertisers to target those that match.
• Dynamic Integration Audiences: The problem with customer list audiences is that they are static, as you upload them manually and then need to update them manually. Some applications allow for dynamic audience integration, mainly email marketing platforms. Once you create a segment in the application, there is an option to sync through to Facebook. Therefore, as that segment updates in the back end, it will automatically update on Facebook.
• Website Engagement: With a Facebook Pixel on your website, you are able to retarget anyone who has been on your website in the past 180 days. This could be broad, targeting everyone who’s been on the site as a whole, or it could be page-specific or time-on-page specific. These ads are also really good for targeting abandoned baskets and people that have viewed specific products on your site.
• Page Engagement: In the same way that you can retarget any website engagement, you can do the same for your Facebook or Instagram pages too. This is particularly useful if you have an active audience on your organic pages.
• Ad Engagement: You can also retarget people who have engaged with your ad, whether that is a video view or a click. This allows you to build out an effective funnel.

Lookalike Targeting

Lookalike audiences differ from the other methods of targeting as they are data-based. A lookalike audience takes the audience information in your customer list or retargeting audience and finds users that are similar to your base audience but not the same. What this means is that you can upload a list of your existing customers and Facebook will find you new customers that are more likely to purchase than others.

In simple terms – lookalike audiences are the new customer acquisition weapon in Facebook & Instagram’s targeting arsenal.

To create a lookalike audience, you select how similar to the source audience you want your lookalike to be. This works on a sliding scale from 1% to 10%, with 10% being the most dissimilar. It’s recommended that you create different percentage audiences. In doing this, you can have different audiences of different similarities and test performance side by side.

Creative and Copy Testing

With all the different creative options available to you within Facebook advertising, it is vital that you not only test different types, but also different focuses. Some of our favourites to test are:

• Solution-focused: what can your product/service offer the audience
• USP-focused: what makes your brand different from competitors
• Review-focused: lead with customer/client reviews
• Case study focused: lead with customer/client stories
• Problem-focused: what problem does your audience have
• Price focused: lead with your price
• Sale-focused: lead with your sale

By introducing different ad focus variations and testing, you have the opportunity to evaluate the results and data to make informed decisions. It is most likely that as your audience is at different stages of their customer journey they require different messaging or creativity to be convinced to purchase/enquire.

Without testing what form of copy or creative resonates with your audience the most and drives the most desired results, you are basing your entire strategy around assumptions. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket with paid social, you need to be able to be flexible. Most of the time, you are surprised by the results!

Targeting Testing

In a similar vein, you can launch various different tests when it comes to targeting your account. Some common tests that we run include:

• Split age testing: create two ad sets segmenting your audience into two different age groups and see which performs best
• Split gender testing: test male vs. female in two ad sets
• Different interest groups: for example, department stores vs. fashion brands vs. weekend interests vs. tv interests vs. music interests
• Lookalike testing: test 1% vs. 2% vs. 3% etc.
• Retargeting testing: running Facebook engagement retargeting vs. Instagram engagement retargeting
• Video Views testing: run 3-second video views retargeting vs. 10-second video views retargeting etc. (Facebook themselves recommend keeping videos below 15 seconds)
• Web pages testing: test specific page view retargeting vs. whole page view retargeting

When testing targeting options, it’s important to factor in audience size. If one audience is significantly larger than the other, all of your advertising budgets will automatically go to the biggest. In this case, you can implement ad-set budgets or ad-set spending limits to counter this.

Landing Page Testing

Along with testing copy, creative, and targeting, an often overlooked aspect to test is your landing page. Particularly if you are running website lead generation campaigns, your landing page needs to be perfectly optimised to convert website visitors.

With years of experience, we know that there are multiple factors that can impact a landing page’s conversion rate, such as:

• The number of fields in your form
• Whether you include Trustpilot reviews or not
• The image option on your page
• How much content is above/below the fold
• The landing page load time

It is only through testing different variations that you can really have the best possible conversion rate.