Best Practice: Facebook Advertisements

Facebook has established itself as an advertising platform, primarily because everyone is on Facebook. The target audiences range from students to CEOs of multinational corporations. You can run B2C or B2B advertisements and theoretically have the chance to find any target demographic on Facebook. But that's not always easy.

Content is everything. No matter how precise the targeting is, if the ads are not attractively designed, the campaign will not perform well. The newsfeed of many users is overloaded with advertisements, videos, and posts from their Facebook friends, and this is exactly where your own ads need to stand out. Therefore, the content and format of your ads must convince the target audience.

Facebook has developed some useful approaches that you can follow when creating ads.

• Call-to-Action - Add a call-to-action in the first 90 lines of your ad. Tell your customers what you want from them.

• Imagery - Use high-quality photos/images with a clear visual language. The focus here is also on generating attention. However, avoid appearing insincere, as this can quickly deter consumers. Here you can find some image databases you can use for your ads. We assume no liability for the use of the images.

• Oversaturation - Try to regularly adjust your ads, because if users see the same ads repeatedly, it can quickly lead to a poor relevance score. In the worst-case scenario, your account can be blocked if too many negative reviews are submitted for your ads.

• Content - Important content should always come first, as this increases the likelihood of a conversion (conversions are desired actions with the ads, such as a purchase or traffic generation).

• Target Audience - Be aware of who your target audience is. Only people who are interested in your content will convert. Try to keep wastage to a minimum and use Facebook's excellent targeting options. If the target audience is not clearly defined, you can also create a look-a-like campaign based on the likes of your Facebook page.

Otherwise, a target audience can be created from user behavior and the demographic data of the top performers in an analysis tool (such as Google Analytics). This brings us to the most important foundation for successful campaigns: Data!

Data & Tracking

Tracking forms the basis for any campaign optimization. Only by measuring achieved goals, such as purchases or newsletter sign-ups, can campaigns be optimized based on performance characteristics. That means, before a campaign is even created, goals should be defined, and tracking should be set up.

For this purpose, Facebook provides a pixel, the so-called Facebook Pixel. This must be implemented on all pages of the website. To measure conversions, the pixel must be slightly adjusted on the respective pages according to the type of conversion. You can find the implementation guide here.

Fig. 1: Screenshot of Facebook Pixel Activity

Better safe than sorry - UTM Parameters

We generally recommend equipping Facebook campaigns with so-called UTM parameters, so the campaigns can also be evaluated in Google Analytics. This has the advantage of better segmenting traffic on your own website. Additionally, this can further control the performance of the campaigns, for instance, based on bounce rates or pages per session.

Fig. 2: Screenshot of Google Analytics Campaign Evaluation UTM Parameters

You can read about how to create UTM parameters and what to watch out for here. The tool for creating UTM parameters is available here.

What can we do for you?

If you have questions regarding the creation or evaluation of your Facebook campaigns, we are always available to assist you. Contact us today.