There are many reasons why a business would choose Facebook over Google. According to recent data*, Facebook enjoys the top average hours spent on an app at roughly 20 hours per month. Companies and businesses know this, so they use Facebook Ads extensively to advertise on the social platform.

If you run a Facebook Ads campaign, you want to optimize it for maximum return. This post will help you do that for your current advertising setup, and we hope it allows you to reach your target audience more effectively.

Why Advertise on Facebook?

Before we get started with the optimization tips, it's best to understand the advantages of advertising on the platform.

Facebook has close to 3 billion active users, and as stated above, they spend a considerable amount of time every month on the platform via the app or website. While on the site, users are more engaged with the content than they would be while browsing search results on Google.

One of the main features of their ad platform is the ability for a business to target their ideal customer precisely. From demographics, interests, behavior, and history, the targeting level helps companies reach the right people at the right time.

Facebook has multiple ways through which a business can advertise; here are a few popular ones:

• Facebook Feed
• Facebook Marketplace
• Facebook Video Feeds
• Facebook Right Column
• Facebook Messenger

Facebook's platform is well-suited for specific goals like brand awareness, engagement, app installs, and lead generation. A primary advantage would be for businesses targeting mobile users since a significant portion of Facebook's user base accesses the platform via the mobile app.

8 Strategies to Optimize Your Facebook Campaigns

Every business needs help with optimization methods, and the internet is full of resources to guide you. We have selected the tips below because of their importance in optimizing your campaign performance.

1. Meta Pixel

You can create a Meta Pixel in your Facebook Business Manager account and can install the Pixel code on your site in two ways: manually or through third-party integration.

To start setting up your Meta Pixel, visit their official page.

What can you do with the pixel installed? Here are some common methods to help your advertising and marketing efforts.

• Use the Facebook Pixel to track conversions - Conversions are the actions you want people to take on your website, such as making a purchase or signing up for your email list. You can see how effectively your Facebook ads drive these actions by tracking conversions.
• Use the Facebook Pixel to create remarketing campaigns - Remarketing campaigns allow you to show ads to people who have visited your website. This method is great for reaching people interested in your products or services.
• Use the Facebook Pixel to track website traffic from different sources - The Facebook Pixel can track website traffic from various sources, such as organic search, paid search, and social media. This information can help you understand where your website traffic is coming from and how to improve your marketing efforts.

2. Select the Right Objective

As obvious as this sounds, selecting the ideal objective is a process you should consider carefully. There are six overall objectives that you can choose on Facebook. Picking the right one is vital. To briefly state them, they are:

• Awareness: Show your ads to people who are most likely to remember them
• Traffic: Send people to a destination, such as your website, app, or Facebook event.
• Engagement: Get more messages, video views, post engagement, Page likes, or event responses.
• Leads: Collect leads for your business or brand.
• App promotion: Find new people to install your app and continue using it.
• Sales: Find people who are likely to purchase your product or service.

Facebook's algorithms, which decide which ad gets shown to whom, use the objective you selected to show your ad to the people that fit the behavior, interests, and historical data. This targeting allows your ad to be seen by people likely enough to perform your advertising objective.

To select the right objective, you can follow these strategies:

• Start with a small budget: It's a good idea to start with a small budget; this will allow you to test different objectives and see what works best for your business.
• Be patient: It takes time to see results from Facebook ads. Don't expect to see a significant increase in sales overnight. Just keep track of your results and make adjustments as needed.
• Buyer's journey: The awareness objective is suitable if your buyer is on a journey and is still getting familiar with your brand. If they are aware already and considering a purchase, the Traffic or Lead Generation objectives might be better. For those closer to making a purchase, Conversions might be the appropriate choice.
• Measure success: Set up proper tracking and conversion events to measure the success of your ad campaigns. Based on the results, optimize and adjust your objectives accordingly.

3. Lead Generation

Kickstarting your lead generation efforts is crucial for establishing sustainable growth. Here are a few tips you can implement to initiate lead generation.

• Lead Magnet: A lead magnet is a free resource offered in exchange for contact information. Offer valuable resources such as videos, PDF reports, or exclusive content in exchange for contact information. Diversify your offerings to cater to varying content preferences.
• Webinars: Engage your audience through interactive presentations or expert interviews. Webinars provide a platform for sharing valuable insights directly with potential leads.
• Contests and giveaways: A popular lead generation tactic is to conduct contests via your Facebook page. Encourage participants to interact by liking, sharing, and participating, capturing contact information while boosting engagement. You have probably seen this often; they are the 'Like and Share this for a chance to win' type posts.

4. Ad Placement

Facebook allows you to set the placement of your ads to automatic, or you can do it manually. For those new to the platform, let Facebook's system decide how to place your ads for optimum performance. The ad placements include:

• Facebook: The most common placement is the feeds and right-hand column. The marketplace shows ads to users browsing that section of the platform. The video feed is also a popular option, and it shows your ad either in the video-only environment or the Facebook newsfeed.
• Messenger: Options offered here are Home and Sponsored Messages. It's used sparingly and probably works best if past users have already conversed with you regarding your product or service.
• Instagram: Offers two placement options here: Instagram Feed and Stories. Expect your demographic to be younger and your cost per acquisition to be higher than if you were targeting audiences on Facebook.
• Audience Network: This network enables advertisers to reach users beyond the confines of Facebook and Instagram by displaying their ads on other mobile apps and websites. Advantages include expanded reach, more ad formats, and reporting and analytics of your ads' performance outside the Facebook ecosystem. Be careful with this placement because if you are looking for conversions, the consensus online is that everything but the audience network works better.

