Globally, 2 billion people access Facebook every month and 1.32 billion people use it every day (Facebook data, Jul 2017). There are more than 400 million daily active people on Instagram (Facebook data, Feb 2017) and 75% of Instagrammers say they take action after being inspired by a post on Instagram (Instagram User Survey, Mar 2017). More than one billion people see Facebook Lead Ads through Audience Network every month (Facebook data, Jan 2017).
FACEBOOK LEAD ADS STEPS
- Identify your business goals.
- Implement Facebook pixel and/or SDK.
- Choose a buying type.
- Map your business goal of getting leads to the best Facebook ad objective, which is lead generation.
- Identify your target audiences and how you’ll reach them.
- Select from available placements and formats.
- Measure campaign performance across devices and platforms.
If your business goal is to acquire new customers you can use the Lead Generation objective. By answering the questions of your business goals, audience, and how you will measure and track results, you will define your overall strategy and help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. These campaigns will have a range across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network, alongside other marketing channels. Sales outcomes help you answer questions like: Did the ads drive your business outcomes? Did they contribute to ROI? Did the results of the ad in sales, leads or app install?
Who are the people in my target audiences? How do I segment my audience? What types of data and insights do I have about them? What are my key focus markets right now and in the future? Who manages my CRM database? How do I use my database for marketing purposes today? What offline data do I use for targeting in other campaigns?
Implement the Facebook pixel and/or SDK
The best audience consists of people who already know your brand such as people who visit your website, have installed and launched your mobile app or have purchased your products or services. The pixel and SDK are pieces of code for your website and mobile app, respectively, that enable you to measure, optimize and build audiences for your Facebook Lead Ad campaign. You don’t need to implement both, but the pixel and SDK can work better together so you can measure cross-device behavior. Read more about how to implement Facebook Pixel and/or SDK. The pixel and SDK each allow you to:
- Optimize delivery to people likely to take action. Ensure your ads are seen by people most likely to take the action you want. For example, making a purchase or fill out a form.
- Automatically build audiences to reach again after they’ve visited your site. Create Custom Audiences so you can retarget people who take specific actions on your website. For example, visiting a product page and automatically sending relevant ads to them.
- Measure cross-device conversions before they take action. For example, making a purchase.
Choose A Buying Type
The buying type you choose is how you’ll pay for and target your ads. Facebook offers three options: auction, reach and frequency, and TRP Buying. Reach and frequency is useful for brand advertisers, but for businesses like you who are focused on driving actions, we won’t go over reach and frequency in this course. This is different from a traditional auction because the winner isn’t the ad with the highest monetary bid, but the ad that creates the most overall value. The ad that wins an auction and gets shown is the one with the highest total value. The total value isn’t how much an advertiser is willing to pay us to show their ad but a combination of the following three factors:
Bid the maximum you’re willing to pay, create compelling ads and target them to the right audience. This allows us to show your ad more, which allows us to learn more about your ad and its audience. In turn leading to more efficient and effective delivery.
Automatic Bidding
Automatic bidding is when the Facebook ad auction system will adjust your bid to generate the most desired actions possible with your budget. If you don’t have a specific value in mind for the result you’re optimizing for, consider using automatic bidding. Use average cost bidding if you care more about maximizing delivery and conversion volume within an average cost threshold. You should use maximum cost bidding if you care more about every result you’re optimizing for costing no more than a given amount.
Manual bidding
Manual bidding is when you decide on the value of the desired action. Start with a bid that represents how much you value the action you’re optimizing for. Lower bids may reduce the number of people in your target audience who see your ad. For example, if you’re optimizing for website conversions or mobile app installs and want to specify a manual bid, you can choose to set an “average” bid or a “max” bid.
TRP Buying
For video ads, TV buyers can extend and complement TV campaigns by buying Target Rating Points (TRPs) on Facebook and Instagram. It gives you predictable delivery of TRPs that are verified on-target by Nielsen.* TRPs measure impressions as a percentage of the target population for an advertising campaign and are a core aspect of how TV ads are purchased and measured. TV buyers can use this planning and buying option to purchase Facebook and Instagram video in a simple and predictable way. This strategy guarantees delivery against Nielsen demographic audiences. Available for ads targeted to Nielsen markets in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Philippines, Thailand, United Kingdom, and the United States.
DEFINING YOUR FACEBOOK AUDIENCE
Customer acquisition should use the following objectives:
- Lead Generation
- Conversions
- App Installs
Core Audience: Create a target audience based on the information people share with Facebook — their location, demographics, interests, and behaviors. Core Audiences help you reach a broad audience with interests relevant to your business goals.
Custom Audiences: Enable you to connect with your most valuable audiences. It’s a key targeting capability to reach existing customers and prospective customers. A variety of data sources can be used to power Custom Audiences: CRM data, Facebook pixel or Facebook SDK. Visitors of specific pages to include Segment audiences by pages visited, time spent, a frequency of their visits, device used and more.
Lookalike Audiences: Allow you to reach new people who share similar characteristics with customers who’ve expressed interest in your business. You do this by selecting a seed audience (ex: Custom Audience from your website), the country or region for your lookalike audience, and audience size.
Targeting on Instagram
Instagram’s total audience is smaller than Facebook’s. Start with broad targeting and refine over time as you learn which audiences convert. Start with a 5 or 10% lookalike audience and narrow down to 1% as the system learns to deliver the outcomes you care about. You can see if any two audiences you’re using are overlapping by using our Audience Overlap tool. Consolidate your overlapping ad sets. If some ad sets are targeting very similar audiences, you could see better results by consolidating them into one with a larger budget.
Improve your ad’s relevance score
Your relevance score estimates how well your ad is resonating with the people you want to reach. If your ad doesn’t get a lot of positive feedback (ex: people clicking on your ad) or gets negative feedback (ex: people hiding your ad), you’ll see a low relevance score. This means delivery may be adversely affected. When your ad’s relevance score is low, it’s less likely to be shown to your target audience when compared to ads from other advertisers. Adjust your targeting so your ads reach the right audience. Refine your targeting by taking advantage of location, age, gender, interest and/or behavior-based targeting to ensure each ad set has a specific, distinct audience. You can also try creating separate Custom Audiences or lookalike audiences for each ad set. You can find relevance scores in Ads Manager at the ad level. Relevance scores for campaigns and ad sets aren’t available.
When you see a video ad in your Facebook News Feed, you’re seeing an ad’s placement (ex: Facebook News Feed) and format (ex: video). Placements are where your ads will appear and formats are how your ads will appear. There are a variety of placements available across the Facebook family of apps and services:
- Feeds (mobile and desktop)
- Instant Articles (mobile only)
- In-Stream Videos (mobile and desktop)
- Right Column (desktop only)
- Suggested Videos (mobile and desktop)
- Feed (mobile only)
- Stories (mobile only)
Audience Network
- Native, Banner and Interstitial (mobile only)
- In-Stream Videos (mobile, desktop, and Connected TV)
- Rewarded Videos (mobile only)
Messenger
- Home (mobile only)
- Sponsored Messages (mobile only)
For example, if you choose the Lead Generation objective, you can deliver ads across Facebook and Instagram. When possible, select all eligible placements for more opportunities to reach your audience across platforms and devices to optimize the delivery of the ads according to your objective and budget. This will help drive more of your desired outcome with the same ad set budget.
Formats and creative:
Creative is the type of media you’ll use in your ad, as the specific video file or image. Similar to how your objective determines available placements, it also determines your available ad formats:
Check out our guidance video to help you through these processes! Read more about how to implement Facebook Pixel and/or SDK.