Facebook with over 2 billion users has become a hot marketing hub in this era. We are sure you must go through dozens of Facebook ads in a day. And also, dozens of ads on how to run Facebook ads the right way.
Sometimes, even though your ad is complete and ready to run, it doesn’t exactly run.
Does that mean successful Facebook ads are purely based on luck or even a “myth”?
No!
Your advertising campaign is most likely failing due to some fundamental errors that you’re making. Don’t worry, we’ve all missed our target audience.
In this article, we will be teaching you how to save your Facebook ads. Let’s get right into it!
Fix your Targeting
Facebook is a powerful advertising platform because a small business can target ads to find the ideal customer in ways that are simply not possible on other platforms.
But, to this, there is a flipside.
If your Facebook ads fail, there’s a good chance you’re not properly targeting your ads.
If you put your ads in front of people who don’t care about your offer, it doesn’t matter how good your ad is, it won’t just be clicked on by people.
Target individuals with a need you can fulfil.
There are two camps that advertisers generally fall into when it comes to targeting errors.
The first camp involves individuals on the social network who make their targeting too restricted.
This tends to occur with the targeting features of Facebook when you go over the top.
The second camp involves individuals who are too broad for their targeting.
How do you know if your problem is poor targeting?
Generally, your ads will have a low ‘Click-through-rate (CTR)’ if you are working on a brand new advertising campaign with decent new ads and your targeting is not set up properly.
By dividing the number of clicks by the number of times your ad has been shown, the CTR is calculated.
Poor targeting results in a poor click-through rate because your ads are irrelevant to the individuals to whom you show them.
You might have a decent CTR, but very low volume, on the other hand.
This is a common sign that your targeting is too narrow, but on the correct track.
Remember, if nobody clicks on your ads, your ads won’t make you any money.
There are a few things you can do to improve your conversion rate if you want to dial in your goal.
Create buyer personas
Based on market research and real data about your existing clients, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer.
By asking questions like, what demographics do they occupy, a buyer persona will help you figure out who your ideal customer is.
You have to know their age , gender, job title, and geographical location at the most basic level.
What does a typical day look like in their lives?
Figure out their pain points.
This will let you understand what their primary struggles are.
By suggesting that you can solve these pain points, you can then use this information when actually writing your ad copy.
See the picture below?
You need to come up with a customer persona that is so detailed that you can easily decide on all of Facebook’s relevant options.
You might wish to stop short of Ethnic Affinity on the ‘More Demographics’ drop-down menu.
Although the section ‘Life Events’ may be helpful, the rest may cause you to target individuals too narrowly.
You will begin to notice that your ‘Potential Reach’ is getting lower as your ads become more targeted, which can negatively affect your click-through rate.
Reach refers to an estimated number of individuals who will see your ad impression.
Target Using Audience Insights
Audience Insights is a very useful Facebook-generated tool.
It is more like a Genie.
Jokes apart, you can use it, in basic terms, to convert broad targeting data into narrow targeting data that is more likely to be converted.
Even if you just give a little bit of information to the Audience Insights tool, you’ll still get a lot more back in the form of data points that give you a sense of who your ideal client really is.
You can then use this information to deploy the targeting features of Facebook to the fullest extent as a small business.
Let’s take a look at how you can use Audience Insights to improve your ad targeting.
Combining Audience Insights with a Basic Buyer Persona
Even if you just have the basics of your buyer persona down, audience insights can become an incredibly powerful tool.
Let’s say we wanted to create a course in Facebook Marketing that taught small businesses how to construct an email list.
How can we use Audience Insights to provide us with data on target individuals?
Well, let ‘s assume that some basic information about our potential clients is known to us.
For argument’s sake, we’ll say that the buyer persona of our customers is the following:
- Age – 21-55
- Location – U.S.A
We’ll then put that information into the options provided by the Audience Insights tool.
Only enter some keywords that are related to the hypothetical product when it comes to interests.
It is possible to base the keywords on what you want to sell, but also on people / companies who might be an authority in your space.
This is because they tend to follow the same target audience as you do.
Don’t you know who these individuals or businesses might be?
By doing a quick Google search on a keyword that is relevant to your offering, fix this issue.
Search for keywords such as, ‘list building Facebook ads’.
Then put these websites and names into the targeting options.
You want to find the right balance here for your advertising campaign.
Note that, between 5-7 interests are enough. Too many and your data might miss some excellent targeting opportunities. Too little and your data will be too unspecific.
