The mechanics of advertising on Facebook is as easy as it has ever been. The ultimate goal for the company is to continually break down barriers of spending on ads, so they can make more money from us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what Facebook cannot seem to replicate, at least for the time being, is the human touch in advertising. That little bit that tells us we are spending too much or that we are not reaching the right target audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps one day they will be able to create an Artificial Intelligence machine that can help everyone ethically maximize our dollars spent. But meanwhile, let\u2019s take matters into our own hands. Here is a good checklist to ensure we are all advertising wisely without unnecessarily draining our dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is very tempting to want to run a general advertisement that reaches out to all your target audiences. But if an advertisement creative and message isn\u2019t targeted, it will not connect with your buyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take for example if you visited the Lazada app and added a few items into your wishlist. Would an advertisement from Lazada bearing the message \u201cMore than 100,000 Products on Sale\u201d or one showing pictures of items similar to those you wishlisted tempt you to act on the ad more?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is important to choose which few products you want to push for the one or two month duration, then build an entire marketing campaign around that. By doing so, all your messages and promotions will be aligned and you can maximise the effectiveness of your Sales Funnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sure you will potentially lose out on selling to others, but the upside far outweighs that loss. On your next sale cycle, be sure to target those you left out this round.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a classic marketing saying: If everyone is your customer, then nobody is your customer. The key to good marketing is knowing who wants your product or service, which also means there will be people who will never want them. And that is absolutely fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is difficult to admit, but most of us have a false perception of who our buyers are. The more time we spend selling for a brand, the more we get lost in our own definition of our buyer profile that may or may not be the real ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One major reason for this is that over the years your product may have attracted a completely new set of customers than it initially was set out to do. So it is important to consistently go back and reassess your audience. Once you have a clear and updated version, your marketing message will become more relevant to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are a few ways to find out who your target audience is, and what they react to better. One is by asking questions directly through surveys. Another is by using advertisements aimed at seeing how they respond to certain hypotheses you build. Do this once every couple of years to realign your company\u2019s marketing direction to your buyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facebook always tells us that if our advertisement carries a high Relevance Score, we can maximise our Reach and Click Through Rate with minimal cost. But the reality isn\u2019t as simple as that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The idea of \u2018minimal cost\u2019 differs from industry to industry, and country to country. In fact even different subsets within similar industries will have greatly varying costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Based on personal experiences with multiple clients across a number of industries, there is such thing as a Minimal Budget Threshold. This is defined as the minimum amount one is required to invest into Facebook advertisement in order for it to return a reasonable number of Leads. Any less, and you would just be wasting your money and time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before committing into any advertisement campaign with a budget that may not give you any returns, there are 2 steps to draw out a decent estimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First is by going into the Facebook Audience Insights[1]<\/sup>\u00a0and dropping down the most possible set of keywords for your product. After defining your campaign objective and target audience, you will be provided with an estimated number of Reach, Demographic Spread, Locations, what other brands they would be interested in, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you identified the top 3 to 5 keywords, you can now insert them into the Facebook Campaign Planner[2]<\/sup>. This will give you a clearer picture as to how many people will Engage with your Ads, and how much you will need to spend to obtain Leads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. Running Test Ads Period<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are still unsure of the estimates drawn out by Facebook\u2019s planning platforms, there is one more thing you can do: run the advertisement for 2 weeks so it can give you a clearer picture based on how much you actually spent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why two weeks and not one? Because Facebook usually takes the first week to learn how to optimise a new campaign, which will cause it not to be as effective as we hope. Once that is done, it will start performing at full capacity. Only then will we be able to properly obtain the closest cost estimates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After two weeks, do a debrief of your spending, reach and number of leads. By that time you will know what is the Minimum Budget Threshold required for you to obtain a reasonable number of Leads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is traditionally a widely practiced belief that an advertisement creative real estate should be maximized with words. Because since you are already paying for the space, might as well make full use of it right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well this is not the same for Facebook. Instead, Facebook encourages