If you are looking to advertise on digital platforms you are probably considering advertising on facebook. And if you are, you have probably already done a bunch of facebook advertising research on the internet and are even more confused than when you started.

If you are overwhelmed by  the information overload on the internet and still wondering what is the best way to advertise on facebook, you need to first understand that it is a variable based question.

What that means in simple terms is that the best way to advertise on facebook for one business may be the worst for another.

The specifications of your business determine what  the best way to advertise on Facebook for it would be. 

Types of Facebook Ads 

• Image ads – It is a rectangular image ad with some text on the post feed (Facebook or Instagram) The ad conveys a message about the business nature of any brand.
• Video ads – It is a video ad on all the pages which is automatically played to the user as soon as the page is loaded.
• Lead ads – Lead Generation campaigns streamlines the process for you, with a combination of properties such as Display, Video for promotion.
• Stories ads – Facebook Stories are short user photos or video collections that can be uploaded to the user’s Facebook Story. Stories will be visible for 24 hours.
• Carousel ads – Carousel ads have a number of rectangular images lined next to each other left to right. These can be scrolled on the screen in either direction.

What is Facebook Advertising?

The oldest yet most effective platform when it comes to digital advertising, Facebook advertising has in depth, the personalized targeting options that can help you catapult a brand awareness campaign to greater heights.

A brand that is looking to reach the maximum number of audience? Again, this facebook advertising should be your top choice.

So, when it comes to fulfilling both these objectives of a campaign (awareness and traffic generation), facebook advertising seemed the most fitting for the job.

Facebook Advertising Strategy

The campaign objective is simply your business goal, with facebook advertising strategy what you want to accomplish by running an ad on facebook, and what action you want people to take when they see your ad. 

It’s important to choose the facebook advertising strategy that will optimize your ad placements based on your objective. 

Facebook advertising strategy offers many types of marketing objectives to choose from which generally fall under these 3 categories:  Awareness, Consideration, Conversion. 

Now let’s discuss each of the facebook advertising strategies and the major objectives to have a better understanding. 

1. Brand Awareness– When one wants to increase their brand’s visibility as well as reach out to the audience who are more likely to follow your page. 
2. Reach– When one wants to maximize the reach of their ad to the maximum number of the potential audience. 
3. Traffic– When one wants to drive an audience to one particular designation like the website, app, page, or messenger conversation. 
4. Engagement– When one wants to reach the audience to drive engagement on the ad, such as page shares, likes, post comments, increasing attendance of the event, engage with the offer, etc. 
5. App Installs– When one wants people to install an app. 
6. Video Views– When one wants people to watch the video ads. 

7. Lead Generation– When one wants to collect prospects/leads for the business or brand. 
8. Messages– When one wants to encourage the audience to interact with the business using messenger conversation, WhatsApp number, or Instagram direct. 

Facebook Advertising Targeting Options

• Interest based targeting– Shows ads to people based on the pages they have liked or the content they have followed.
• Behavioural targeting– Shows ads to the users according to their interests or retargets them based on their history. 
• Demographics targeting– Shows ads to the audience based on their age, gender, job title, education and more.

Advantages Of Using Facebook Ads

With more than 2.25 billion monthly active users, Facebook has become a major part of our lives. 

Not only this, but Facebook is also considered as one of the best digital platforms by businesses to reach out to their target audience. It’s believed that 30% of the total digital advertising share is contributed by Facebook Advertising. 

We can’t put enough effort into the fact that how Facebook is playing a vital role in businesses, all types of businesses. It’s been there in the market for a long while, and we know that.

But to make it clearer, let’s disscuss the top 5 advantages of advertising on Facebook: 

1. Facebook Ads are affordable: First thing first, Facebook ads are way more affordable than other popular digital media platforms for advertising like Google, Youtube, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. And majorly, you can start your Facebook ad campaign at a however price you want, even as low as INR 200. The higher your budget the more your reach will be. 

