Facebook Advertising Is Good For Your Business

1,230,000,000.

That’s how many active daily users are on Facebook.

Digital marketing has drastically changed over the last decade. Ten years ago, Facebook had just switched from being a platform reserved for college students to a platform that everyone could access. The profile pages looked completely different and “Newsfeeds” and “Timelines” didn’t exist.

Fast-forward to today. Not only does Facebook now use algorithms to filter what they think you’ll find most interesting, they also feature opportunities for businesses to use the platform as a way to advertise to users.

If you’re still unsure about why investing in Facebook Ads is a good place to spend your marketing dollars, read below for the four main reasons they can be a smart investment for your business.

1. Everyone is on Facebook

With 1.23 billion daily users and 1.86 billion monthly users, Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world. Which means that Facebook Advertising creates an extremely valuable opportunity for businesses to get in front of prospective clients who are on Facebook.

While other social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat have gained popularity over the years, Facebook is still the king when it comes to social media. In fact, Facebook has more than double the amount of adult online users than any of the other platforms.

The other key thing to consider about Facebook users is that they span across all age groups. While the most popular age group on Facebook is 18-29 year olds with an 88% user rate, the drop off is minimal for older age groups.

In 2016, 84% of 30-40 year-olds and 72% of 50-64 year-olds used Facebook. Even the 65+ age group still came in at 62% usership.

The bottom line is any type of customer you might want to attract is on Facebook. Which means you can harness its popularity for your advertising.

2. Facebook Ads Can Be Laser Targeted

The challenge with having access to so many users is making sure your ads get in front of your target customers.

Luckily, Facebook advertising allows you to be highly targeted with the audience your ad will be in front of. You can use the following targeting options:

Demographics that can be broken down by age, gender, geographical location, etc.
Interests based on what the user likes, shares, clicks on, comments on, as well as the apps he/she uses
Behaviors based on activity on Facebook, as well as 3rd party partner data from Acxiom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. This includes purchase activity, device usage, and travel preferences.
Key pages visited on your website (aka retargeting)
Lists of email subscribers or customers in your database

You can even ask Facebook to find other similar users, called Lookalike audiences, after you create an audience using the options above.

The specificity of Facebook’s targeting capabilities paired with the amount of information they can gather on their user’s interests makes it a great option for advertising.

3. With Facebook Ads You Can Set Clear Goals

There are two general types of Facebook Ads you can run and each type achieves a different goal for your business.

With Engagement Ads, the goal of your campaign is to engage your audience by encouraging them to take action and interact with your post. The focus of these ads is to help get information out about your business and grow and nurture your audience. This also helps you learn about the messaging and content your audience connects with and can inform the future ads you create. With these posts, you may not even realize they are an ad at first because they’re meant to blend in with the typical organic posts you interact with.

With Direct Response Ads the goal of your campaign is about driving leads and sales. These ads will have an offer and a call to action to “sign up” or “call now” or “click here.” The offer and call to action are two critical components to successful direct response advertising. These are great if you’re trying to sell a specific product or offer a new deal.

First, determine why you’re running the ad campaign (exposure vs. response) and then you can use Facebook’s goal setting options to ensure you achieve that goal.

4. Facebook Ads are Easy to Track

Tracking the success of any ad campaign is extremely important. It allows you to measure the number of leads and sales generated directly from your Facebook ad campaign.

The process to set up Facebook conversion tracking is simple and similar to other ad networks.

The first step is copying your unique tracking pixel and adding that to every single page of your website.

Once that’s complete, you have two options for tracking conversions:

Track custom conversions using a webpage URL. For example, if you want to track demo sign ups, then you would copy the demo sign up thank you page URL and tell Facebook to track that page as a conversion.
Event tracking using Event codes. This is a bit technical because you’ll need to copy a line of JavaScript and paste it at the end of the pixel code (before the </script>) on the webpage you want to track. For example, if you want to track demo sign ups, then you would copy the Lead Event code, which “fbq(‘track’, ‘Lead’);” Then you would paste that code right before the </script> of your pixel code on the demo sign up thank you page.

If those steps seem advanced, then there’s also the option to email the code and directions to your developer. For most websites, this should be an easy, pain-free process. :)