Facebook ads can be a tricky and elusive endeavor. While most business owners understand that these ads can significantly improve brand visibility, many are confused about how to create their own following best marketing practices.
Unfortunately, due to the rising competition and increased saturation, Facebook has become a pay-to-play platform. Organic, or natural, visibility on this platform is nearly absent, especially for brands just starting out. Because of this, running ads on Facebook is an absolute necessity for ecommerce brands that hope to experience success.
Ecommerce Objectives for Facebook Ads
Before creating an ad, merchants should ask themselves this important question: what do I want to achieve with my ads? Do I want to point people to my website or do I want them to sign up for my newsletter? Or do I want them to “like” my page and increase brand awareness? Facebook offers a variety of objectives when creating ads, but ecommerce brands should focus on only two: engagement and traffic.Merchants can create ads to promote their Facebook page, which aims to grow a highly-targeted, relevant audience through asking for page likes. These types of ads will be optimized to garner page likes and fans. This is recommended for brands just starting out on Facebook, or brands that have not seen much growth in audience size.
Secondly, merchants can also create ads that direct users to a specific page on their website. By clicking on these types of ads, users can navigate to the merchant’s website to (hopefully) make a purchase. As you can see in the ad example below, this ad features a special “Shop Now” button, which serves as an attractive call-to-action for a prospective buyer. These ads can help increase traffic to an online store and can be customized for certain sales, seasonal changes or holidays.
Key Features of Facebook Ads
So what are the most important features of a Facebook ad? We’ve created a little diagram that pinpoints each key component of an ad—from the headline and description to the photo. This diagram should help you understand how all of the components come together to create a complete ad.
Now that you’re familiar with all of the pieces, it’s time to learn how to create your ad. Facebook has a really informative tutorial that can help walk you through the process, but we’ve outlined a few marketing best practices that can be extremely beneficial to your ad campaign:
- Use original, high-quality photos
- Always include a call-to-action
- Advertise important information first (ie: sales, giveaways, news)
- Ensure text is short and sweet, but compels users to click
- Headlines are important, but descriptions are what people are going to read in their News Feed
Where are ads placed?
Ads can be placed in a few different areas within the News Feed. During the creative process, advertisers can choose where their ads show up. Facebook will automatically provide a default setting, which includes Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed and the Right Column feed on desktop displays. However, you can choose to keep these display values or alter them. The diagram below gives you a better idea about where those placements land within Facebook.
Now that you know a little more about how Facebook ads are constructed, it’s time for you to get started creating your own! If this still seems a little over your head or you need some help implementing your ideas, remember that Volusion also offers Social Media Marketing and Consulting services with a great track record of growing brands on social media.
Have any questions about Facebook ads? Leave us a comment!