Best Practice: Facebook Advertisements

Facebook has established itself as an advertising platform, mainly because everyone is on Facebook. The target audiences range from students to CEOs of multinational corporations. You can run B2C or B2B advertising and theoretically have the chance to reach any target audience on Facebook. But this is not always easy.

Content is everything. No matter how precise the targeting is, if the ads are not appealing, the campaign will not perform well. The news feed of many users is overwhelmed with ads, videos, and posts from their Facebook friends, and this is exactly where your own advertisement needs to stand out. Therefore, the content and format of your ad must convince the target audience.

Facebook has developed some useful approaches to guide you in ad creation.

• Call-to-Action - Include a call-to-action within the first 90 lines of your advertisement. 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, try not to appear unreliable, as this can quickly deter consumers. Here you can find some image databases you can use for your ads. We do not accept liability for the use of the images.

• Oversaturation - Try to adjust your ads regularly because if users see the same ads repeatedly, it can quickly lead to a poor relevance score. In the worst case, your account might get suspended if too many negative reviews are given on your ads.

• Content - Important content should always come first to increase 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 interested in your content will convert. Try to minimize wastage and use the good targeting options available on Facebook. If there is an unclear target audience, 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 demographic data of the top performers in an analysis tool (like 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 for performance criteria. This means that before a campaign is created, objectives should be defined and tracking set up.

For this, Facebook provides a pixel, the so-called Facebook Pixel. This must be implemented on all pages of the website. For the measurement of conversions, the pixel must be slightly adjusted depending on the type of conversion on the respective pages. The implementation instructions are available here.

Fig. 1: Screenshot Facebook Pixel Activity

Double-checking with UTM Parameters

We generally recommend adorning Facebook campaigns with the so-called UTM parameters so that the campaigns can also be evaluated in Google Analytics. This has the advantage that traffic on your own website can be better segmented. Furthermore, the performance of the campaigns can be further adjusted, for example, according to bounce rates or pages per session.

Fig. 2 Screenshot 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 any questions about creating or evaluating your Facebook campaigns, we are always available. Contact us today.