Keep in mind that you can only target interests on Facebook that have a large enough following.
Some of the names and websites I found on Google didn’t register when I tried to enter them in the interests section. That’s why they’re not there.
Let’s take a look at what we discovered as a result of providing this information.
We know right off the bat that the size of the audience is around 700-800k.
Right now, we’ve just invented this audience, so that doesn’t mean much.
However, it does give us a sense of what is possible if we were to run advertisements across the social network for this audience.
A lot of individuals means that without saturating the audience with our presence quickly, we can advertise a lot.
We also know that the audience is also evenly divided between men and women.
Throughout this post, you’ll notice that there are blue bars and grey bars. The grey bars compare the audience demographics to the rest of Facebook.
The grey bars for 55-64 and 65+ are at 0% because that age range was not included when I was formulating my target audience.
Above is an image of the Top Categories page. The ‘Top Categories’ page lets us know the top pages liked by people in this audience for each of the categories shown in the social network.
This is where you really begin to learn a lot. That’s because Facebook interest targeting is extremely powerful and this page lets us know what interests our target people have.
We can see where most of the target audience is situated by looking at the location.
In the comparison column, the percentages just translate what the two bar colours indicate into numbers.
That’s how our ‘Selected Audience’ compares to the rest of Facebook, if you don’t remember.
A disproportionate number of people in San Francisco are in this audience, as you can see.
And, finally, we can see that the audience we have targeted spends 117% more on business purchases than the rest of Facebook.
This is reassuring if you’re selling a course to small business owners since your course could be classified as a ‘Business purchase.’
Are your Facebook Ads not performing as well you want them to? Don’t worry, we are there to help you out. Get in touch with us and we will help you figure out the right persona and targetting.
Turning That Information into Highly Targeted Ads
So, we now know how to target our advertising campaign as a result of the information provided by Facebook Audience insights.
In order to optimise our click-through rate, we also inadvertently developed the basics of a buyer persona.
If we were looking to create a course for Facebook Ads that taught people how to create a list, here’s an example of how we could build a persona with our ad to target people.
- Age: 21-55
- Gender: Male & Female
- Education: College, Grad
- Relationship: Married, Single
- Location: New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago
- Job Title: Management, Sales and Administrative
- Interests: Rebelmouse, Life on Fire, Gary Vaynerchuk, Hubspot, Hootsuite, Social Media Examiner, Ali Brown
- Device: Desktop and Mobile
- Income: 50k Plus
If you do it like that, however, you could accidentally include certain interests that are not worth targeting.
It might turn out, after all, that individuals who like Rebelmouse really don’t like Facebook Ads courses.
Therefore, the use of raw data gives you a chance to be more selective in your targeting.
Even if you struggle to come up with a customer persona, the Audience Insights tool can still help you realise who your ideal customer is.
The insights of audiences vary from well-known Page Insights.
Page Insights tells you how people interact with your page in order to explain it in simple terms.
Audience Insights tells you who is in the social network interacting with your page.
Go to the Audience Insights page to gather data for a Fan Page and click Create New.
Next, click on the ‘People Connected to your Page’ option when the pop-up appears.
Then, under the pages tab on the left, enter the name of your page.
You’ll then be supplied with a data set that will tell you who is actually interacting with your page.
As we did earlier, you can then use that information to create a highly targeted ad.
Combining Audience Insights with a mailing list.
If you currently have an email list, you can also use that to work out who your target market is. Thanks to the Custom Audiences feature, you can upload your email list to Facebook.
If you want to upload your email list and use it to create an audience on Facebook, go to the Power Editor.
Now, click on ‘Audiences.’
Click on ‘Create a Custom Audience’ and choose’ Customer List.’
As this is often the easiest thing to get and also the easiest cross-reference for Facebook, I only mentioned e-mail addresses.
Almost everyone puts their email address in, but when signing up for Facebook, fewer individuals put their phone number in.
The e-mail list you upload needs to have at least 1000 monthly active users on it who use Facebook in order for Facebook to do this effectively.
It might take a few days for Facebook to analyse your audience.
You will have to go back to the Audience Insights page when it’s done and click on ‘Open.’ There, you will be able to access the ‘Custom Audience.’
Once done, you will have a better understanding at who your customer actually is.
When creating an ad and choosing your audience, you might just target your mailing list directly.
Using your email list, if you can create a buyer persona, you can then target many more people on Facebook using that buyer persona.