2. Brilliant Targeting options: The targeting options on Facebook to reach out to your targeted audience is incredible. Do you want to reach a middle-aged vegan living in Jaipur who’s in a search of healthy vegan recipes? You got it.  (We will discuss the targeting option in detail)

3. Easier to set up a campaign: Setting up a successful campaign on digital media platforms can be overwhelming. It requires a strategy and a thorough understanding of the publishing tool. But setting up an ad campaign on Facebook is comparatively easier than other platforms especially Google AdWords. Also, you can run the same campaign on Instagram without any additional setup. 

4. Useful Analytics: The proper analysis plays a huge role to run a successful ad campaign. Facebook provides in-depth data about your targeted audience related to your campaign goals. Not only the impressions, but it also gives you other important metrics like likes, comments, page-clicks, CTR, website websites, form views, and many other cohorts to help you make better decisions in real-time. 

5. Various Ad types: Some of the commonly used ad formats across digital platforms are text, image, form, video. But on Facebook, you have more options than that like- lead generation forms, page boost, post-boost, shopping ads, offer ads, and many more. (More on this later)

Types of fb campaign Objectives

The first thing to set up a Facebook ad campaign is to choose your campaign objective. 

Before discussing campaign objectives in detail, let me quickly show you your way till there- 

1. Log in to your ads manager account (Link)
2. Select the campaign tab and click on the green button to create your campaign

Once you click on the “Create” button, the very first thing you will see is a tab to select your campaign objective. 

What exactly is the campaign objective?

The campaign objective is simply your business goal, what you want to accomplish by running an ad, and what action you want people to take when they see your ad. 

It’s important to choose the right campaign objective as Facebook will optimize your ad placements based on your objective. 

Facebook offers 11 types of marketing objectives to choose from which broadly fall under 3 categories-  Awareness, Consideration, Conversion. 

Now let’s discuss each of the marketing objectives to have a better understanding. 

1. Brand Awareness– When you want to maximize your brand’s visibility and reach out to the people who are more likely to follow your page. 

2. Reach– When you want to increase the reach of your ad to the maximum number of your potential audience. 

3. Traffic– When you want to drive people to a particular designation like your website, app, page, or messenger conversation. 

4. Engagement– When you want to reach an audience for driving engagement on your ad, such as page likes, shares, post comments, increase attendance of your event, engage with your offer, etc. 

5. App Installs– When you want people to install your app. 

6. Video Views– When you want people to watch your video ads. 

7. Lead Generation– When you want to collect prospects/leads for your business or brand. 
8. Messages– When you want to encourage people to interact with your business using messenger conversation, WhatsApp number, or Instagram direct. 

9. Conversion– When you want people to take specific actions like purchasing on your website, app, or messenger. 

10. Catalog sales- When you want to show people your products for them to make a purchase, also known as shopping ads. 

11. Store Traffic– When you encourage people to visit your brick and mortar stores. 

Select the objective that most cohesively aligns with your business goals. 

Once you select your marketing objective, you will have a tab from where you can name your campaign, select the pricing type (based on the objective), A/B testing option. 

Click on “Next” from the bottom right corner to proceed further. 
Once you click on the “Next” button, you will get to choose the budget of your campaign and the starting and end date. 

Types of Facebook audience targeting options 

As I’ve mentioned before, Facebook has almost 2.25mn monthly users that’s why it’s inevitable only to target people who would be potentially interested in your product.

Otherwise, if the majority of the audience doesn’t get converted then it’s a waste of your advertising cents. 

Now that Facebook offers a wide range of targeting options, reaching out to your potential audience is a matter of strategy. 

Let’s see how you can create your Facebook audience.

Broadly, Facebook has 3 audience targeting  types: 

• Create a New Audience set 
• Custom Audience
• Lookalike Audience 

Let’s dive deep into each of the targeting options. 

