How to navigate the Facebook ad campaign maze: part I

Now that summer is here, it’s a good time to reflect on the past six months of Facebook advertising. The year started with a mega deal — the company’s $19 billion cash-and-stock deal for social messaging app WhatsApp — and has evolved along with the way with the introduction of more advanced direct marketing-based ad targeting features and tools. What’s been clear throughout each of these announcements and changes to its advertising platform is that Facebook is no longer just an engagement or branding platform for marketers. Now, it is a highly diversified engagement plus direct-response performance-based advertising platform. Facebook now offers advertisers a growing set of ad solutions that help generate real, measurable business results. By implementing these ad types, marketers can begin to realize the full customer acquisition benefits of Facebook advertising. Navigating the growing maze that is Facebook advertising isn’t easy. What was once a simple ad solution has evolved into a multifaceted platform that requires the right marketing partner to achieve the best results and ROI. A new report, “10 Tips for a Successful Facebook Campaign,” published by my company, Matomy Media Group, outlines 10 of the most successful Facebook ad campaign strategies. In today’s post, and in a subsequent post, I will highlight some of those strategies and show how each can be implemented relatively easily for success with Facebook Advertising. Tip #1: Master Lookalike and Custom Audiences Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences feature is a great tool to grow your current customer base. Lookalike Audiences enables you to reach new users who are likely interested in your business because they are similar to customers who already engaged with your product. Facebook does the hard work of finding and targeting the right audience for enhanced customer acquisition, making it easier for you to broaden your reach with as little testing as possible. The social network’s Custom Audiences tool gives marketers the ability to target ads to current customers based on email, phone, app user ID, IDFA or Facebook user ID lists. Use Custom Audiences to create specific offers based on the particular buyer stage certain users have reached and target those users via Custom Audiences. When you upload a Custom Audience list to Facebook the system will match up the information with current Facebook users to serve your ads to only those people. Tip #2: Start Facebook Retargeting Early and Use It Often While Custom Audiences is a useful tool for reengaging current customers, it is also a great tool for retargeting potential customers that expressed an interest in your product and visited your website or mobile app but haven’t completed a desired action. For instance, a travel website could use Custom Audiences to reach a group of people who searched for flights on your website but never made a reservation. These people could be targeted with a News Feed ad that says: “Come back for 10 percent off your next flight reservation." Tip #3: Find the Right Bidding Mode Facebook offers four types of bidding modes: CPM, CPC, Optimized CPM (oCPM) and CPA. Choose your bidding mode in accordance with your campaign goal (i.e., mobile or desktop app Installs, better user engagement with your Facebook page, etc. Here are examples of how to choose the right bidding mode to meet your Facebook ad campaign goals: To drive traffic to your site use CPC bidding. To get exposure to your ad for branding and awareness choose CPM bidding. To maximize reach, while optimizing towards a likely conversion, choose oCPM. Mastering the different bidding modes will save you time, money and perhaps most importantly, frustration. It will also ensure that you’re able to track and optimize your Facebook campaign from the moment it starts and not have to adjust campaign tracking parameters in mid course. In the second installment of this two-part series, we’ll examine how to get the most out of your Facebook ad creative. Hint: size matters! This was an excerpt from a new report published by Matomy, 10 Tips for a Successful Facebook Campaign. The report can be downloaded for free here. David Serfaty is Director of Social Advertising at Matomy Media Group (LSE:MTMY), a global digital performance-based marketing company. He can be reached at david.s@matomy.com. Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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How to navigate the Facebook ad campaign maze: part I

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