If your business currently encompasses Facebook Ads into its digital marketing strategy, then here at Assured Marketing we’re putting together some best practices that you can follow for maximising the profitability of your Facebook Ad Campaigns.

According to Sprout Social, Facebook advertising has grown at a rate of close to 25% year-on-year since 2019. With this, there has undoubtedly been many businesses turning to Facebook for advertising but failing to generate a practical Return on Investment (ROI) from their campaigns.

Many business owners simply lack the time and/or ability to run profitable ads, perhaps due to the complexity involved with running multiple ad campaigns on Facebook.

So what can be done as a business owner if you’re looking to keep Facebook Ads as a part of your business’ marketing strategy going forward but don’t want to encounter unnecessary spend (or even losses) in your search for more customers?

Well in this blog our experts will give insight on how profitable ads can be established on Facebook keeping the all important factor CPC as low as possible.

How Facebook Ads Work

Following suit of the majority of digital advertising platforms Facebook’s Ads work on a CPC basis. The only notable difference between ad campaigns on Facebook when compared to Google AdWords is that they focus on displays image/video content to entice users.

Whilst there are other factors regarding their functionality that could be discussed this isn’t the aim of this article. If you’d like more information on the workings of Facebook Ads we have more information available here.

Improving Profitability on Your Facebook Ads

From more advanced audience targeting, to micro-adjustments on content to increase conversions there are many different factors that should be considered when enhancing the profitability of your Facebook Ads.

First, Optimise Your Ad Creative

You won’t get anywhere without first catching people’s attention. When an ad displays to a user on Facebook it will be as they scroll through their content feed looking at what friends, family and pages they’re interested in are posting. This means that your ad (be it image, video or carousel) has to grab their attention enough to make them stop scrolling and start engaging!

Whilst a video based ad is normally always going to be more successful on Facebook, due to it’s power of catching a users attention versus image based ads, there are still many ways that ad creative can be optimised to improve campaign profitability.

Take for example the NatureBox Facebook Ad below, the graphic has been crafted in a way to display their desirable products, but the first thing you see is the USP they’ve chosen to highlight. Emphasis on the ‘free trial’ USP will immediately grab a users attention, then once they observe the quality of the products on display they’ll become much more inclined to purchase.

This example is one of many great ads that are out there for you to draw inspiration from. So conduct some research into the kind of ad creatives you think would suit you business best. We’d recommend starting with competitors and industry leaders whose ads you’ll be able to find on the Facebook Ads Library.

For some more useful tips on how to improve your ad creative and what practices work best, take a look at a recent article of industry experts put together by BigSpy.com

Secondly, Implement Micro-Adjustments That Improve Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

For ads to generate a sustainable level of profit, they simply need to generate more in sales than you are spending on the campaign. Once you’ve evaluated whether or not your ad creative is doing enough to grab a user’s attention, you should be turning your efforts to how exactly you push that user down the sales funnel.

To do this successfully you need to be looking at everything else the user is seeing when they see your ad. What are you asking them to do/buy? Why do they need it? Where can they buy it? 

The first obvious micro-adjustment that needs to be made is in that there captions on your Facebook ad should briefly summarise the product/service being

 advertised and close with a strong call to action. This drives home the message of the ad and how you want a user to interact, terms such as “click here”, “buy now”

“get yours today” etc. are crucial in instructing the user once you have their attention.

Once you’ve implemented these strong call to actions (CTA) into either your caption or as part of your ad creative, ensure that what you’re asking the user to do is easy!

Facebook actually allows you to add CTA buttons to your Ads, whether at the bottom of videos/images or as part of an article preview, utilising these is crucial to make the sales journey easy and simple to follow for the user.

Overall, as you follow the above two steps in improving the aesthetics alongside the usability of the ad, the CTR will increase naturally leading to more Facebook users beginning the sales journey through your website.

Next, Be Certain That Audience Overlapping Is Limited

The majority of marketers know the importance of limiting audience overlap when running ads to avoid certain ads not being shown.

Having multiple ads from the same advertiser targeting similar audiences will result in Facebook calculating which to show based on the performance history of the different ads. The platform does this to ensure that your ads are not competing against each other in a bidding war to be shown to your target audience of users. 

But when there are multiple campaigns running at audiences with similar interests, there will inevitably be an overlap in the users that fall into both audiences. This group of people are now far less likely to see your intended ad due to Facebook’s decision to simply show them the ad with the best performance rating.

Using your ad manager you can view the potential overlap of users in similar audiences and begin optimising your targeting in more detail to help reduce the impact of this negative factor on your advertising campaign.

Take a look here at an article from Facebook themselves providing some useful information on how to assess audience overlapping and manage campaigns to limit its effect.

Finally, Implement Conversion Tracking & Remarketing

For you to be sure that the Facebook ads you’re running are profitable, you’ve got to be able to track direct conversions from them. 

Luckily, Facebook Pixel is super-easy to implement throughout your website and can then be linked to specific ad campaigns through the ad manager. 

Once correctly set-up, the Pixel easily tracks users that are following the ads to your website and which ones are converting ahead of others. 

The data generated by this is absolutely vital to your marketing efforts. Whilst in traditional TV or Radio advertising, companies had to rely on customers telling them where they’d heard about them from, Facebook Pixel simply tells you if a user has bought directly from one of your ads. Knowing which campaigns to scale up

 and which to abandon in order to preserve spend gives a far more methodical approach to businesses looking to engage in advertising.

Not only this, but in using Facebook Pixel, specific audiences can be established based on website traffic or existing customer information.

Surely  we’ve all noticed that having been on a company’s website in the past they have started to appear in our news feeds on Facebook. Well, this is simply remarketing in practice. As a platform Facebook can see which websites you’re visiting and if there’s an active advertising campaign for that business then through establishing an audience based on web traffic the platform will be sure to broadcast the ad to you.

Well with successful remarketing, you can take advantage to reach people who may have gotten all of the way through the sales journey only to abandon cart at the very last minute. Successful retargeting gives a second bite of the cherry at ensuring these users convert/enquire.

Conclusion

As a whole, whilst there may be some other areas to learn, focusing on the above points will certainly allow you to begin creating Facebook Ad campaigns that can generate sustainable profit. 

In any industry ROI is key to success when it comes to marketing, there is no better way to quickly scale a business than by having the faith in your marketing strategy to bring you the footfall that is needed.

Want to learn more about how profitable Facebook Ads can help you scale your business’ marketing efforts? We’d love to hear from you! Our team would be happy to discuss the options available to you, so click here to Get In Touch