Create a new audience– To create a new audience set, you can apply hundreds of filters from the following categories: 

• Location
• Age 
• Gender 
• Languages 
• Demographics
• Interests 
• Behaviors 
• Connections 

A bit more about each of the categories: 

Location

Location segmentation allows you to include or exclude the people based on their location. 

You have 4 options to define your potential audiences’ location: 

• Target “People living in or recently in this location” to reach people who live in that location or most recent location in the area. 
• Target “People Living in this location” to reach people who live in that particular area. 
• Target “People recently in this location” to rach people whose most recent location is in the area
• Target “People traveling in this location” to reach people whose most recent location is in the area but whose home is at least 125 miles away. 

Then you can add an exact location by typing the name of a country, state, city, town, address, district, or whatever. 

After you’ve entered the location, you get the option to select the exact city itself or select how wide you’d like to target around the city. 

You can select multiple cities by following the same steps. You can also choose to include or exclude each of the cities according to your requirements. 

Age, Gender, Language

These options are self-explanatory. 

• You can choose the age range of your audience by selecting the minimum and maximum age. 

• Select the gender from the option “All, Men, Women”

• You can choose a particular language based on the location or leave it blank (English by default)

Demographics

This is one of the most detailed targeting options in Facebook ads. It helps you refine your potential audience on the bases of the following options (each has many options available on its own): 

• Education 
• Financial 
• Life events 
• Parents 
• Relationship
• Work

Interest 

Interest-based targeting is one of the best targeting options because it allows you to especially target people who are interested in products and topics similar to yours. 

You can type the interest in the search box and suggestion for similar topics, or simply browse through the topics given in the menu. 

Behavior

Behavior based targeting allows you to target an audience on the bases of their purchase history, pages they like, device types, etc. This is also one of the most helpful targeting options to reach your potential customers right when they are more likely to use your service or product. You can also type the behavior in the search box and get suggestions or else choose from the menu. 

Connection 

You can choose to segment your audience based on how they have interacted with your Facebook page, app, or event before.  This can help you narrow down your audience, best for follow up with an audience that already has connections with what you do. 

Here are the options for each-

Facebook pages

• People who like your page
• Friends of people who like your page
• Exclude people who like your page

Apps

• People who used your app
• Friends of people who use your app
• Exclude people who use your app

Events

• People who responded to your event
• Friends of people who responded to your event
• Exclude people who already responded to your event

Custom Audience 

A custom audience is a set of people who have already interacted with your business, perhaps in a form of your visitors or contacts. 

Click on the “Custom Audience” from the “create new” dropdown list in the audience setting. 

A popup will appear with 2 broad segmentations: Use your sources and Use Facebook Sources. 

Let’s discuss each of the different ways separately- 

Website

With this option, you can create an audience based on your website visitors through the conversion pixel you’ve installed on your site. 

Here you have the option to segment the audience based on- 

• all website visitors
• people who visited a specific web page
• or visitors by time spent. 

You also have the option to include or exclude multiple segmentations to create your audience. 

Customer List

The custom audience option allows you to upload your existing customer list directly. This list can have data like email ids, phone numbers, apple Ids, etc. 

Your customer list can have up to 15 different parameters. In addition to uploading your files, you can also integrate your Mailchimp’s list to create your custom audience. 

You can also follow this guide from Facebook to clear your customer list for the better targeting of your ad campaign. 

App Activity 

You can create an audience of people who have launched your app or have taken any particular actions within the app. 

First, you will have to connect your Facebook app and set up app events. Follow this guide to know more about app events on Facebook. 

Offline Activity 

You can create a set of audiences of people who have visited your store, made a call, or have done any other offline activity to interact with your business. 

For this, you will have to set up offline events. Follow this guide to know more about offline events on Facebook. 

Other custom audience segmentation options from “Facebook sources” are pretty self-explanatory.

