AlphaBoost

Start Thinking About Audience and Ad Composition - Seriously!

So, you’ve advertised on Facebook in the past, but you’re not sure if you achieved the optimal results for your brand. Determining how to optimize an ad campaign can be daunting, especially when there’s buzz about major brands that can’t seem to derive value and tangible results from Facebook advertising. If you have a basic understanding about how to run a Facebook ad campaign and would like to learn more about how to optimize the next one, here are a few topline best practices on how to refine your approach:

This first thing to consider is audience composition. Who is your ideal audience? What does your audience currently look like and what percentage consists of highly relevant fans? Your initial priority should be to focus on converting the most relevant Facebook users to fans of your page (think of this as the center of a bullseye).

It’s imperative to understand audience composition so you can test ads to see if you’ve exceeded demand for your most desired and relevant audience. How do you know if you’ve exceeded demand? Simple, calculate your cost per fan. Although you can estimate, you don’t really know your CPF until you try it – set aside $5K for a test to determine your benchmark. Knowing this benchmark is a good way to gauge your target audience size. If your cost per fan is relatively low and stays low throughout your test, then you’ve not yet exceeded demand and you should keep ad targeting focused.

Think about your target audience as the first half of a bell curve; CPF will continue to climb as you approach the end of the bell curve where you can no longer acquire more highly targeted fans. When you’ve reached the midway point on the bell curve, pivot to a new targeting area and start acquiring fringe fans that have like-interests. If your initial CPF is relatively high, then expand your targeting and focus on conquering other relevant areas with related interests.

Depending on your audience composition, either develop ads for your current target audience or develop ads for where you want to go next - fringe fans with related interests. And this all goes back to the types of content you are going to be publishing to your page – build an audience that is going to pay attention to the message you are planning on syndicating through the newsfeed.

We suggest you parse out age, gender, location, language, broad and precise targeting to have a CPF benchmark for each segment of your target audience. This will be helpful if you choose to target specific audience segments in the future - you’ll know what it costs and what kind of ads to deploy.

Next, think about ad composition. Short, concise copy with a strong call to action usually has the highest conversion rate for marketplace ads. Make sure your ad copy speaks to whom you’re targeting – the more relevant your ad is to the end user, the higher your click-to-fan rate will be. This statistic is a great way to benchmark how your ads are performing on Facebook. Even if an ad is performing exceptionally well, don’t forget to rotate your creative! You don’t want to burn out your audience on one ad, and burn out is reflected through the “frequency” metric on the Facebook ads dashboard.

Be open and flexible with your ad copy and imagery! Test different creative variations and trust your advertising partner, they’re here to help you optimize and execute an ad campaign in the most effective way possible – but ask for transparency, just to make sure.

Lastly, make sure your landing page on Facebook is compelling enough for someone to like your Fan Page or engage with your campaign. Your ad campaign will deliver the relevant audience, but it’s up to you to seal the deal by publishing engaging content that will convert them to fans. For more on how to boost engagement, take a look at our recent post for a few tips and tricks.

Here’s an image from fMC, which shows brands are more talkative than their fans, and that’s just bad business.

At fMC, Paul Adams presented stats on the lightweight nature of user engagement. Brands are more wordy that users. Be frequent, but lightweight.