Powerful, Underused Facebook Ad Tools You Should Be Using (by Jon Loomer)

In March, the whole Agorapulse team traveled to San Diego on a mission to attend the best sessions at Social Media Marketing World, compile notes of the key takeaways and share them with you. We’ve created 20 blog posts from those notes, here’s one of them!

Quote from the session: “You can’t expect to target people who don’t know you and sell them stuff”

The Problem: The biggest challenge that advertisers have with Facebook is allocating the time and resources to run successful campaigns. Facebook is not helping this situation with its strategy of constantly putting “press play” options in the way of business owners. These options encourage us to “boost post” or “promote page”, but they just don’t work as well as a properly implemented strategic advertising campaign. Thankfully, Jon has developed a step-by-step system that is easy to follow and will help you to:

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• Target customers

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• Target readers

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• Measure ROI

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• Optimize your ads

Want to attract fans, measure and optimize your Facebook advertising budget? Here are the steps Jon suggests:

#1 Target Your Customers

Any savvy business person knows that repeat business is vital to success, yet many businesses fail to use Facebook ads to target their existing customers. Jon says this should be your starting point. Create custom audiences based on your database and start targeting those connections on Facebook. When you have exhausted the option of targeting connections who already know you, the next step is to start creating lookalike audiences to attract people who are similar to the customers you already have.

#2 Target Your Readers

“Website Custom Audiences” (WCA) is hands down the most exciting development by Facebook in recent months. Now businesses can target people who have visited their website with ads on Facebook. Building trust with readers who already know and like your content by targeting them on Facebook will deliver a much better ROI from your advertising budget. Jon recommends that you split test your ads to see which ones perform best.

#3 Measure ROI

ROI is an almost mystical concept in social media. Any business owner, boss or financial controller needs to know what return they are getting from Facebook ads. The fact is that you can measure the ROI from your Facebook advertising campaigns. Jon talked the attendees through how to include conversion tracking on their ad sets to measure the best-performing adverts. By implementing his strategy, you will be able to track your cost per acquisition.

#4 Optimize your Ads

Advertisers are missing a serious opportunity by underutilizing the “Facebook Ads Report” feature. Jon encourages advertisers to use this information! The reports are full of useful metrics that break down advertising data based on your demographics. Know what you’re spending and which of your target markets are giving you the best return on your investment. Facebook ads work if they are optimized well; advertisers are clear on their objectives and know what the goal of each campaign is.