Ads on Facebook are a powerful digital marketing tool: here are how they work and the costs.
Facebook initially started as an entertainment platform where people could meet and re-meet virtually, exchange opinions and share their passions. In a few years, this social network has transformed into one of the most powerful digital marketing tools, and many companies worldwide use it to implement their businesses.
But what is the link between Facebook and advertising? This social network provides people who own a professional page with a paid advertising tool that allows them to expand the visibility of the brand and reach a series of marketing objectives: in this guide; you can understand what Facebook ads are, to which what they are used for, how much does it cost to invest in this type of advertising and how to do it consciously and efficiently.
Facebook Ads: What they are and what they are based on
Facebook has a very high amount of user traffic, which is why it is an excellent platform on which to “find” potential customers. The Facebook Ads, which are the technical term of insertions, are personalized ads targeted to a potentially exciting target to a given product or service.
With this ad system you can promote many events, such as your fanpage and its content, your website or blog, an event, a video, an application or products from the catalog.
Unlike Google’s paid advertisements, they show ads to people who may be interested in the product or service promoted by a company precisely because these users, through their actions on the platform, have shown Facebook that they have similar interests to those of the company. company that has invested in advertising.
Another aspect that Facebook has turned into a real success is social proof: people are more likely to trust a company if their contacts already follow or buy it. Facebook knows how to recognize this mechanism well and therefore tends to show the faces and names of people who have already liked the products or services of a given company so that people feel more predisposed to click on the ad.
Facebook Ads: What they are for
Facebook Ads are usually included in a global web marketing plan so that all the tools and all the platforms can converge towards the same goal.
This type of activity, if carried out professionally and with the support of a capable professional, can lead to the achievement of a series of results:
- Investing in brand awareness, implementing brand visibility;
- Intercept the latent demand that is composed of customers who do not know your brand but are potentially interested in the product or service you offer;
- Cultivate new leads, then collect new contacts that are profiled on your business and that can be loyal through a series of actions through email marketing etc.;
- Bring targeted traffic to your website, whether it’s a blog or e-commerce. This aspect is positive both for you that you can increase the number of visits to the site and for the people who can find content and products/services that reflect their interests on the platform;
- Promote and sell the products on your Facebook catalogue;
- Stimulate the interactions of people under your content to create a loyal community and real brand ambassadors.
Facebook Ads how they work
Creating high- performance and effective Facebook ads is not easy: it is advisable to contact a social media specialist who already has experience with the Facebook Business Manager tool and various campaigns.
To launch an advertisement, there are 3 phases: the campaign, the group of publicity, the ad.
Creating a campaign is the first phase, the fastest one, and consists of choosing the objective that varies according to the company’s needs that want to get a promotion. There are three categories of goals:
- Notoriety, with brand awareness and coverage;
- Consideration, with traffic, interaction, app installations, video views, generation of contacts and messages;
- Conversion, with conversions, sale of products in the catalogue and traffic at the point of purchase.
After identifying the goal, you need to set up your ad group, and there are many options to choose from and different budgets to invest in. After selecting the types of positioning, we proceed with creating the kind of audience that must view the ads: also, in this case, there are many alternatives, more or less complex, to choose from. Finally, there are the actual advertisements in which we deal with the creativity composed of copy, image and CTA.
How do you define the cost of Facebook Ads?
The first important thing to distinguish is the budget to invest directly on the Facebook platform to start the sponsorship campaigns and the store dedicated to the professional or agency that takes care of setting up all this work. Investing in Facebook Ads means choosing a capable and competent person who takes care of the advertising strategy, identifying investment objectives and budgets, the creativity to be created, the monitoring and analysis activities to understand if the results achieved are favourable or not.
After this preamble, let’s get into the specifics: there are many variables to define how much Facebook Ads cost, but two, in particular, are the offer and the budget. The budget is the total amount that a company is willing to spend on an advertising campaign: Facebook offers two types of accounts: daily and lifetime. On the other hand, your bid is the amount you are willing to spend to get the placement of an ad. If the request is not chosen, Facebook automatically calculates one based on the dedicated budget and the timing of the duration of the campaign.
The factors that influence the cost of Facebook Sds
Before defining the cost of Facebook ads, it is important to consider what are some determining factors:
- The specificity of the reference target. If you target a particularly sought-after audience, the costs of your Facebook advertising will be higher;
- The chosen marketing objective has an important influence on the cost of the sponsorship campaign. In general, making sales and collecting leads have a higher price than brand awareness campaigns or blog traffic;
- The presence of more or less established competitors on the platform. Your marketing costs depend on how many competitors you have, how much they are willing to spend and what their campaign-level relevance rates are, so it can be helpful to carry out competitor analysis ;
- The timing of the advertising activity. In some periods of the year, such as Christmas and Black Friday, the advertising budget increases dramatically due to the relationship between supply and demand;
- The relevance score is another critical metric for those who work with Facebook. When users interact with your ad, its relevance score increases; on the contrary, if many users ignore your ad or click on “this ad is not relevant”, your score will decrease. If your ad achieves a high relevance score, it is favoured by the Facebook algorithm and may have a lower cost even for the same placements.
What’s new in Facebook Ads in 2021
2020 was a very intense year for Facebook and everything related to digital sponsorship campaigns, so there is some news to know about the last months. The first is the transition from Business Manager to Business Suite: now the platform allows you to manage both FB and IG from one place with an essential variety of tools. Finally, according to recent tests, Facebook is phasing out the 20% text restriction on sponsored ad images.
Does it make sense to invest in Facebook Ads?
Many companies still wonder today whether it makes sense to invest in Facebook ads. It depends on the business strategies outlined, but Facebook is one of the best performing platforms to have quality digital visibility and destined to grow over time through a competent and consistent digital strategy with the brand.
Thinking of opening a Facebook page and not needing to invest in advertising is anachronistic. The new pages’ organic reach is close to zero, and Facebook is no longer an expensive personal diary but a simple advertising tool.
Those involved in social media marketing know that the organic ranking of the pages is minimal and is continually decreasing: the presence on Facebook today only makes sense if a targeted advertising strategy is planned, otherwise the resources dedicated to producing content risk to be completely wasted.
