Facebook Ad Tactics for Search Marketers

With more than 500 million unique users, Facebook is a great opportunity for advertisers. With a self-serve image and text-based ads platform, it’s fairly easy to use. In addition, it has more potential for social engagements through interest and profile targeting, comments, real time feed and more.

If you are familiar with Google AdWords, then you definitely don’t want to miss out on Facebook! Comparing to Google, Facebook can average more impressions and lower average CPC.

Through the social interactions such as “liking a comment/post,” marketers are using more creative ways to provide consumers incentives to “like” and engage businesses pages. Therefore, it gets more and more crucial to catch up on some best practices for Facebook Ads and convert the social engagement to actual revenue!

1. Define the goals and provide incentives based on the goals. For example, if you are looking for more emails to update your database, then you can offer free downloads in exchange for the user’s email address.
2. Target connections and their friends (retargeting people who already know your brand such as friends’ friends).
3. Use top keywords to find interests.
4. Segment your audience. Start with high level, and then explore to sub segment. Based on the performance, shift budget to campaigns that are working.
5. Test image before Ad copy: images are the key driver for click through rates. Draw attention to ads with contrasting colors and link images to the audience to increase relevance.
6. Keep Ad fresh to avoid Ad fatigue by rotating Ad copy and images.
7. Maintain the FB experience. Create links within the Facebook environment. For a Facebook landing page, it’s always good to integrate a “call to action” and more social features on the page such as video, comments and share. And always remember to place “like” button on the top.
8. Remember social influences search. Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 50% more likely to click on paid ads.

As for now, Facebook does not have any “quality scores” for advertisers to follow. However, the CPC is defined by two main factors: click though rate and user feedback. Facebook is watching closely on user experience and feedback. Therefore, continuous testjng is the key to success. It’s also a good idea to check Google Adwords and see how and why the ads are converting, and apply the winning keywords on the Facebook campaigns.

Speakers:
Matt Lawson, VP of marketing, Marin Software
Justin Merickel, VP, Marketing and New Product Development, Efficient Frontier
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
John Yi, Strategic Program Manager, Marketing APIs, Facebook

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Contributed by: Alice Lee, e-Strategist, Milestone Internet Marketing