Facebook advertising can be tricky. With so many targeting options and so much data to analyze, for the uninitiated it can be a difficult puzzle to solve. Luckily there are a few things to make your journey into the advertising and marketing business a little easier.
Facebook offers a number of preloaded and selectable behaviours to target. For example, if you’re designing a campaign for a travel company you may want to target people who have recently used a travel app. And guess what, Facebook allows you to do just that. Combine this with broader targeting and you have the potential to reach an audience you know is already interested in escaping on a jet plane, not sure of when they will return.
Try running your ads in specific hours of the day. It is no secret that there are peak hours of activity when it comes to Facebook. Between the hours of 4-11 PM traffic steadily increases. Now think about how you are spending your budget. Would you like to be spending money in the hours of the day that aren’t active? Not only will your carefully constructed campaigns reach fewer eyes, they are also less likely to be clicked on. Next time you are setting up the campaign length check the option to chose the hours in which your ad will run. Targeting different time zones? Don’t worry about it, Facebook accounts for that shift accordingly, only delivering your ads in the hours specified in each time zone.
Data. Collect all your data. Look at it, love it, break up angrily with it, and get back together. You’re going to have that sort of love-hate relationship with the piles of data that stream in off your Facebook ads. The only advantage is, if you know what you’re doing, they can be easier to read than your significant other. It isn’t a quick process, it will take time, but once you have an understanding of what the data is saying you can use it to better position future ads.
These are only a few ideas for how to optimize your Facebook campaigns, there are many more, and much more detailed outlines you can find elsewhere online as well, but these should get you thinking. Here’s to better ads!
