Nov 29, 2019 | Blog, News
Many businesses and organisation use Facebook Advertising as a channel to grow. It can be a highly effective, low cost way to connect with your your targetaudience, and with a new change ahead, this great tool is about to improve the way your Ad is seen.
The key change I want to focus on in this article is to the newsfeed description text (this is the text you see under the large headline). Essentially, when you include a link in an Ad you have the option to add a description (this is separate from the headline).
Previously, everyone got to see this piece of text in your ad. Now, when this Ad appears in the News Feed it will now show ONLY to those more likely to take the action you want, whether it’s purchasing a product or filling out a lead form.
Why is Facebook doing this?
Because they are on a mission to make the delivery of content (paid and organic) more relevant to its users. So hopefully it will make marketers (and publishers generally) be more strategic in the content they produce.
What does it mean for users?
To be honest, they are not likely to see the change at all. And the description is only going to be shown to those most likely to engage with the ad anyway. But it does mean that the headline text is all the more important.
Will it improve the performance of your Ad?
At the moment it’s hard to tell. But, any change that improves the experience for Facebook users is a good thing.
Just as an example, some people are more likely to take an action, such as making a purchase, when they see the price of an item directly in an ad. Others are more likely to make a purchase when they see the price only after interacting with an ad. Facebook will decide whether or not to show your description based on what we think will most impact each person and cause them to take a meaningful action.
It’s an even more tailored way to get your product in front of the right audience.
What’s the catch?
It won’t always be seen by your target audience, that is the nature of the social media beast. So be strict with what you put in the description. It’s best to keep it as non-essential information (to your brand) and put that essential information in the headline of your Ad. What’s the headline we hear you say? This text (up to 25 characters) below the image or next to the image is larger and more obvious than the other text sections, and clearly describes the most important piece of information to users.
Don’t forget though that non-essential isn’t always non-useful, think of it is an additional way to connect with those you want to serve.
Jul 24, 2018 | Blog, News
Social Media Nibbles E07: Picking an audience for your next Facebook Ad
Hello and welcome to Social Media Nibbles. I’m Paula O’Sullivan, social media strategist and head possum at Possum Digital. In this episode we’re going to be looking at how to choose an audience to target for your Facebook advertising.
Now during 2018, Facebook has undergone wholesale changes to its platform including the Ads Manager. We know that organic reach is down and we know that there’s been significant changes to the terms of service which have resulted in things like tightening up on the use of email lists and increased ad content reviewing, but just like any good marketing plan, you need to be flexible to changing outside circumstances.
If you haven’t before, you may want to consider investing some budget in Facebook advertising. If you’ve had less than ideal results in the past, one of the factors might be the biggest challenge of knowing who to actually target and how to find them. With 15 million monthly active users on Facebook in Australia, there’s a huge pool of potential customers, so you can waste a lot of money really fast, but if you have a limited budget you need to be laser focused on how you spend your advertising dollars.
Before you start any more ad campaigns you need to look at who you actually want to target and how you do that.
The type of audience you’ll need will be based on your own circumstances but the more you test and measure the better your targeting will be.
Before you start any advertising, if you haven’t already, make sure you get a Facebook pixel from your account and place it on your website. If you don’t have a pixel, in my view, don’t even bother advertising as you’re wasting a lot of money and effort. Any good web developer, or you can find a good YouTube instructional video, can help you.
Now let’s look at the types of audience targeting options available to you.
The first is what Facebook calls Core Audiences.
This type of targeting allows you to select your audience through personal and behavioural characteristics so you can target things like demographic, that would be age, gender, work, relationship status. Location, now this is especially useful if you have a shopfront or if you only want to target people in a specific geographical area. Interests, which include the types of pages liked, the kind of content posted, engaged with, hobbies, places people have checked into and how people generally like to be entertained.
As you would all know out there, every time you do something on the internet or within Facebook, it actually drops a little bit of data into your Facebook profile and that’s how Facebook gathers information about you.
Facebook has removed access to third party data and some interests have been removed, so while this is a good way to start if you’ve never advertised before, you don’t actually want to rely on this type of audience for your long-term advertising strategy.
The second type of audience is a custom audience.