You can create a custom audience based on how people have interacted with your business through the following related activities: 

• Videos on your page
• Your Instagram account 
• Your lead forms 
• Events 
• Instant Experiences
• Facebook Page 
• Shopping

Lookalike audience 

Facebook Lookalike Audiences let you reach the people who are similar to your existing customer database – making them highly likely to convert as well.

To create a Lookalike Audience, you first need to create a Custom Audience to tell Facebook what type of users you want to reach. Next, select the “Lookalike Audience” from the audience creation menu and select a target country and a percentage (1%-10%) of the targeted country’s Facebook users. The percentage signifies the people most similar to your selected Custom Audience.

Once you have made your audience based on your goals, you can save your audience and ensure in other campaigns later on. 

Types of Facebook ad formats with specifications 

Now that we are done with the business objectives and creating your audience for the Facebook ad campaign, the last and most important step is to select the format of the ad. 

Following are the ad formats available on Facebook: 

1. Facebook Image Ads
2. Facebook Video Ads
3. Facebook Carousel Ads
4. Facebook Right Column Ads 
5. Facebook Collection Ads
6. Facebook Story Ads
7. Facebook Lead Generations Ads
8. Facebook Offer Ads
9. Facebook Messenger Ads
10. Facebook Page Likes Ads

Each of the ad type in detail with their specifications: 

Facebook Image Ads

The bulk of Facebook ads are classic image types as it’s also one of the easiest ad formats to create. You just have to choose an eye-catching image and add some ad copy to it. 

These ads can be used for various objectives like brand awareness, getting more engagement, driving conversions, etc. 

Example: 

Specification: 

• Image size: 1200 x 628, and 1080 x 1080 for 1:1 image
• Image file types: .jpg or .png 
• Text: 125 characters (if there’s no link)
• Headline: 25 characters 
• Link description: 30 characters

Best for:  Generating traffic and leads to your website. 

Tip: Add only 20% text to images if needed, because Facebook tends to reduce the reach of text-filled images. 

After creating your audience, you can move ahead, select your page on which you would want to run your ad and add your creative, URL (if any), headline, description, and final CTA that you want to be displayed to people who will see your ad. 

Facebook Video Ad

Video has grown tremendously over the last few years, and Facebook has also given a lot of importance to video ads. 

Facebook feed video ads are the same as Facebook image ads, but with video instead of images. 

There’s also in-stream video ads which are short-formatted non-skippable pre-roll or mid-roll videos that appear for hardly 5-10secs. 

Video ads can also be used for multiple purposes like image ads. 

Example: 

Specification: 

• Dimension: 600 x 315 (landscape), 600 x 600 (square)
• Formats: .mp4 or .mov
• Max video size: 4GB 
• Max video length: 240 mins 
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Best For: Generating leads and traffic to the website. 

Follow the same step we explained in the Facebook image ad, just upload your video or choose the existing once on your page in the add media option. 

Facebook Carousel Ads

Facebook carousel ads let you add up to 10 images and videos in a single post, where users have to swipe through the carousel to see your message. 

These types of ads have usually a higher engagement rate comparatively and give more benefits inside a single ad. 

These ads are generally used to showcase the multiple aspects of the brand or a product. 

Example: 

Specification:  

• Image resolution: 1080X1080 (.png, .jpg)
• Video resolution: 1080X1080, up to 4GB (.mov, mp4)
• Headline: 40 characters
• Link description: 20 characters
• Text: 125 Character (if there’s no link)
• Quantity: Min 2 cards and max 10 cards in a single ad. 

Best For:  Generating sales and leads for your product or service. 

Follow the process as mentioned earlier and choose the carousel from the given ad type options. Then select your images/videos and write your headlines, description, URL separately.

Facebook Right Column Ads

Facebook’s right column ads can only be placed for desktop users. It appears on the right side of the feed. The demand for the Right column has been reduced a lot because of the comparatively higher use of Facebook on mobile devices than computers. 

