This blog post was written by Taia Veren, C Street account executive.
It’s a misconception to think you need thousands of dollars to make an advertising impact on Facebook, and while the ease of boosting posts is tempting, there might just be a better, more effective option out there for businesses entering the pay-to-play arena of social media advertising.
Boosting posts is fairly easy, but it doesn’t allow for the most effective options when choosing details about the post and targeting audiences. Facebook changed its algorithm awhile back to push the posts of a user’s friends and families to the top of their newsfeed. This makes it very hard for business pages to get their posts seen organically. These days, if you want your content seen on social media, you’ll have to invest in it. Since this is the case, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of the money you’re spending.
There’s another option for advertising on Facebook called the Facebook Ads Manager. It’s a free ads management tool by Facebook that allows more precise ad options to be chosen by the user and puts the user in more control than with boosting posts. You can get to the manager by clicking the drop-down arrow in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page and clicking ‘Create Ads.’ From there, you can start to see all the different considerations you can choose for your ad.
The Facebook Ads Manager is more in-depth and may seem a bit more complicated than the simple ‘boost’ button, but it does give you more for your money. One of the most important features the Ads Manager offers is a pixel. The Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that has a code you can put on your website. This allows you to track website visitors and then retarget those users with Facebook ads in the future. You can also see what your website visitors are doing on your site when they navigate it.
With the Ads manager, you can choose your objective: awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, conversions and more. You can also track and follow your campaigns as they progress and make changes accordingly. There is also the placement options feature where you can pick where your ads are shown. With boosted posts, Facebook gets to pick where your ads are shown (desktop, mobile, Instagram, articles, etc.)
The Ads Manager offers businesses a very useful tool used for branching out to reach a wider audience. It’s called creating Lookalike audiences. It’s one of the best features the manager has to offer businesses. Once you create your custom audiences, it helps find potential audience members for you based off web engagement, email lists and Facebook engagement. It’s all about finding the right people to see your posts, so by letting Facebook analyze the data, it can find your audience for you.
The Ads Manager offers you the option to turn on and turn off your ads on a schedule to hit peak traffic times instead of just running it nonstop like a boosted ad. Another feature is creating very customized audiences. Instead of just using age, gender, geographic location and other similar options to target audiences, you can, for example, target people who have read a certain blog or viewed a certain landing page on your website. This allows you to see what people are most interested in and target them based off those more narrowed conditions.
Overall, if the Ads Manager seems overwhelming, it’s okay to start with boosting posts and then transition to the Ads Manager when you feel comfortable. Boosting is still a good option, and it has delivered results for many businesses. Whichever option you choose, an important thing to keep in mind is your focus or objective. Any ad or boosted post will have the best results when it includes a call to action. This might be as simple as ‘Learn More’ or ‘Contact Us.’ Are you ready to enter the arena of paid ads? Experiment with Facebook advertising options to see what works best for your brand.
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