[su_heading style=”default” size=”16″ align=”left” margin=”20″]To Facebook or Not – that is no longer the question. The question is, are you using Power Editor or not?[/su_heading]
Take it as a given, you need to be on Facebook and you need to be marketing there, i.e. spending money, not just posting. You also need to be split testing.
Like it or not, Facebook is here to stay. By a long mile, it is the biggest and most advanced of the social media platforms. Moreover, Facebook is no longer free. The reality is that to benefit from Facebook’s very powerful platform you need to cough-up. In short, you have to pay to play.
Over the last number of months we have been running a number of Facebook advertising campaigns for clients. Here’s what we’ve learnt and our advice.
1) Advertisers need to move budget out of Google AdWords and into Facebook advertising. The sooner you do this the better. Soon enough the penny will drop for everyone. Get in there first.
2) In our view Facebook Advertising, when executed using Power Editor, is more powerful than Google AdWords.
3) Why is Facebook advertising more powerful than AdWords? Simple, Facebook knows more about its users than Google 
does. Think about it, Facebook knows where you live, who you like, who your friends are, your age, interests, education, what you do, what you ate yesterday etc. What’s more, they know how to use this information.
4) Admittedly Google is trying to catch up with Google+, but they have a long way to go. What’s more Google+ is unintuitive, unpopular with too many conflicting user profiles. Google needs to sort out its multiple profile policy.
5) How exactly is Facebook advertising better than Google AdWords? Well, did you know that Facebook has its own version of the Google AdWords Remarketing product?
Remarketing allows an advertiser to follow a user around the web and re-advertise to them again and again, a tool that is particularly useful for more expensive, longer lead time purchases.
Facebook does this using pixels, or small pieces of code that you can place on your website, and then track a user as they move from your website to Facebook. Facebook calls this Facebook Exchange, or FBX. It’s one of our favourite Facebook advertising products. A potential customer is a better advertising target if you can advertise to them immediately after they have visited your website. In marketing parlance, they are a warm lead. FBX is so powerful and has so many other uses it’s worth a blog post by itself and is something we will return to another time in the TravelMedia.ie blog.
6) Stop using the Boost Post button. You are throwing money away. It’s a simple vanity buy. You are buying views with no metrics or analysis. You should always use Power Editor when advertising on Facebook.
7) Power Editor. Yes, it’s a little more complicated and clunky than Adverts Manager but as its name suggests, it’s very powerful. What we like most about Power Editor is:
- The ability to split-test multiple ads at the one time. Yes you can do this in Adverts Manager but there aren’t as many placement and demographic options.
- Audience demographics. Target exactly whom you want to advertise to with pinpoint accuracy. Stop spending money advertising to an irrelevant audience.
- Ad placement. Choose exactly where your ad is seen, the mobile newsfeed, all of Facebook, Wi-Fi only, desktop only, etc. Neither the Boost Post button nor Adverts Manager allows you to do this. We now know that 70% of people access their Newsfeed on their mobile device. Power Editor allows you to target only the Mobile Newsfeed. Remember, run multiple ads in the first 24/48 hours and then split test the results for CPC and audience relevancy.
- WCA, or Website Custom Audiences. This is one of best new products that Facebook has recently introduced and it’s amazingly under-utilised. In short WCA allows you to choose exactly whom you target, within your own customer database. For example, you could choose to target a very specific advert to customers who opened your newsletter in the last 24 hours, and then another advert to customers who signed up to your newsletter in the last week. From the campaigns we have run recently this is a very powerful tool, especially when targeting users within the last 24 hours since their last touch point or brand interaction.
Conversion Tracking and Lookalike Audiences are two other recent Facebook advertising products that we are fans of and are testing weekly. We’ll deal with these in another blog post.
Happy split testing.
If you are interested in learning more about advanced Facebook marketing, then please contact a member of the TravelMedia.ie team.