Check your Facebook budget
The CPC model for purchasing ads should be used by those who are new to Facebook Ads, as it is easier to figure out how much each conversion costs you and how your ads actually perform.
Should your ads be poor performers, you’ll also stop yourself from burning through your budget.
When it comes to Facebook, it is a platform for bidding.
What does that mean?
It means you’re bidding against your competitor who are targeting the same audience.
The marketer who is prepared to pay the most gets the most exposure.
You get minimal exposure if you spend too little and, hence, your ads will not lead to sales.
If your Facebook campaign is struggling with this issue, how do you know?
Despite precise targeting and impressive ads, if you’re still not getting clicks, low bids could be the root of the issue.
This is for the reasons that have been mentioned above. Low bids = Low exposure
Try setting your own bids if your advertising campaign fails because your ads do not get a high enough click-through rate.
So, you could set a bid of $0.66 in the example above.
You won’t necessarily be paying $0.66 cents for every click you receive because of how Facebook’s bidding platform works.
What’s going to happen is that you’re just going to end up bidding marginally higher than the highest bidder before.
Before, $0.50 could have been the highest bid.
You will potentially end up bidding in the region of $0.51-$0.53 thanks to your new maximum bid, provided that no one is willing to go higher.
However, there is one thing you need to remember, or else this will all crash down , leaving you with no outcomes and a sense of dejection.
It is only worthwhile to raise your bid if your ad is good.
If you increase your bid, but your ad is not good, you will be penalised by Facebook.
Ads with a low click-through rate on the CPC model make Facebook less money.
That’s because there are fewer individuals clicking on it.
In order to make money, Facebook relies on individuals to click on it.
Facebook will then charge you more to recoup their losses, or they may even completely stop serving your ad.
That is why it is so vital to have proper targeting.
However, don’t get too complacent, as even social network targeting can’t save youif the next point I’m about to make is ignored.
Your clicks are not click-worthy
The next reason your ads might fail if you’ve taken care of your targeting and your bidding strategy is that they’re just not click-worthy.
Remember, you’re competing against a lot of visually appealing content on Facebook.
On Facebook, attention is a scarce commodity and it’s up to you to create advertisements that draw users like nothing else.
The last thing you would want is to be irrelevant, people hate that.
When you are still not getting clicks, even though your targeting is brilliant and your bid is set high, your ads tend to be the main issue.
Let’s take a look at how we can make click-worthy ads that encourage people to click on them.
To keep things simple, we’ll breakdown Facebook Ads into three main components.
Be it Newsfeed ads or Sidebar ads, these three components need to be optimized, if you want your ads to work.
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The Headline
The headline needs to grab the attention of the audience you’re targeting.
It needs to be so good that, they stop scrolling through their feed.
How can you do this?
Design your headline such that ‘enter the conversation that’s taking place in your customers’ mind’– a term coined by the influential adman Robert Collier.
A headline could do this by asking a relevant question based on something that is essential for the person viewing the copy of the ad.
For example:
- Struggling to get customers?
- Is no one visiting your website?
- Need someone to help you lose weight?
- Wondering where you should invest your money?
There are a couple of crucial things that make both headline examples effective. If you want to emulate the power of those ads consider the following—
- Ask a question. Questions make people stop, think and assess their situation in the context of what was asked.
- Use power words. You’ll see the word ‘free’ used in a lot of ads — that’s because it works.
- Use numbers. Numbers grab attention. ‘30-day trial’ is an example of using numbers.
- Be direct. State the result that you can provide in the simplest way possible.
The image
You can tell they have one thing in common just by looking at the two ads shown earlier.
When you start to notice a trend like this, though not always the case, it’s often because it works.
Users on Facebook are usually consumers of visual content.
Posts that have photos produce 53% more likes than those that do not.
Feed them what they’re hungry for.
See how the text almost emulates the headline in the image and contains a call-to – action that looks like a button?
This is the type of thing that captures attention and encourages people to click on advertisements.
What’s the takeaway, then?
Use pictures in which people look at the camera and try to include text that amplifies your message.
Of course, this is a starting point, as you’re free to experiment later.
Ad Copy
The large chunk of text in an ad is its copy.
It’s going to do a great deal of heavy lifting for you and sell your offer.
In the form of a ‘call-to – action,’ it will explain what was described in the headline and tell people what to do next.
