7 Facebook advertising best practices to follow for better campaign results!

Social Media Advertising is an excellent way for businesses to increase brand awareness, maximize reach, improve engagement, and hence drive revenue. While this is commonly known, businesses still shy away from digital marketing because of doubts such as “where do I advertise?”, “whom do I advertise to?” and “how do I advertise?”. And many businesses often execute campaigns based on limited knowledge and experimentation. This is a hit and miss approach, it may be effective at times but it is definitely not efficient. In this article we’ll cover the best practices to create an efficient Facebook Ad campaign and get the best returns on your ad spends! 


What are the best practices to ensure a well performing campaign?

1. Define your strategy before getting started

Without a well defined strategy, it is very easy to get lost in the multitude of options available on Facebook Ads Manager. Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself before jumping into the creation of your campaign:

  • What am I promoting? 
  • What is the goal of the campaign? 
  • Who is my ideal customer?
  • What action do I want customers to take?
  • What is the usual process that customers follow for this action?
  • What will incentivize customers to act accordingly?

Once you have answered these questions, you will have better clarity on what you want to achieve, from whom and the requirements for the same. This will help you to create an optimized campaign.


2. Choose a relevant Campaign Objective

The first and an extremely important step to creating a campaign is to select the right Objective because Facebook will optimize your placements, spends and results accordingly. Go ahead with an objective that resonates the best with your underlying goal of what you want to achieve from the campaign.
Say you want to generate orders for your restaurant for example, then you might want to select Traffic and redirect as many relevant people to your online menu as possible. Alternatively you can also split test with Awareness and promote the availability of your online ordering service. You can select from a variety of objectives such as:

  • Brand awareness
  • Reach
  • Traffic
  • Engagement
  • App installs
  • Video views
  • Lead generation
  • Messages
  • Conversions
  • Catalogue Sales
  • Store Visits

3. Focus on targeting to reach not a quantity but a quality Audience

At the start, you answered who your ideal customer is, and you have to reach them using the targeting options available. These are users that are most likely to interact with your ad and act on it. In a bid to reach a wider audience, you may end up including irrelevant users who aren’t interested in what you’re advertising. This leads to a lower relevance score and higher costs. Facebook allows you to narrow down on users based on their interests, behaviors and demographics; it also allows you to upload an audience of your existing customers. Check out the various targeting options:

  • Custom audiences, which target specific users from your email list, or users who have taken certain actions on your site, your Facebook page, or your Instagram’s business profile.
  • Lookalike audiences, which replicate qualities from your custom audience and help you reach similar users as your existing ones.
  • Demographic targeting, which allows you to reach users of a specific age, sex, etc.
  • Location targeting, which enables you to target users in a particular area.
  • Interest targeting, which helps you reach users who have shown liking towards particular pages, topics, etc.
  • Behavior targeting, which targets users based on their online activities such as shopping, etc.
  • Connection targeting, which determines if you want your ads to be shown to users who are or are not connected with your brand

4. Smartly choose where to show your ad by defining the Ad Placements

Depending on the audience you are targeting and the ad you’ll be showing, you can specifically narrow down on where to show your ad by selecting the right placements. You don’t want to waste your money by showing your ad on the wrong platform, device, or format. Say for example you know that your customers are going to order from their phones, then there is no point of showing your ad on desktops and you should choose mobile placements only. Here are the different placement options available: 

  • Platforms; Facebook or Instagram
  • Devices; Mobile or Desktop
  • Network; Cellular or WiFi
  • Assets; Stories, In-Stream, Instant Articles, etc.
  • Expanded Audience Networks

5. Allocate a healthy Budget, assign a proper Schedule & apply the right Optimization

The next step is to define a Budget for your campaign, set an amount to be spent daily or an amount to be spent over the lifetime of the campaign. If you have a limit on how much to spend per day, or if you plan to run the ad indefinitely, or if you anticipate multiple changes in the limit, then allocate a daily budget. In case you are okay with Facebook maximizing spends on a particular day yielding high results, or if you are planning on using dayparting, then allocate a lifetime budget. You can either run the campaign indefinitely or Schedule it to start and end on particular dates. You can even choose dayparting and run your campaign only at specific times and on particular days of the week. Next is applying automated Optimization of spends to keep the costs low or manually enter a bid cap for either link clicks or impressions.

5. Choose an Ad Format

Now you have to select the type of ad you want to show your customers. It can be a single or multiple images, a video, or an experience. Here are the ad format options you can choose from: 

  • Single image ads
  • Video ads
  • Carousel ads, which allow you to show several videos and/or pictures
  • Canvas ads
  • Collections, which open up to be a full-screen mobile experience.

It is important to note that video content is not only treated more favorably in the Facebook algorithm, but it's also more likely to be shared and remembered than static content. To ensure a high CTR and result, it is essential to match the copy of the ad to the creative in a way that it is enticing for customers.

7. Add a clear Call-To-Action

After the creative and the copy, you have multiple options to add such as destination URL or where you want to redirect customers, a display link or URL description and a CTA button. A good looking ad and copy is of no use without a clear CTA.


Is there an easier way to create Facebook Ad Campaigns?

Enter Facebook Ads via Hashtag Loyalty, the simple step-by-step ad builder enables businesses to create and execute campaigns on Facebook and Instagram from the Hashtag Loyalty dashboard itself. 

Over the years, Hashtag Loyalty has helped businesses collect customer data at their offline stores, and the newly introduced Facebook Ads feature enables businesses to use this data to create Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences based on them. What good is this? It means that businesses can specifically target their existing customers who have previously interacted with their brand and push them to transact again. What’s better? Thanks to the Lookalikes, businesses can now reach potential customers that are similar to their existing customers and acquire them.


Why create Facebook Ad campaigns via Hashtag Loyalty? 

1. Simplified step-by-step ad builder

You don’t need expert knowledge to create and run effective and efficient campaigns. 

2. Hyper-specific targeting

You can leverage your existing customer data and filter it by lifecycle stage (New, Regular, VIP, Lost, etc.), feedback, demographic, outlet location and even loyalty points balances, to create Custom Audiences or Lookalikes based on them from the Hashtag Loyalty dashboard itself.

3. Online to offline RoI

On the completion of your campaign, Hashtag Loyalty gives you an exact monetary RoI on your campaign spends.


Why is this a breakthrough feature for your business?

It gives you complete independence from aggregators!

Thrive, enables you to set up your own online ordering system and delivery infrastructure. Hence helping you become self-sufficient and maximize revenue thanks to increased profit margins and decreased commission costs.

And now the Facebook Ads via Hashtag Loyalty feature enables you to leverage your customer data to retain existing customers and also acquire new ones!Hence, giving you complete autonomy over your business and putting you in control of your own destiny. Simply redirect the marketing budget allocated to aggregators to your own ad campaigns!

--

That’s it! Facebook ads seem more complicated than they really are. Once you are familiar with the different options, you can experiment with them and optimize the performance of your campaigns. 

Sign up to setup your own online ordering system free-of-charge using Thrive!


Author:
Anshul Jasani

Setup in 5 minutes and start accepting orders!

🔥 Click here to order directly from the best restaurants across India👆🏼