Example: 

Specification: 

• Image resolution: 600X600, 1200X628 (.jpg, .png)
• Image ratio: 9:16 to 16:9 (no link involved), 1.91:1 (if there is a link)
• Text: 125 characters (if there is no link)
• Headline: 25 characters (any more will appear truncated)
• Link Description: 30 characters

Best for:  Generating awareness about your product, service, or shop. 

Follow the same procedure as mentioned earlier for creating an ad. Then choose Facebook News Feed ads in the “Media Placement” drop menu list.  

Facebook Collection Ads

Facebook collection ads make it easy for people to browse a product/service catalog on mobile. These ads feature one main video or image along with 4 smaller accompanying images in a grid layout. 

The link mentioned in these types of ads takes the user to a post-click experience powered by Instant Experience without leaving Facebook. 

Specification: 

• Image resolution: 600X600 (.jpg, .png)
• Max image file size: 30mb 
• Text: 90 characters
• Headline: 25 characters 
• Video resolution is the same as the normal video ads. 

Best For: Generating awareness about your product, service, or shop. 

Follow the same steps for creating an ad, then choose a single image ad or carousel accordingly. After that select, the “ Add an Instant Experience” option and then finally a template in which you would want to show your collection. 

Facebook Stories Ads

These days stories ads are in high demand owing to their placement strategy, which is at the top of the feed. Stories are images or videos that disappear after 24 hours. 

You can create full-screen vertical ads that appear between stories. Image story ads are visible for 5 seconds unless the user swipes out to the story, videos last for the length of the video.

Story ads usually work the best on mobile devices rather than desktop. 

Specification: 

• Image size: 1080 x 1920 (but keep your text within 1080 x 1420)
• Video aspect ratio: 9:16
• Max video length: 15 sec

Tip: Leave 250 pixels at the top and bottom free from text and logos

Best For: Generating leads and awareness about your product/service or brand. 

 Follow the steps mentioned earlier and then select “Stories” in the media section. 

Facebook lead Generation Ads

As the name suggests, lead generation ads are used for generating leads for your product or service. This Facebook ad type allows people to download your content or sign up for your offer without leaving the Facebook platform.

You can create an image ad with a CTA accordingly which will take the user to a particular form page or you can create a lead generation form that will allow users to fill in their details for their desired result. 

Example: 

Specification: 

• Image size: 1,200 x 628 pixels
• Ad copy text: 90 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link Description: 30 characters
• Context card headline: 60 characters
• Context card button: 30 characters
• Privacy Policy and website URL links are required

Best For: Generating sales and leads for your product or service. 

Facebook Offer Ads

This ad type is perfect for brick-&-mortar store owners who want to attract more people to their stores.

Once your offer ad is live, any user who clicks on your ad and redeems the offer will receive an email containing the details and terms of use

Example: 

Specification: 

Image size: 1,200 x 628 pixels

Image ratio: 1.9:1

Offer title: Up to 25 characters

Ad copy text: Up to 90 characters

For you to be able to create an offer, your Facebook Page needs to have at least 50 Likes.

Best for: Showcasing your offer and generating leads. Very helpful for brick and mortar stores. 

Facebook Messenger Ads

Messenger ads appear in the main tab of Facebook messenger, where people spend time chatting with friends.

A user will see your ad in the inbox amongst their conversations and can click to initiate a Facebook conversation with your page.

Specification: 

• Image size: 1,200 x 628 pixels
• Minimum width 254 x 133
• Image ratio: 1.9:1
• Text: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Description: 30 characters

What’s next?

As you have seen, Facebook has a lot of targeting options and ad types to stand upon almost all of your advertising needs. But, for the better result, we’d suggest you to always do A/B testing to find out what works for you accoridng to your business objectives.

Want to know more? Write to us at [email protected] and our facebook advertising expert will get in touch with you.

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