You can target Mobile or Desktop users if you select 'manual placement' and want to target specific users. You can also choose between iOS and Android users to get even more granular, which is especially helpful if you have an app currently launching on only one platform.

5. Images Matter

Ad design is an entire field of study on its own. Some of the most prominent ways to make a creative difference in your campaign are condensed into a bite-sized list.

• Image format: To align with your Ad format, i.e., photo, video, stories, messenger, carousel, slideshow, collection, or playables, your image format should be best suited for your campaign. For instance, a carousel or slideshow would work better if you have various products to showcase.
• People: More accurately, happy people in images convert well. These images give a sense of comfort to the viewer and confidence in the product. Once you have these two emotional connections, your ad image will resonate with the viewer enough to warrant action by them.
• Text and color: If you use image ads in the 'right-hand column,' your image size will be smaller, so adding too much text over the image would look too busy. Similarly, using text color that does not contrast well will fade your message. The color theory of your images should align with the emotion you want to extract from the viewer.
• Image quality: The first part of quality is the resolution; use high-resolution images so that clarity is never an issue. Next, the image must be relative to the ad and relevant to the action you want the viewer to take. If you want to sell, show your product; if you are looking for a lead, show someone happy with their choice.

6. Use Videos When Possible

Videos form a big part of advertising today. Some studies claim that video ads perform better than image ads by anywhere from 30% to 50%. This data shows that users prefer watching their content over reading or viewing an image. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your video ads:

• Short and simple: Keep your videos short and to the point, and show the most significant unique selling point (USP) you have. You have a few seconds (the consensus is 3 seconds, to be precise) with your video to make an impression; the introduction must be innovative and engaging.
• Use text wisely: From subtitles to text overlays, using textual content in a video is vital to accentuate your video's message. Remember, some people may be watching on low volume or even muted; this way, your message still gets communicated.
• Vertical: Since mobile is the no.1 method through which people get on Facebook, vertical video format should be the de-facto format in which you create your ad.
• Upload to Facebook: Do not post a video you uploaded to YouTube to advertise with; instead, upload it to Facebook. Since it will be a native ad, the platform won't marginalize its priority. You can always upload it separately to any other platform as well.

7. Research Your Competition

Your competition has been doing what you've been planning to do; they have already done A/B tests, market research, and tested ad copy, too. That's not to say that you will succeed with what they have done; quite the opposite. People are quick enough to relate when they have seen something before.

Rather than mimicking them, you should research your competition to:

• Understand your market: Your competitors have their Facebook pages; visit them. See what customers are doing on it. Is there engagement, or are their clients sharing stories? They could even be using it as a support center. These interactions give you an idea of what people in your product sphere are used to receiving and will enable you to understand how to drive marketing for your product.
• Clear objectives: We read about the objective types Facebook allows you to advertise with. Your competitors are already servicing customers using those objectives. It gives you an idea of approaching the market with your product.
• Opposites: Your competitors may have just stuck with what they believe is working without considering optimization. Identifying this is possible by looking at their page history. Is the marketing message the same? Have they done anything differently in tune with trends? This research can reveal the untapped potential to maximize your Facebook campaign.

8. Customer Profiles

The most important strategy is to create your customer profile. Building your ideal customer profile can help you tap Facebook's immense granularity. Demographics can include location, age, gender, education level, relationship status, and household income, among many other features of your perfect customer. Some strategies that can help along the way in this aspect are:

• Why are you seeing this ad?: Ever wonder why you are seeing a particular ad on Facebook? When you click the three dots on the top right of a sponsored post, you will see a popup (like the image above) with a link to click and check why you see this ad. It will show you the demographic reasons why. This association is a great tool to understand the reasons for some advertisements on Facebook, how to use the same system to target your product for potential sales and leads, and, of course, build a customer profile.
• Custom Audiences: A Custom Audience is an ad targeting option that lets you tailor your ad to people who like your page, have visited your website, used your app, are on your customer list, and have engaged with your profiles and content. You would be retargeting people who have already shown an interest in you. That interest came about because they may have visited your page or website earlier, or a friend of theirs either liked your page or bought something from you. This correlation means your customer profiling is working!
• Browse the library: Facebook stores the ads running on its platform and makes them available via the Ads Library. You can search all the ads running across Meta technologies and find details such as who paid for them and when they ran. The library is a fantastic tool for seeing current advertisements from your industry on the platform. You can search by keyword or company name.

The potential offered by Facebook enables businesses to tap into the immense possibilities of advertising on the platform.

By understanding audience behavior, refining ad placement, and crafting captivating visuals, companies can create campaigns tailored to user preferences. This approach fosters engagement, conversions, and long-term brand success in the competitive digital landscape.

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* (source - datareportal)