What Facebook Ads Can Do & Can NOT Do for your business

The few things you want to know (or wish you knew) about Facebook ads.

Facebook ads CAN - 

• Bring your business offerings to the front of your ideal audience, i.e. people that are most likely to take the action you want, be it purchase a product, download a PDF, sign up a course, etc. The data power of Facebook hence the targeting capability is not matched by any other social media platforms. 

• Re-target people who have shown interest in your ads based on specific behaviour metrics you are after (e.g. clicked on a link, viewed a particular product or page, added a product to the cart and etc.). You can re-target those people over and over again to your budget’ content until they are converted. 

• Track & attribute conversions to your ads even when the action takes place days after the visitor viewed or clicked on your ads (but not converted right then).

• Be paused & resumed anytime at your will, so you are in total control of your ads and spends.

• Be cross-placed to Instagram (including Stories) and Audience Network (i.e. third-party apps and platforms that your audience might be on).

However, Facebook ads CAN NOT - 

• Work without a Facebook business Page. 

Facebook likes to see that you are serious about your business on the platform and are investing your time & efforts consistently on it.

As a rule of thumb, the more established your business Page is (Page followers/likes being one key metric), the more effective your ads will be as Facebook will have more quality data to work with, assuming those followers/likes are genuine and are from the right audience for your business.

• Change a bad products/services. 

Facebook ads are powerful but they are not magic. If your products or services don’t resonate with your target audience or the quality needs improving, it won’t sell more just because you spent £10k/month advertising it.

• Guarantee conversions. 

When set up correctly, Facebook ads can be very effective in driving the right people to your destination (website, landing page, lead-hen form etc) to give your business the best chance to convert them.

It, however, has no control over the rest of the journey, i.e. the user experience on your website or any third-party platform where your end game is set to take place. So if you get plenty of traffic but not as many conversions, the questions you shall probably ask are: How does my website look? Does it make sense to my potential customers coming from my ads? Is the page loading speed good enough? What’s my page bounce rate? and etc. I am sure you get the idea.

• Work with no or a poisoned pixel.

If you want Facebook to find, track & re-target the right people for your business, you need to have the Facebook pixel installed on your website (or landing page). It is a data-collecting code that you place on your website.

In addition, if your website has been attracting wrong traffic (i.e. not your target audience), Facebook ads won’t be able to deliver the results you want until Facebook has learned (from scratch) what your ideal customers are actually like. 

• Deliver the ‘magic’ overnight. 

Running Facebook ads are all about testing. And this takes TIME. Depending on how complicated the typical conversion journey is for your product or service, you might need to test for a while before you find the right ‘formula’ to conversions: different copies, different creatives (imagery vs video), different audience types (cold vs warm), different audience interests, and different combinations of all these elements. 

This is particularly true if it’s a product or service that has never been promoted on Facebook before. But even it has been done previously, it might not work now or not as well, as things change all the time nowadays, so does Facebook, the market you try to target, and your audiences.

Is Facebook ads for your business in 2020?

Now you have a better (or more realistic) idea of what Facebook ads can do and can not, is it something you feel right for your business and want to harness to upscale your business in 2020?

Maybe you are still not sure and would like to find out more?

In either case, I am here to help. Just drop me a message on LinkedIn or email 📧 helen@thesmartsocialmedia.com, and I will answer any question you may have.

Thank you for reading and speak again soon!

Helen x