In order to generate compelling copy, there are several things you can do:
Create an effective CTA
Your CTA needs to tell individuals what to do next. To generate a positive click-through rate, it must be encouraging and to the point.
Both examples of a CTA are ‘Sign up’ or ‘Learn more’.
As with your ad’s headline, some power words should also be included in your copy.
You’re going to need a split test for your CTA (more on that later). But, just make sure your ad has one, for now.
Talk about benefits
Let’s face it, in this competitive world, we need to talk more than features.
There’s your copy to sell. So, you need to make sure that the benefits that will result from clicking on your ad are clear to potential customers.
Take the above picture for an example.
The copy is filled with benefits. It’s clear and concise and it explains everything in a simple, easy-to-understand fashion.
Let people know what’s in it for them and how their life will get better as a result of having clicked on the ad.
Don’t make the mistake of trying to be overly inventive. This isn’t the place to be clever – it’s the place to be clear.
Create urgency
A call-to-action with the sense of urgency is the perfect recipe for an ad.
Let people know how open your offer will be for a long time.
Let them understand the advantages of signing up now.
Of course, when utilising this tactic, don’t lie.
If you’re looking for some inspiration on how you should implement this tactic to enhance your click-through rate from this social network, take a look at some of the above image examples.
Social proof
Another way of putting your ad copy on steroids is social evidence.
If you don’t know what social evidence is, it’s basically a way of influencing people by letting them know what other people have done in a particular situation.
By describing how many people already use your product/service, you can enforce this in your copy.
To some extent, the picture above does this.
It describes how 30,000 marketers are involved in this activity.
Subconsciously, as so many other people are involved with it, you may assume that this event is worth investing in.
As a result, clicking on the ad may make you feel more inclined.
You’re using the same ad over and over
What normally happens two or three times after having driven or walked past a billboard?
That’s right, you’re starting to ignore this. It’s like there’s not even a billboard.
Facebook ads are billboards just like that.
And, just like real-world billboards, they’re prone to the same problem.
‘Ad fatigue’ is the technical term for this.
Remember, you’re picking a set target group with Facebook that will see you advertising.
Eventually, that group of people will become tired of what you are.
You need to change your ads on a regular basis because of this.
You can determine when is the right time to change by looking at your metrics.
One such metric is ‘Frequency.’ This tells us how many times each person in our ‘Reach’ has seen our ad.
It is calculated by dividing Impressions by Reach. In simple terms, it is how many times your ad is shown divided by the number of people it was shown to.
However, frequency analyzed in isolation can be a hard way to work out whether or not an ad is suffering from ad fatigue. It only tells you how many times a given person has seen your ads.
Therefore, you need to interpret frequency in the context of CTR. If you notice that your CTR is beginning to fall as your frequency rises, you know that ad fatigue is setting in.
Don’t expect it to be perfect in the first try
It is nearly impossible to get it right on the first go even if you are an Facebook Ads expert.
The problem is that Facebook could pick a winner too early and then stop you from collecting information on how the other advertisements perform, with all things being equal.
You could test the following things:
- Try other countries. If your offer isn’t geographically limited, you may be able to extend your offer to other countries. This is a good idea, if you have a great ad that is currently suffering from ad fatigue. Target English speaking countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada.
- Test different images. If you test images and nothing else, there’s a big chance that you’ll make some major improvements. Create the same ad, but apply 8-10 different image variations.
- Use different headlines. Follow the same instructions provided for images- Same ad, 8-10 headline variations. You could try experimenting with statement vs. question, for example.
- Experiment with copy. Continue the approach used for images and headlines. Consider using social proof.
- Target different devices. Ignore the hype surrounding mobile. Your offer might work better if you focus only on desktop devices. Test and see what happens.
- Ad Type. Are you only using Sidebar ads? Your campaign might be more successful if you use Newsfeed ads. Already using Newsfeed and Sidebar ads? Try video Newsfeed ads instead.
- Targeting. Try targeting different interests. Get comfortable, as well, with some of the more advanced targeting features on Facebook. A good one to take a look at is ‘Lookalike Audiences.’
You may want to concentrate on split testing your targeting first if your offer is limited to one country and the audience is small.
You make it so that you don’t end up bidding against yourself for the same ad spot by targeting various audiences.
Remember that before ad fatigue chokes off your results, you only have a certain amount of time to make the most out of a winning ad.
To know more about Facebook marketing, read through our Most Powerful Facebook Marketing Guide To Grow Your Startup Now
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