Best Practices for Advertisers

When advertisers create media plans and strategies to acquire customers on Facebook Ads it is important to ensure that the client’s business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are aligned to their marketing goals. This is sometimes overlooked and could be a very costly mistake.

Facebook’s platform is built to allow for this synergy between marketing goals and campaign objectives.

What are Facebook’s campaign objectives?

Campaign objectives are key performance indicators that a Facebook campaign will optimize towards when you launch your campaign within Facebook Ads manager.

Facebook allow you to choose campaign objectives based on your marketing funnel goals. Each campaign objective contains different metrics for measurement and optimizes towards that specific metric.

The campaign objective you choose also enables which auction and audience will be exposed to your ads. For example, a traffic campaign will allow the advertiser to drive traffic to a specific landing page. This campaign allows you to select a few conversion metrics to optimize delivery. The conversion metric you choose will influence Facebook’s algorithm towards that specific goal.

Optimization & Delivery Options for Traffic Campaigns:

• Link Clicks – This will enable Facebook to show your ad to users most likely to click on your link
• Landing Page Views – This will enable Facebook to deliver your ad to users most likely to click your ad’s link and load the website
• Impressions – The ad will deliver as many impressions as possible to users based on your budget and location targeting.
• Daily Unique Reach – Deliver ads to people up to once a day.

Marketing Funnel 101:

It is important to refresh your understanding of a marketing funnel and the ideal customer journey that a user will take when they experience your business/brand online.

Awareness:

When users interest with your business for the first time they are considered “upper funnel”. This would be where the ad and business create awareness to drive that user towards interest in the brand.

Consideration:

The consideration period is an ad objective that enables the user to consider taking an action. This would be your campaign objective’s CTA or Call to action. For example, a popular call to action would be “buy now”.

Conversion:

This conversion is the actual action where the user conversion occurs and completes the campaign’s desired action. For many businesses this is also where a value is realized. A common example of conversion value would include a sale on an e-commerce website.

Aligning Your Marketing Funnel and Facebook Targeting

It is important that when selecting your campaign objective and determining where to allocate media spend that you consider the marketing funnel and customer journey. In some cases leveraging ad creative and campaign’s that are not aligned with your target audience could limit the overall performance of your Facebook Advertising. Audiences are a key component to powering your Facebook Ads.

Here are some of the different types of data and targeting that is possible to leverage:

• Demographic targeting – This is available within the Facebook platform and provides options to filter age, gender, and location.
• Native Interests – Interest level targeting in Facebook allows you to filter for specific interest & behaviors such as “small business owners” or “woodworkers”.
• Lookalikes – A lookalike audience leverages the Facebook pixel data to find similar customers that have visited your website and performed an action. For example, you could find new customers who look like customers that have purchased a product before.
• Site visitors – Leveraging Facebook’s pixel is a powerful toll to set up re-targeting campaigns. A common example is using the pixel to create a 30-90 day audience of users who visited your website.
• First Party – First party and CRM data is another powerful way to re-target and bring users back to your website. You could also use email lists and first party data to “seed” a lookalike audience.

Balancing Targeting, Audiences, and Campaign Objectives

In order to effectively select which audiences and campaign objective is appropriate for the business, begin by first asking yourself “what does success look like?”.

Once you have defined success and the key metrics for the business you could back into your most optimal audience, targeting, and campaign objective.