The great news is that you can target people who are on your email list or have visited your website or even engaged with your Facebook page or content on your page.
Now this type of targeting is my personal favourite, as you are using your own data to create Facebook advertising campaigns.
Creating a custom audience from your email list is actually relatively easy. You simply upload your list in a TXT format and Facebook will do the rest. What you may want to think about before uploading your list is segmenting your list into categories like repeat customers, leads that haven’t purchased and so on and so forth.
This helps you refine your targeting even further and will help with lookalike audiences, which I’ll talk about in a minute. Know that from now any list you upload, you will need to let Facebook know if you collected the data directly from your customers or did the data come from an external source and you will need to remove email addresses from anyone who opts out of your email list.
For website traffic, you can use your Facebook pixel to create an audience of people who do things like visit a specific page on your website, go to your lead capture page but don’t actually put in their details or sign up or they fill a cart and then abandon that cart.
If you are using website traffic as a basis for your custom audience, you will need to drive traffic so that the pixel can collect data. If you’ve never had a pixel on your site before, when you place the pixel on your site I like to make sure that I’m driving really good traffic from a variety of sources and I’m doing that for at least two to four weeks before serving ads.
Again, the more defined your audience is, the better you can target your message.
A great feature I’ve been using is creating audiences based on who engages with your Facebook page or content.
One strategy that warms up an audience is serving an ad to a cold audience with just a video, nothing else, and a little bit of text at the top. Then see who watches it for more than 10 seconds and then this group actually becomes your custom audience. You’ve gone to a cold audience, you’ve given them a video, a bit of educational content and if you think 10 seconds isn’t a long time, sit down and actually count that out. Then once you’ve created a new audience of these people who have watched your video for more than 10 seconds, you can serve them a second ad with another call to action.
Now the third type of audience is a lookalike audience. Facebook can help you find other users who look like your custom audience. All you need to do is to create your custom audience then ask Facebook to create a lookalike audience for you.
Say for example you upload an email list of people who have purchased a product from you. Then what you’re telling Facebook to do is to say, can you please go and find me more people like this? Facebook will find anyone it thinks actually looks like and will behave like the people who have already purchased from you.
Importantly, the quality of the lookalike audience is going to depend on the quality of your original data and how you have set up your custom audiences. The more specific data that you can give Facebook, the better the lookalike audience outcome will be.
Before you set up your next Facebook ad campaign, have a plan for who you are going to target and what type of audience you need to reach them.
Thank you for listening and if you liked what you heard in this podcast, please subscribe and share it with your friends. Make sure to visit our website possumdigital.com.au, where you can listen to more podcast episodes just like this one and read our latest blogs.
Jul 16, 2018 | Blog, News
Are Facebook Lead Ads right for you?
It seems that everywhere you turn, marketers are talking about leads, leads and more leads. It’s true, to grow your business you need to bring in new clients and so you need to attract leads in order to be able to convert them into paying customers. Social media, specifically Facebook Lead Ads, is an excellent way to achieve this.
If you’re new to strategic lead generation, or if you’ve tried various strategies and tools with no success, then you may want to try a Facebook Lead Ad.
Essentially, a Facebook Lead Ad is a way to be able to capture someone’s details within the Facebook platform. Users click on an ad, they are then taken to a form which is prepopulated with the data Facebook has for them, then the details are held in the Ads Manager. You can then go and download a CSV file of your captured leads whenever you like.
If you want to have a look at some examples, you can look here.
Advantages of Facebook Lead Ads
- They are inexpensive and easy to set up
- You do not need a landing page or lead capture programs
- The data will be viable, as it’s prepopulated
- Great for mobile user experience
Disadvantages of Facebook Lead Ads
- You are not sending people to you own website
- There is limited space for you to craft your message
- Not all CRM systems integrate into Facebook, so you may need to manually move data
- If you’re not careful, you can generate a lot of low quality leads as the experience is so easy for users
Facebook Lead Ads are great if you are just starting out or don’t have the budget to create your own landing pages. With every tool, the better you plan, the better chance you will have of being able to generate leads for your business.
Have you used Facebook Lead Ads before? Will you use them to generate leads?
