Facebook Advertising - Extract The Most Out Of Your Campaigns

Facebook, similar to many other start ups, has struggled to monetize their content from day one. 

Only recently have they implemented a system in place that excites advertisers and works to provide marketers a chance of deeper demographic profiling than previously seen on any other platform. When I say recently, we are talking in the past couple of years – making this not really a new chance for marketers, but definitely one that has only come into its own in the past year.

We run numerous campaigns for clients on Facebook, the reason? Because of the profiling ability and quick setup. It is very exciting to be able to target women, aged 20, living within a certain region of Australia all from a quick 2 minute setup dashboard.

So here are some ways to extract the most out of your campaigns:

Finding your sweet spot - Yes, it does cost money

Like any platform, Facebook will take you a little while to figure out the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of conversions. Ideally we will identify this spot and then inject as much money as humanly possibly (if the conversion rate remains consistant) though without enough budget to properly test the water, finding the sweet spot can take a lot more time and money than if you had of arranged for a decent sized budget to be applied to the campaign from moment go.

Be realistic, $2000 may sound like a big monthly test amount, though when you divide that by 30days it is merely $66 a day. At $2 per click, that is still only 33 new visitors a day from your advertising.

People who understand search, understand Facebook

Looking for someone to manage your Facebook setup and the ongoing running? Search marketers are likely your best bet. Working in search myself for a few years, I can quickly tell you that the majority of SEO/SEM consultants will be very much around Facebook and its rewards. Due to the bidding nature of Facebook advertising, it naturally pulled in SEM consultants looking to try and lower their cost per conversion – especially those who were incentivized for doing so.

Constantly test creative and measure the results

Don’t just upload one set of creative and set and forget.  You may be missing out on valuable potential to drive more conversions. If you are like me though, you might have a campaign that converts in what you would call the ‘upper to high conversion rate’ area – I then get paranoid about tweaking such a campaign as even a week of reduced conversions means I still have to foot the bill for the advertising as well as the lost revenue. 

All I can suggest is setting aside 1-2 weeks of testing time every 2-3 months. Just accept that you will have that loss should it go wrong, or, if it goes right, you may be one very happy Facebook advertiser.

Facebook brings real demographic insights into how your other search campaigns might be going

Facebook basically puts a face to the data. You can see age groups, genders, locations and interests of people who click on your ads – something that I personally use to drive my search campaigns in Adwords into new realms. It gives me ideas on how to better write copy to target the ‘sweet spot’ and also ideas on language and landing page design when it does come to targeting them in Google.