It is no longer news that online advertising today leans on two major hinges – Facebook advertising and Google advertising. While Google ads rely on the power of Google’s search algorithm, Facebook ad campaign relies on social traffic to drive promoted content to interested users.
Personally, I use Facebook ads in just about anything related to my business. In fact, if Facebook advertising gets shut down today, my major alternative would be to go back to blog and forum advertising.
However, this post is not on other media of advertising but on the 5 things that will determine the success of your Facebook Ad campaign. A lot of people run ads wrongly even with their best efforts, this is understandable given that there is a lot of half-baked, hyped information about Facebook advertising.
You see people rush into Facebook ads, burn through a ton of money, lose badly and run off never to return again with the impression that ads do not work. So what really makes a Facebook ad a successful one?
In this post, I have discussed the 5 things that will determine the success of your Facebook ad right from the onset. If you get this thing wrong, you are likely to fail in your ad campaign. Read on to learn more!
1.) The Ad Objective
The first step in any ad campaign is to know exactly why you are running that ad. Get this wrong and every other thing will fail flat. Unfortunately, a lot of marketers do not carry out enough analysis to identify what their objective is before running ads.
Not doing this is the first reason why a Facebook ad campaign will fail. Knowing the objective of the ad will give your ad focus and help you detect failure easily.
There are several ad objectives to consider when running ads. You could run ads simply to drive traffic to your website either to sell something or to generate viable clicks on your offers.
You could also run traffic to a post to sell something via post engagement or you could simply drive social traffic to get people to subscribe into your list, also known as the Lead Generation objective.
Facebook ads make knowing your objective quite easy because the manager tool already has in-built Objective options in place. You will find Objectives like:
– Traffic
– Post Engagement
– Lead Generation
– Page Likes
– Video Views
– App Installations
– Conversions etc
Whatever is your intention for running ads, the objective should be clear from the start so you can optimize your ads campaign properly for the best ROI.
2.) The Audience and audience analysis
If you wish not to waste hard-earned income on Facebook advertising then you need to know who your audience is. You do this by first having a general idea of who you are going to target with your ad. Failing to identify your audience means you Facebook ads campaign is dead on launch.
So how do you know who your audience is? This shouldn’t be difficult because you should have a fair idea of the niche where your audience belongs to before you start setting up your Facebook ad campaign.
Now, let’s assume you already know your audience, you still need to do the further analysis so your ad campaign will be as laser-targeted as possible. To do this successfully, you need to run some test ads using your supposed audience.
Next, go to the Audience Insight tool in your Facebook ad manager to check the analytics of your ad (those that responded best to your test ad).
Your Audience Insight tool will give you analytics covering parameters like Age, Gender, Location and which indices cost more money than others. This also known as Cost per Click or Cost per Impression as the case may be.
At this point, you will be able to tell where to focus your ad targeting efforts and money at with ease.
3.) Your Copy and value proposition
Simply put, it is your copy that will engage people and when combined with your offer, push them to take the action that you desire strongly. The copy of your ad should be in clear, easily understandable language and should clearly state what the ad is about.
You don’t want to confuse your audience by using verbose grammar and missing your message. The rule of thumb is to use as fewer words as possible. Your header should be engaging and attention-grabbing enough to pass stop people who see the ad on their Facebook or Instagram feed.
The body of the ad should be engaging with a clear value proposition of what the ad is about and a clear call-to-action that your ideal audience is going to take on viewing the ad. If there is a link on the ad, it should be clearly visible if the Facebook ad campaign is using the Post Engagement objective.
Ads with too much hazy grammar can be a turn off as people have a very short memory span on social media. One look at the ad and it looks like too much work reading it and you find people turning away and scrolling past it to more interesting stuff on their feed.
READ: 5 Tips for Cheap and Effective Facebook Advertising
4.) The creative of the ad
The creative of your ad refers to the graphic used to set up the Facebook ad. It could be an image or a video as the case may be. Facebook and Instagram have a specific guide on the type of images you can only use for their ads.
Your image must not only be high definition, but it should also have certain measurements so as to fit in properly for the ad you are running. Your creative should sharp and clear to the eye so it catches attention easily.
To ensure the success of your Facebook ad campaign, try testing around with different images or videos till you find one that commands a better audience engagement then stick to it.
Generally, video Facebook ad campaigns convert better than other types of ads and if you can use a video creative to test run your ad to see how it goes.
5.) Split testing and Scaling
Split testing is really simple and very effective in helping you determine which ad campaigns are converting better than others. Remember that you do not want to waste your funds in dead campaigns that won’t yield the results you need.
Split testing means running several versions of the same ad campaign using different elements like a different copy or image or video.
Of course, there is an option for split testing your Facebook ads campaign on the Facebook ad manager tool right there.
So how do you win at ads after split testing?
It is after running a split test or checking your Audience Insight that you can comfortably scale up your ad budget. You do this to drive more results because your test ads have shown you to be on the right track.
Only successful ad campaigns should be scaled up, anything less than that is wasting money. Some marketers leave a bad ad running for more than 3 days when it is clear that the ad has no hope of performing.
Personally, I kill my ads after 2 days of non-performance and you should too.
So there you have it, 5 things that will determine the success of your Facebook Ad campaign in no time at all.
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