Jul 2, 2018 | Blog, News
Facebook Ad funnel Strategy
Since changes to Facebook’s news feed have impacted on the organic reach of a lot of pages, more and more publishers are turning to Facebook Advertising to supplement their current efforts. And if lead generation is part of the strategy, there will typically be a funnel of some sort involved.
Usually, this funnel would involve created a cold (sometimes icy cold) interest-based audience, creating a couple of ads and sending them straight to a landing page. This might not be the best solution for you. Instead, why not have a look at a funnel that engages people with some educational content in Facebook first before you send them to a landing page?
Here is an example of what you can do within Facebook to create warmth and engagement in an audience before you send them to a landing page.
Step 1
Take your existing email list and upload it into Facebook to create a Custom Audience (making sure your list is compliant).
Step 2
Use this to create a ‘Look alike’ audience. This is who you will target in your campaign.
Step 3
Set up an ad campaign with an ‘Video views’ objective
Step 4
Set up your Ad set to target the look alike audience you created earlier
Step 5
Create a video-based ad and publish it!
Step 6
After a few days, see if you have people watching your video for more than 10 seconds. If you do, then create a custom audience of those people.
Step 7
Set up a new campaign for your landing page
Step 8
Target the ad to the people who watch your video
And the best thing about the above is that you can use this strategy for any campaign not matter the industry or subject area. You can even add additional videos or other types of educational content at any point during the campaign if you want to have more engagement.
Also, the video can be one you upload or even a Facebook Live. Lastly, you can create a look alike audience of those who engaged with your video and start a new campaign!
May 21, 2018 | Blog, News, Uncategorised
Setting up Facebook Business Manager
Do you use Facebook to market your business? It’s likely that you have a business page, ad account (even if you just boost posts) and a pixel. And if you waste time moving from page, to ad account and back to page again, then I highly recommend use Facebook Business Manager – an all in one dashboard to manage all your Facebook tools.
What is Facebook Business Manager?
Business Manager is a free platform created to help Facebook advertisers integrate marketing efforts across their business and with external partners, like agencies. Facebook Business Manager provides a solution for anyone who needs to run, place, track and manage assets such as Facebook page, Instagram account, audience list and product catalogues. Having all your business information all in one place helps you and your business maintain control of your Facebook assets and securely manage user access.
You must consider using Facebook Business Manager if:
- You have more than 1 person working on your Facebook and/or Instagram marketing
- You need to manage multiple Facebook or Instagram assets such as Facebook Pages, ad accounts, or app
- You use a supplier to help create, run, or manage your Pages or ads, but want your business to maintain ownership of all Pages, ad accounts, and assets like pixels
- You want control over access and permissions to your assets without attributing ownership to individuals who assist your business operations
- You want to request access to other pages, ad accounts, and apps, or share your pages, ads accounts, and apps with other agencies
Setting up
If you think Facebook Business Manager is for you, here are the basic steps in setting it up and getting started.
Note: You must decide first who is going to be the admin. Your admin will be in charge of all clients, employees and accounts.
- Go to Business.Facebook.com and log in using your personal account. Create your Business Manager Account and give it a name. Usually this would be your business name.
- Create your Profile. Give your first name, last name and business email id.
- Invite people to your Business Manager. When inviting people to your business manager, consider asking them to add log in approvals that will serve as an extra security feature.
To invite people to your business manager:
- Go to Business Manager Settings.
- Under the People and Assets tab, click People.
- Enter the work email addresses of the people you want to add and select the role you’d like to assign them
4. Add a page to Business Manager.
- Go to Business Settings
- Click the Pages tab.
- Click Add New Pages.
- Select one of the 3 options: Add a Page, Request Access to a Page or Create a New Page.
- If you choose to request access or add a Page, enter the Facebook page name or URL.
5. Set up an employee to advertise on your page. You can add people to Business Manager to advertiser for your business without providing access to billing and invoice information.
Assign a role and an ad account to your employee:
- Go to Business Manager Settings.
- Under the People and Assets tab, click People.
- Search for the employee you want to make an advertiser and click Assign Assets.
- Select Pages, Ad Accounts, or Product Catalogs.
- Assign the Advertiser role.
- Click Save Changes.
Once you have set up the basics in Business Manager, you’re good to go. You can now separate work from your personal life.
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