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How to Improve Your Consumer Products Facebook Advertising Results

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An August 2011 report from The Pivot Conference showed more than 85 percent of companies surveyed are now using social advertising or are planning to add it within the next year and of those surveyed, over 90 percent advertise on Facebook. Add to that the fact that Facebook now outranks Google as the site with the most overall users and hits per day and it’s little wonder that nearly two thirds of CEOs say they are satisfied with the results of their social media advertising.

However, not all is rosy with Facebook advertising.

Webtrends reported recently that Facebook’s 2010 click-through rates were actually down from 2009. 

Nonetheless, eMarketer estimates that Facebook advertising will reach $2.19 billion this year in the U.S. alone.  Many industry watchers believe Facebook’s value is rising, despite historically unimpressive numbers.  

Fast and Easy Ad Creation on Facebook

Using Facebook’s ad platform means you don’t have to be a designer.  However, content is crucial because space/characters are very limited, so you need a compelling call to action. Depending on your business objectives, from the ad you can link to your Facebook Business Page or an external landing page.

As with other major online advertising, you bid on Facebook ad placements, choosing cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM).  Once you assign a bid rate, campaign time-frame and maximum spend per day or per campaign, you’re good to go.  

Facebook’s Advertising Performance reports on impressions, clicks, CTRs, amount spent and so on.  Responder Demographics show details about who’s viewing or interacting with our ad, and daily graphs are available.  And to monitor results to an outside website, you can use Google Analytics.

While it’s fairly easy to create an ad, making them effective is not quite so easy.

4 Ways to Improve Your Results on Facebook

1. Understand your audience

Industry expert Perry Marshall likens Google AdWords to the Yellow Pages and Facebook advertising to the neighborhood coffee shop.  The reason for being on Facebook is entirely social, and this underscores the need to understand your audience and your goals.  Perry offers a quiz to help estimate the value of Facebook advertising.

2. Take advantage of Facebook segmentation and create custom advertisements

Facebook’s tremendous opportunities for micro-targeting offer almost endless demographic and psychographic filters.  Once you determine the audience you want to reach, filter them through ZIP codes, job titles, employer, interests, "likes," etc.

Because your audience is on Facebook for social reasons, ad quality and design matter.  Make your ads striking.  Include an image, skip typical ad jargon and get friendly (it’s Facebook). Rotate more than one ad to avoid “ad blindness.” Check out Marketing Sherpa's detailed advice for creating and targeting your ad.  

3. Make your ad “Likeable”

Make your ad “Likeable” in both senses of the word.  You want viewers to like your ad enough to click on it, but you want them to literally like it, too, to get broader exposure to their friends and via a News Feed mention.  

Linking to a destination within Facebook lets people “Like” the page, specific activity, etc. from the ad, connecting them with your page or activity.  This increases your CPC benefits.

4. Test, Test, Test

Testing produces success.  With good testing your can learn infinite valuable information about your audience and finely target ads based on what’s working best.  Test to find the strongest headlines and other messaging, images, time of day to run the ad, geographic locations and other target details, etc.  Test multiple ad variations, changing just one thing at a time.  

Be sure to set goals and objectives for your advertising, so you have something concrete to measure against.  Once you’ve developed an ad that converts well, you should consider switching to cost-per-impression rather than CPC. It could save you money.

Facebook may be by far the largest, but Facebook advertising still has some distance to go before it’s on a par with the other “big boys.”  But there is plenty you can do right now to make Facebook advertising work for you. 

We’d love to hear from others out there who have had increasing success with Facebook advertising.  What worked best for you?