Facebook Exchange
Source: AdExchanger.com

Back in  June 2012, Facebook announced the debut of their Ad Exchange. What does this mean for your business?

Think of the Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX) as a way for business owners to retarget and follow up with prospects when they are surfing around on Facebook. For example, a prospect may visit your website, read all about your product or service, and then leave because the timing isn’t right to contact your business.

And if your prospect is one of the 955 million active Facebook users, then she will probably end up browsing facebook.com within a few hours or days.  Now, with the introduction of FBX, you can laser target your ads to display only to prospects who have already visited your website.

(For more info about how to use retargeting on Google AdWords, read How to Bring Prospects Back Using AdWords Remarketing.)

This is pretty exciting and I just started testing ads for one of my private clients this past month.  So far, the results look promising.

 

How to Use the Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX)

At this time, there are only a few advertising platforms that have access to FBX.  So if you want to test this out you’ll need to create an account on one of the following: adRoll, AppNexus, DataXu, MediaMath, TellApart, TheTradeDesk, Triggit, or Turn.

To get started, here are a few strategies you may want to test to bring prospects back to your website:

  1. Special Facebook promotion. Reward your prospect with a special offer exclusively for Facebook users.
  2. Testimonial or endorsement.  Create an ad that is a testimonial or endorsement for your business.  Facebook is all about sharing so your prospect will be more likely to read and respond to this type of ad.
  3. Reminder.  Your prospect is busy so it’s possible she got distracted and simply forgot about the problem she’s trying to solve.  For example, if you’re an appliance repair business, then create an ad that says, “Did you fix your appliance yet?”

 

Since the prospect has already displayed intent to buy your product or service, you can craft an ad campaign that resonates and converts more than a standard Facebook ad.  There really are countless different ways to capture attention and bring lost prospects back so you can turn them into sales.

If you’re already testing FBX, then please post a comment below to share your campaign performance so far.