The Dos and Don’ts of Facebook Advertising

Facebook continues to be a main staple of digital marketing strategy. While it can help businesses connect easier with potential customers and help businesses easily earn more traffic and greater brand impressions, it’s important to follow the best practices for the largest return on your advertising investment. Here are the key things to keep in mind when setting up an ad campaign.

Dos:

• Use Lookalike Audience: The Lookalike Audience segmentation that Facebook advertising offers helps businesses find new customers by matching similar data from their existing audiences, based on page likes, email lists, and more. This helps target your advertising against those criteria that will likely match the background, interests, and needs of your current customers.
  
• A/B test: Your ad campaign should be as optimized as possible to reach the most receptive and relevant audience and drive the highest clicks and conversions. One of the most important best practices is to test if a slightly different approach might work better with audiences. For instance, using a different image for the same copy and seeing which one drives more clicks can help you get an understanding of what will be most engaging to your audience so you can make changes as necessary.
  
• Use ads to retarget your audience: Facebook helps you not just appear to customers who are most likely to be interested in your product or service, but also target those who’ve engaged with your content in the past and earn back their business. Facebook Pixel helps you track user activity on your website so you serve those consumers with ads that might help remind them of your brand and drive them back.

Don’ts:

• Target too broad an audience: Facebook gives accounts the ability to target audiences pretty specifically. You can segment audiences by demographics like age, income, location, interests, and other criteria like if users are using a mobile device or desktop computer. The more specific you are in setting your ad audience parameters, the more likely you are to get your product in front of the most relevant people. Use your target customer personas to decide which ad segmentation rules to apply.
  
• Use too much text: You don’t want to ignore the rules around how much space text can take up on an image or how many characters can appear in the copy section of the ad. As a rule, text in image is limited to 125 characters and can’t be more than 20% of your ad image. Ad copy is usually limited to 90 characters and headlines at 45 characters.
  
• Ignore restrictions: Facebook has clear guidelines about what is and isn’t acceptable for advertising. Among the things that brands can’t advertise for includes anything illegal, tobacco related products, weapons, adult-related materials, and over a dozen more products and categories. It’s important to review their prohibited and restricted content list before begging the ad campaign creation process.
  
• Use nonexistent functionality: Don’t include any checkboxes, play buttons, or other images that don’t work or send users to related content.

You can get familiar with the full set of Facebook ad rules found on their site here.

Facebook advertising is an important component to your ecommerce business and overall digital marketing strategy, and getting it right is crucial to driving success. To learn more about Facebook ad best practices, contact our team of experts today.