Facebook Advertising: Insights from a Facebook advertising agency (part 1)

It seems that a wave of advertisers is jumping on the Facebook advertising wagon. With 400 million+ engaged users and becoming the second largest website in the US, highly advanced targeting features, and a social advertising space that is not saturated yet, who can blame them? Hello…! Converting Facebook ads are up for grabs!

While it is easy to launch advertising campaigns on Facebook, scaling the lead/client acquisition is a demanding challenge. Advertisers must take into account, regardless of type of industry/vertical in which they operate, that Facebook advertising is easy to set up but currently a high-maintenance activity when you need to make it scale profitably.

We have rounded up some of our insights relating to effective direct response advertising on the world’s most successful social network to date and presented them as follows.

Here are some advises:

1. Test various creative options for your campaigns. Textual approach that performs very well on Google will not necessarily work well on Facebook. Test several combinations of text and image ads. As a basic rule, both should be highly tailored to the target audience to boost ad CTRs.
2. Conversion rates are still stable across verticals, but not for long. This means that once you have succeeded in stabilizing a campaign in terms of CTRs and CPA, you can feel comfortable with allocating higher daily budgets to the given campaign.
3. Facebook users are multilingual, and non-native English speakers are much more comfortable with English than you may think. Don’t hesitate to test and target:
   1. Native-English speaking expats using Facebook away from home, e.g., Target that American living in Germany with an English ad running in Germany
   2. Non-native English speakers within various geographies, e.g., German-speaking individuals within the UK. Serve that individual with English and non-English ads, and test. This strategy can work even if your core product is currently offered in English only. It’s worth a shot to expand your market by offering your English product to non-native English speakers on Facebook using tested combinations of English and non-English ads and landing pages.
4. Mmmm… “I Like”. Ads that are tagged with the longed-for “I Like” feature, will appear on user news feed pages and can get substantial viral spread. To acquire that, ads must be perceived as super-cool: funny, highly informative, provocative - appealing ads that stick out. It is worthwhile to map out personas within your target audience and investigate what Facebook ads your created social characters would “like”.
5. Facebook advertising analytics:To date, Facebook is far behind Google providing advertisers with advanced reporting and analysis features. This may change in the future and the bulk-upload and conversion tracking features (currently in beta) indicate Facebook’s advertising product is on the right track.Seperia is using Edge.BI, a decision support system for online marketers, which includes an advanced Facebook advertising analysis model. First, Facebook data is retrieved automatically via an API on a daily basis, and is integrated with advertiser back-office/CRM data. Second, quick OLAP analysis tailored for Facebook advertising analysis enables quick identification of new conversion and client value opportunities at a granular level. We recommend looking into it.As a second best, advertisers should at least make an effort to integrate Facebook advertising data with their BackOffice data on “static” reports like Excel. Such integration will show, for example, a certain segment in advertising that is driving acquisitions at a CPA that is 20% above target, but that segment is generating client values which are 100% higher than the average. You will want to continue that advertising.

To summarize, this article introduced some of initial Facebook advertising tips. However, this is only the beginning. In the next article, we present insights relating to the holy grail of Facebook advertising: TARGETING!

Facebook knows much about its users, including demographics, interests, social maps, social communications, birthdays, behavior on site, preferred applications, and etc. Reaching your exact audience and connecting real customers to your business is the make or break of direct response advertising on Facebook.

Stay tuned, we will be relating to advanced targeting insights on our next piece Facebook Advertising: Insights from a Facebook advertising agency (part 2).