5 Ways To Jumpstart Facebook Ads

The Facebook Paid Ads program has tremendous potential if you know what trees to bark up. And if you’re willing to put effort into making your advertising as effective as possible, as with any other type of advertising. In this article, I’ll cover some tips to improve your Facebook advertising.

1.  Take Advantage Of Facebook Targeting Features

There are numerous specialized targeting features in Facebook. Expanding targeting beyond age, gender and other basic demographics provides opportunities to target more specifically and/or widen your advertising reach. On Facebook, some of the ways in which you can target are by precise interests, connections on Facebook, education, workplaces, etc.

Here’s an example of precise interests:

Here’s an example of education and work (in advanced targeting options section):

2.  Improve Metrics & Tracking

Advertisers can be easily tempted to use Facebook to simply increase brand awareness. General goals like driving traffic to a fan page and/or getting people to watch your new video are too vague and are a recipe for wasted ad spend. Instead, make conversions goals specific and measurable.

Here are some examples of specific Facebook goals you could track:

• Sell 500 widgets in a month at a cost of $10 per widget
• Get 10,000 new fans on a company page. Market an inexpensive product on the page & get 4% of all new fans to make a purchase.
• Get 10,000 video views & get 2% of all viewers to the site to purchase a product
• Get 2,000,000 ad impressions at an average cost of 0.50 and get 4% to download a whitepaper

As you run campaigns, modify and fine-tune goals as needed. For example, the second goal listed above could end up like this:

• Get 10K new fans on a company fan page. Market an inexpensive product on the page and get 4% of all new fans to make a purchase
• Once customers, retarget them via a drip marketing campaign, which has an average conversion rate of 15%

Good goals tie into overall marketing objectives. And all your marketing initiatives (online and offline) should eventually work together like a well-oiled machine.

3.  Grab Facebook Users’ Attention

Facebook users don’t come to the site to peruse ads. They stop by to see what their friends are doing, look at pictures and send messages to other site users – which means that any paid ad you post must be interesting enough for these tuned-out participants to abandon usual routines and pay attention to paid advertisements. Here are some suggestions:

Use bold colors in images or logos in ads. These catch the eye and grab people’s attention. Take a look at this example from MGD:

Add a colored border to your ad images. This is also a great way to make your ads more eye-catching compared to other advertiser’s messages.

Use female faces. These images tend to convert best when used on Facebook ads, and the number of stock images available today means that female faces can be adapted to nearly any advertising scenario. Happy female faces tend to convert best.

Tie your ads to a specific promotion. Clearly define the benefits of clicking on your advertisement with a limited-time offer or specific promotion. Asking users to “take action now” goes a long way toward breaking them out of their routine Facebook usage cycles.

4.  Use Text In Your Images

Words in images have been working well, so include words around your images. Some examples are a compelling offer like “50% off” or a call to action like “call us today.” Aim for a font that is big and bold so someone can see the text if they’re sitting in front of a computer or walking by a computer. Aim to place fewer words over an image. I personally like no more than 4 words.

5.  Change Ads Up Often

Compared to AdWords, ads will run their course fairly quickly in Facebook. So, be sure to change ads up often. You don’t have to make dramatic changes to ads for them to be different. Try simple changes like the suggestions below so your ads stay fresh:

• Different border color (thin black, thick red, etc.)
• Different colors in your image/company logo
• Different images (like picture of well known person at company, a happy woman, etc.)
• Different angles of images (like someone looking directly at the camera)
• Different text on top of an image so that your ads stay fresh

Finally, Facebook users have already trained themselves to block out advertising messages and become burned out on repetitive messages more quickly than the users you reach through other advertising programs.