July 1, 2016

The 7 Major Types of Facebook Ad Campaigns

When you are thinking about your Social advertising strategy it’s important to understand the mechanics of the different types of ads at your disposal. Facebook’s ever expanding arsenal of ad products is great because it gives advertisers a choice in the way they reach their targeted audience. But without a proper understanding of how each ad ultimately works and you may be misusing the platform.

1. Video Views: Just like Pre-Roll Facebook Video Views are a great way to get a video message in front of a targeted audience. You can also build any Video View campaign to gear towards website referral and build website referral campaigns to include video. You can also push your Video View campaign into Instagram which is a big plus. Negatives: About 85% of Video Views on Facebook are still happening without sound. Most of our ads are built with closed captioning to combat the fact that Facebook Video’s fire without sound. Also you are charged for a Video View even when it is far from a completed view.

2. Website Referral: Website referral ads can be static images or video content with a goal of delivering customers to a message relevant landing page on your website. If your audience is well aligned with your message (think a previous customer or a specific product) than website referral campaigns utilizing static images can be quite effective.

3. Lead Ads: When lead ads were introduced I could hear the entire retail realm cackle with excitement (especially those in higher end industries such as real estate and automotive). The proper way to look at lead ads is like that of a hand-raiser. Remember when someone engages with your ad it is because you put an appealing proposition in front of them. Social is unlike paid search in that you are pulling people into the shopping funnel. A new product launch would be an excellent event for a lead ad. Customers could express interest in the hope of additional information being made at a different time. Negatives: When you build out a lead ad campaign you identify specific data sets that you would like when the customer expresses interest in your offer or special. The more data you ask for the lower the likelihood that a customer will fully engage with a lead ad. Once the customer confirms their interest and the data transfer, information than transfers into your Facebook page and is downloadable into excel. Another big downside of Facebook lead ads is the lack of any real integration with CRM’s outside of Sales Force.

4. Canvas Ads: On the surface canvas ads are flexible and interactive. They have the potential to be beautiful BUT they do have a downside. Negatives:  Canvas ads only work inside of mobile platforms and and if your goal is website referral you are adding an extra click to deliver your customer to your landing content. What we have seen in the early goings is that while Canvas ads can accomplish a variety of goals in execution it will be at a higher cost than other more seamless campaign structures.

5. Claim Offers: Outside of Fan Generation and General Post Promotion, Claim Offers were Facebook’s original type of advertising. Like an offer on Groupon the customer “claims” the offer by clicking on it and is e-mailed the full offer details and disclaimer that can be printed and presented like a coupon. I still love claim offers from the standpoint of it putting your audience in the most control.

6. General Content Promotion: If you are organically posting on Facebook these days (without promotion) you know what we have known for a long time. It’s not working. In the past you could use a 10-15% benchmark of Facebook followers that see a post impression. That number had dwindled for business on Facebook and in most cases is between 2-4%.

7. Promote Your Page (Fan Generation): Before Facebook’s ad platform matured the “name of the game” outside of general content promotion was fan generation. Back when organic posting still mattered a post that garnered quick engagement could easily gain traction amongst your followers (without promotion). The more followers you had on Facebook in essence the more people to see your content which was especially positive if your audience was relevant to your brand (and likely a customer). With custom audiences, 3rd party data and the ability to speak directly to your own database we have cut out the middleman and now speak directly to custom audiences without worry if  they want to actually “follow” your Facebook page or not. Negatives: Fan Generation is not a noble pursuit in the modern era of Facebook marketing. You will still grow followers and fans as fans of your brand are delivered your targeted sponsored content.