almost zero captions on creatives and as few as 100 characters on the descriptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is no conspiracy to make businesses spend more on ads here. Facebook did not create these rules anymore than they wish it upon their advertisers. In fact, these are observations of how users react to content on Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Facebook believes the most effective content should be Thumb-Stopping, which is defined by the act of pausing the senseless downward scrolling of posts on a mobile device with the thumb. And users almost never stop to look at advertisements. Instead they prefer to look at what their friends share online, and almost none of their friends add a tonne of captions and catchy sales titles onto their images or videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So when your advertisement is getting a very low Relevance Score, consider looking at your creative and descriptions. Simple is key. If you don\u2019t believe it, run an A\/B test using this hypothesis and see the results for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine if you just bought a new Air Fryer online after careful consideration and also after seeing the barrage of ads on your Facebook Feed. Then imagine still being advertised to buy the same Air Fryer even after having just gotten one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It will be annoying to you, and a complete waste of money for the advertiser. This is what happens when you do not exclude the people you converted from Facebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This can be done by excluding the people who visited a specific web page of your website, for example the checkout page of your eCommerce website. That way, Facebook will know not to target the people who bought from you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In case you are wondering if any potential buyers fall through the gaps with this format, you can always add a Facebook Pixel to the Add To Cart button of your eCommerce page. This could mean that those who added your products to their cart but did not perform a checkout will be separately pooled into a new audience set.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Facebook gathered enough individuals in this pool, you will then be able to perform a Remarketing advertisement[3]<\/sup>\u00a0towards them. Perhaps giving them a limited time additional discount to spur their buying impulse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The worse thing any marketer should do is run a bunch of advertisements, getting good results but not know how it happened and not able to recreate it. So it is important to tag each campaign with hypothesis that you are trying to prove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I briefly mentioned this method of tracking performance when asking you to test for yourself if less words is better for your Facebook ads. But this can be applied to all manners of ads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advertisements do not just serve the purpose of selling things to people or creating awareness. They are also used sometimes to determine what our target audience responds to, and even who our target audience really is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever we run an advertisement campaign, try to set a hypothesis that we would like to test for. After two weeks, gather the findings of the campaigns and compare the performance to determine your hypothesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, you want to know if audience Set A or audience Set B respond better to a product you are selling. Declare H1: Set A Responds Better Than Set B, which makes H0 the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make sure to keep everything else equal, including your creative, description, budget and the times your ads run. That way the difference cannot be chalked up to other factors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two weeks into the campaigns, gather your findings to see which is working better. From there you can, with some certainty backed by numbers, determine whether H0 or H1 is true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite Facebook making the Ads Manager easy to set up and use, it will not, at least in the near future, be able to perform the due diligence discussed above. Running advertisements on Facebook isn\u2019t as easy as inserting information we assume is true and seeing what happens later. It is, in all intents and purposes, very similar to running a science experiment. Get it right, though, and see your ads dollars yield results that will help your business grow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n [1]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cFacebook Audience Insights.\u201d https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/business\/news\/audience-insights<\/a>. Accessed 22 Jan. 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cGetting Started with Campaign Planner | Facebook Ads Help Center.\u201d https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/business\/help\/1776354522643452<\/a>. Accessed 22 Jan. 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cThe Ridiculously Awesome Guide to Facebook Remarketing \u2026.\u201d 18 Jul. 2018, https:\/\/www.wordstream.com\/blog\/ws\/2015\/11\/16\/facebook-remarketing<\/a>. Accessed 23 Jan. 2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The mechanics of advertising on Facebook is as easy as it has ever been. The ultimate goal for the company is to continually break down barriers of spending on ads, so they can make more money from us. But what Facebook cannot seem to replicate, at least for the time being, is the human touch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":765,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1744,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/1744"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.info-trek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Improper Creative<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Not Excluding People You Converted<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Not Declaring Hypotheses and Measuring Performance.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n