Tips From The Experts: Sam Talks About Facebook Advertising

You’ve taken the plunge and published your very own website for all the world to see! But creating a website that perfectly showcases your brand is only the first step. Now it’s time to start thinking about the most effective ways to bring potential clients on board. Today, there’s no way to avoid the strong influence that Facebook plays as a platform to advertise your site. With over one and a half billion users spanning across the globe, it’s hard to ignore the potential of Zuckerberg’s territory.

The question is: How can you give your Facebook presence that boost it needs?

You’re probably already thinking to yourself, ‘well, where (and how) do I start?’ Don’t fret! Sam, a creative analyst, has got your back. A friendly face around the Wix office, his approachable nature helped us narrow down all the essential aspects needed in order to give you the complete lowdown on how you can create Facebook ads.

Tell us why you use Facebook Advertising? What are the advantages over Google ads or other online ad services?

We use Facebook ads because we can reach an enormous audience of potential new users who are already aware of the value of an online presence. Also, we can take advantage of targeting which identifies Facebook users who behave similarly to our own Wix users. Facebook has access to a huge amount of data that they can use to show their users ads that are more relevant to them.

What kind of data?

Anything from age and interest to behaviors.

Let’s say, I want to promote my small business, what’s the process?

A good place to start off is by setting your objectives and researching your competitors and the market. Next you’ll create the actual ad, set your target audience and finally plan how you will divide up your budget.

Now can you explain a bit about each step?

Objectives – The objective focuses on what you want to actually attain from posting your ad. It may be to increase engagements such as Likes or it may be to direct traffic to your site.

Targeting – Choosing your audience will be dependent on the objective you set in step one. You can target your audience according to the following: location, age, gender, languages, interests, education, relationship status and behavior.

Creating – The way you chose to create your ad, again, will be influenced by your set objective. The goal you have set and the type of ad you create will go hand in hand. If you want to “send people to your site”, a link ad is the most popular option – but not the only one.

Budget – Facebook allows for two budgeting options, either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. A daily budget, as the name suggests, will pace your spending throughout the day where as a lifetime budget will pace your spending throughout the time period the ad is set to run.

Once I’ve decided on the type of content I want to promote what are my other options?

The Facebook platform is absolutely heading toward a mobile-oriented future. I believe more money is already being spent on Facebook mobile ads than Facebook desktop ads. Saying that, you have a couple of options in terms of the placement of the ad – you can either have it in the user’s main news feed or it can be displayed in a smaller sidebar ad. You also have a few variations regarding the type of ad. First you have image ads, where the users can click to expand the image before heading to the landing page. Followed by links ads and videos. We’ve had most success in the news feed, where the creative appears in the user’s native navigation of the platform.

We spend almost all of our Facebook budget on image ads. That said, most advertisers use link ads which don’t expand. We’ve tried the video format but haven’t had much success in driving new users. The reason might be that we attempted to drive users through videos on Facebook via desktop while industry consensus is that video ads work better on mobile. You’ll have to test and see what works best for you.

How do you create an effective ad? What’s the secret recipe?

We’ve done a thorough analysis of what works for us on Facebook visually. We came up with these 6 criteria:

Short text – clear, simple accompanying text. Product -focused visual – an easily identifiable product (in our case a browser or laptop). Showstopper – we want the entire composition to be a stunning image. High contrast – between the background and the hero (product). Legibility – clear on-image text. A story – this one is least crucial, but we like the user to be able to imagine a backstory to the image they’re looking at.

We’ve found that the more of these characteristics a post has, the more likely it is to drive new users at an efficient rate.

Can you tell us the most effective bidding strategy?

There are two ways to go around bidding: you can let Facebook automatically bid on your behalf or you can manually select what will be more effective depending on your objective.

I recommend to start with automatic selection so you can see what Facebook gives you, this is a favorable choice if your campaign is time sensitive. If you have a long running campaign you can play around with it more and tweak it depending on your objective.

For beginners, you want to make your sure your objective is correct and get started with automatic bidding. You can choose how you want to pay – pay per click or pay per objective. If you’re audience is broad then you want to pay per objective (click to site) and if your target is small, like Wix’s, then it would be optimal to pay per impression. Remember that Facebook wants to show content that people want to see, so the higher your click through rate the lower your bidding rate will be.