Why should you choose to use Facebook ads?
With Facebook’s monthly active users increasing, and the social network’s ability to target your customers based numerous variables, running paid campaigns on Facebook seems like an obvious choice for most marketers.
This means your Facebook ads have a greater chance of being viewed by your target audience. And, because Facebook collects a lot of user data (such as age, location, and interests) you can create ads and post-click landing pages that are perfectly tailored to them.
Currently, more than 3 million businesses actively advertise on Facebook. Here are some of the reasons why you should consider Facebook as a viable paid advertising channel for your business.
Facebook ads versus Google Ads
According to Business Insider, there are 2.3 million Google searches every minute.
Google is the world’s largest search engine, with more than 80.6% of global market share, Google Ads is the perfect place for marketers to tap into Google’s vast search traffic.
Think of the Google Ads platform as an online marketplace, where businesses pay to have their ads shown at the top of the search results page (search ads), or get displayed prominently on other websites (display ads).
Google Ads is used as a paid marketing platform because:
- It allows you to attract more customers by showing ads on a platform people actually use to find information i.e. Google.
- Helps you promote offers to a local and global audience.
- You can reach your target audience at the right time with segmentation and personalize your ads with Facebook Responsive Ads feature.
Google Ads does get a lot more search traffic than Facebook ads, plus users who type queries in the search engine have a higher buying intent than Facebook users who are scrolling through their newsfeeds. However, if you’re looking for better targeting options or trying to bring back lost visitors through remarketing, then Facebook ads are your best bet.
To succeed with Google Ads, you have to choose the right keywords for your ads and create relevant post-click landing pages with every ad. The success of Facebook ads lies in creating the right audience list who get to see your ads, creating high quality relevant Facebook ads and connecting them to dedicated post-click landing pages.
You can also use Facebook’s split test tool to test audiences and ad creatives to get the best, most optimized results.
Let’s review the list of advertising pros for both the networks.
Google Ads pros
- Users have higher buying intent.
- Simple keyword based targeting.
- Easily drive sales and conversions for your business.
- A large pool of users who use the search engine every day.
Facebook ads pros
- Ability to create your own custom audience based on multiple targeting options.
- Powerful remarketing ability, you can call back visitors with the help of precise remarketing lists based on
- social visits or specific website visits.
- Choose from multiple ad formats to create ads for lead generation, brand awareness, and direct sales.
- Average CTR is lower than Google Ads, it’s as low as 0.9%.
What separates Facebook ads from Google Ads or other search engine paid marketing options such as Bing ads, are the network’s Audience Insights and targeting features.
Let’s look at Facebook’s Audience Insights and targeting options in detail.
What are Facebook’s Audience Insights?
Audience Insights show marketers data about their target audience so they can create ads that are more relevant to them.
Facebook uses native data to show you audience features that include:
- Age and gender
- Relationship status
- Education level
- Job role
- Top categories
- Page likes
- Top cities
- Top countries
- Top languages
- Frequency of activities
- Device Users
The network uses third party data (collected from Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon) to show audience features that include:
- Lifestyle
- Household income
- Home ownership
- Household size
- Home market value
- Spending methods
- Retail spending
- Online purchases
- Purchase behaviour
- In market for a vehicle
You can use Audience Insights to access three views of audiences:
Facebook allows you to create Custom Audience, Lookalike Audience, and Saved Audience lists, you can then use Audience Insights to learn more about your audiences and create ads that are targeted at them.
Custom Audience
A Custom Audience is Facebook’s ad targeting option that allows you to find existing audiences among people you know on the platform.
The Custom Audience list includes people whose contact information you already know, so you can use email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs, or app user IDs to create and save audiences you would like to show ads to.
Facebook compares the contact information you submit with their own data and helps find your customers or leads.
Here’s what you have to do to create a Custom Audience for your Facebook campaign:
Click the Audience tab in the Ads Manager:
Select ‘Create a Custom Audience’:
Choose from the following five options to reach people who already have a relationship with your business. These can be existing customers, leads, or people who have interacted with your business on Facebook:
You have the option of creating up to 500 Custom Audiences per ad account. However, if your Custom Audience list includes fewer than 1000 people it’s better to choose CPM bidding to ensure that your ads are shown to the audience you want to reach.
You can update your Custom Audience as your customer list grows, this will help your ads get maximum reach. You should also consider creating a Lookalike Audience from your Custom Audience list to reach people similar to your customers and leads.
Lookalike Audience
Lookalike Audience is a sub-set of your Custom Audience list. The Lookalike Audience is a target audience you create from a ‘source’, this can be your Custom Audience, pixel data (users who have visited your website or post-click landing page), mobile app data or fans of your page.
Facebook then finds people who are similar to the source, or look like them, as they are more likely to positively respond to your ads. You can choose the size of your lookalike audience during the ad creation process.
A smaller Lookalike Audience is more likely to closely match the source audience, a larger Lookalike Audience may increase ad reach but it decreases the level of similarity between the source audience and the Lookalike Audience.
You can create a Lookalike Audience list from the location you select during ad creation. To create a Lookalike Audience your source audience must consist of at least 100 people from a single country, plus you have the option of creating up to 500 Lookalike Audiences from one source audience.
Saved Audience
Facebook allows you to save an audience you have created for an ad campaign and use it for future campaigns, by creating a Saved Audience. Creating a Saved Audience helps you save time as you don’t have to narrow down an audience list for every campaign. You can then use Facebook’s targeting options to select a target audience if you’re running and managing multiple campaigns at once.
To create a Saved Audience list, select the ‘Use a Saved Audience’ option in the Ads Manager and create an audience list from all available targeting options:
You have the option to edit your Saved Audience on your Audiences Page.
In addition to providing marketers with the opportunity to collect insights about their audience, and creating different audience lists the social network also gives marketers the option of narrowing down a target audience via one of the vastest and laser-focused targeting options.
Facebook’s ad targeting options
You can segment audiences for your Facebook ads using Facebook’s ad targeting options that cover the following parameters.
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Connections
- Remark
Connections
This targeting option lets you reach people who have a specific connection to your business page, app or event. The filter allows you to select the users who perform a specific action on your website or post-click landing page and also come under the other targeting categories you have selected:
- People who like your page.
- Friends of people who like your page.
- Exclude people who like your page.
- People who used your app.