by Amelia Krahe | August 17, 2015
This is the third part in my three-part series about Facebook advertising. If you haven’t seen the others, be sure to check out Part I and Part II first!
If I’ve been persuasive, by now you’re 1.) convinced that using Facebook ads is a great idea for your business and 2.) really good at targeting your specific audience. The final ingredient for your potent Facebook ad cocktail? The ad itself.
Linking: Where should you drive ad traffic?
Each ad must link to a specific page of your website, and making sure your ad creative is directly relevant to the page it links to is critical (the section on ad performance dives into relevance more). While the ad is associated with your business’s Facebook page, users who click will come to your company’s website. Here are a few suggestions for where to bring your visitors:
Important service pages
FAQ pages
Specials, deals, & promotion pages
Listicle-type posts
Recent blogs
Pages that provide easy-to-access, well-structured, bite-size information (along with a form with a strong call-to-action, or CTA) help to improve the quality of a user’s experience on your site, and will increase the chances that they’ll call or fill out a form once they get to your page.
Key components of a Facebook ad
Facebook’s ads are divided into three major tiers: Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. A campaign sets an overall objective (clicks to website, post engagement, etc.) and buying type (auction vs. fixed price). Ad Sets specify an audience and budget. Ads are where you generate the ad creative, links, and any ad variations. That’s what we’ll focus on here.
1. Text
This is a one or two sentence, catchy intro to your ad. Leading with a question, keeping it brief, and even adding an element of humor is a good idea here.
2. Image
Choosing a relevant, interesting, or funny photo is key to an attractive, clickable ad. Experience tells us that real company photos usually outperform stock photos. Carousel ads, a new Facebook ad feature, allows you to display multiple images (and links) for a single ad. For non-carousel ads, Facebook recommends a photo size of 1,200 x 628 pixels.
3. Headline
This is the place to briefly explain what this ad is for. The name of the page this ad links to, the advertised product, or the topic of the blog post is what should be included here.
4. News feed link description
Though Facebook will automatically fill this with an excerpt of the the page to which the ad links, this field is customizable, and is a great opportunity to provide people with a more meaty and enticing description of what they’re about to click.
5. Call to action
Want viewers to learn more, sign up, book now, contact you, or something similar? Choose one of 7 optional call to action buttons to display in the bottom corner of your ad. This provides another way for users to engage with your ad. When clicked, they’ll be taken directly to the specific page on your site (in the above ad’s case, to the spray foam service page).
Keep track of ad performance
FB Ads Manager data
Facebook’s Ads Manager has some very helpful reporting features. Metrics like number of impressions, clicks, frequency (or how many times an ad was displayed to each visitor, on average), click through percentage, and cost per click are all helpful factors for determining how effectively your ad is performing. These metrics are key to informing any edits or variations you create, as well. An ad variation with a low impression rate and high cost per click probably needs some new messaging or perhaps a snazzier photo.
Facebook also measures relevance score for your ad on a scale of 1-10. In Ads Manager, this is defined generally as “how your audience is responding to your ad” after it reaches 500 impressions. Recently, however, we’ve noticed that fresher, more recent content (like newly published blogs with seasonal messaging) are more likely to get high relevance scores. So yes, creating an ad about that recent blog you wrote on August air conditioner maintenance is a good idea. With a monthly click spend of around $250 and consistent, weekly ad management, a solid benchmark to aim for for clients in the HVAC and home performance industry is between 5-10 goal conversions per month and a low (under $0.60) cost per click.
UTM tracking codes
While the reporting offered by Ads Manager is great, it’s important to get the full picture of what users are doing not only within Facebook, but what happens once they get to your site as well. Making sure each ad is trackable, then, is key. Warning: I’m going to get a little technical...
While Facebook offers URL tags and conversion tracking directly in Power Editor, I like using “UTM codes” that specify the campaign source, medium, and name. Using Google’s URL builder, I create a custom URL that has a few tracking tags attached to it. These tags drive data directly into everyone’s favorite analytics program, Google Analytics. By viewing Campaign data within Google Analytics (GA), I’m then able to see how many visitors came to the site, session duration, the number and type of conversions, and all the other good stuff GA reporting has to offer. Specific UTM codes can be set at either the Ad Set or Ad level.
Combined, these reporting capabilities do allow you to see pretty far into how your ads are doing, how often people see and click on them, actual website conversions, and cost per click.
What makes a good & bad ad?
While it’s tempting to use the text and headline areas of your ad to emphatically promote your awesome company, being salesy and overtly promotional isn’t going to fly on this platform. Generally speaking, people are not visiting Facebook to sign up for an energy audit. However, a witty or funny text that grabs a user’s attention plus a real photo of your team doing an audit can get you some attention. Using ad creative that is native to the platform and not making a sales pitch is key. Talking about things like the season, beating the heat, saving cash on energy bills, or a fun fact about how much solar, leading with an engaging with a “did you know?”, and keeping it casual is the way to go. This way, people won’t view your ad as something totally alien to their normal Facebook experience, but will find it more integrated. If your ad is good and your target audience is on point, your chances of getting that visitor on track to customerhood are a heck of a lot better.
Now get out there and start Power Editor-ing away, people!