Improve Your Facebook Ad Performance with Facebook’s New Guide

Is your Facebook ads performance suffering or even nil? Facebook feels your pain. When your ads don’t perform well, it’s a knock to the reputation of their platform. In order to help you succeed, they released a Facebook guide for better ads, video ads to be exact. This is something I’ve noticed about Facebook. They are pretty supportive of their users and if you look around, you will find a ton of free training and more to help you get the most out of Facebook.

All The World’s a Video

100 million hours of video are devoured by users each day on Facebook. That’s a lot of video, so your content better stand out. If it’s an ad, that’s a whole new can of worms. Your Facebook ads need to grab attention quickly as people scroll their News Feeds. You have about a quarter of a second to get the job done.

With the onslaught of services like Periscope, Facebook Live, and others, you better on your video-making game. The days of being camera-shy are over. If you don’t like to be in front of the camera, you better be a good cartoonist or something that will translate over to eye-catching video. If you are creative, then you know you don’t always have to be in front of the camera. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with screen capture.

Facebook Does The Research on Facebook Ads

Facebook began a study in the 4th quarter of 2014 and ran it for 1 year through the 4th quarter of 2015. They selected 850 English language video ads. Then they recruited their control group of people without a creative or advertising background to evaluate each of the Facebook ads.

The study was quite thorough. Each of the Facebook ads were evaluated twice using 19 questions grouped under the following 4 dimensions:

• First impressions
• Branding
• Messaging
• Video features

Facebook was then able to develop a Facebook guide for better ads to help advertisers improve Facebook ads performance.

Information I Learned From the Facebook Ad Guide

First and foremost, your Facebook ads need to bring your brand to the front. Your brand message should be clear at the very start of your video ad without the benefit of sound. From personal experience, I’ve noticed a lot of people caption their videos since even if the video autoplays, the sound is always muted. This is exactly Facebook’s first suggestion based on their study: include captions. 46% of the ads evaluated didn’t have a clear brand message.

Adapt your Facebook ads for News Feed viewing so that they get results:

• Showcase – Make your service or product visible for the majority of the 30-second Facebook ad
• Conversation – Don’t rely on conversation to convey your brand message
• Brand Link – Is the brand easy to identify? Is there a link?
• Sound – Again, the brand message should be apparent even without sound
• Message – Should be concise and memorable, but not too long or detailed

Overall, for marketers, the Facebook performance guide had some great stats, information, and suggestions. There is an industry-wide demand for video that compliments other aspects of online marketing. The days of throwing together some text and links and slapping them everywhere possible are over, my friends.

Facebook suggests that you design your Facebook ads with the screen in mind while understanding how people interact with content on different devices. Don’t be afraid to cater to the scrolling News Feed environment. It does have its advantages. Then, be ready to adjust for better Facebook ads performance.

Wrap Up

So, if your Facebook ads that contain video have disappointed you, you now have a guide direct from the source to help you optimize your Facebook ads performance. No one said online business was easy! I’d love to hear about your ads in the comments. Do you use video?

How to Effectively Use Facebook Audience Optimization Tools

In January 2016, Facebook Audience Optimization tools were released as a tool to organically help publishers better reach their target audiences. Facebook Audience Optimization tools help publishers by providing the following features:

• Publishers are able to add interest tags to their content so Facebook can connect that content with interested parties
• Publishers can limit post visibility by location, language, and gender
• Publishers can monitor the performance of each post based on the interest tags specified

Facebook is seeking to help publishers with the ever-shortening attention spans of their followers by providing the tools to build better relationships with their customers. This, coupled with the recent additions to Facebook Messenger for business, and there’s no question why Facebook stays at the top of social media updates all the time.

Why Facebook Audience Optimization Tools Are Important

Facebook has 1.59 billion active users in any given month. The Facebook Audience Optimization tools are aiming to target engagement rather than reach. That is a much more SEO-like approach. So when you hear the experts talk about social media and SEO going hand in hand, it is ringing more true than ever in Facebook news.

Anything that helps you know, focus on, and target your Facebook audience more effectively is worth your attention. You may not always use such tools, but you should stay on top of social media updates for this type of news to see if it is useful to you. When we are talking about being able to target your audience based on filtered criteria like interest, location, language, and gender, that is huge. That means that Facebook is only going to show that specific post to people who meet criteria that you control.

How to Access Facebook Audience Optimization Tools

The only other place I’ve managed to find this information is on Facebook’s blog on this topic, so let’s get to how this whole thing works. They tried the tool initially with a few big media players, like The New York Times and MTV, who actually saw more engagement than normal.

To access the Facebook Audience Optimization tools:

1. Go to your business Facebook Page.
2. In the top-right corner, click Settings.
3. Click the General tab in the left navigation.
4. Click Edit beside Audience Optimization for Posts.
5. Click the checkbox and the Save Changes button to being using Facebook Audience Optimization tools.

Now you will see the tool added to the following areas of Facebook:

• Page post composer
• Graph API
• Third party publishing tools
• Instant Articles

Additional Information On The New Facebook Audience Tools

These new Facebook Audience Optimization tools replace the old Interest Targeting tool from before. In tests, the tool has proven to drive engagement upward while the organic reach of a post stays about the same, so it’s a limited boost to the previous limits on organic results.

When using interest tags with your content, the maximum number is 16, but Facebook suggests only utilizing between 6 and 10. The new Facebook Audience tools aren’t currently available on mobile. They must be accessed using the desktop website. It is also not currently available in languages other than English and Facebook has no plan to expand it linguistically at this time. Should you decide to boost a post where you’ve used the Facebook Audience Optimization Tools, this will work as a regular ad and your settings and interest tags will not affect it.

If you want to learn more about how to best use the Facebook Audience Optimization tools, check out their Best Practices page.

Wrap Up

I really like to hit the source for information about new features like this and Facebook always does a nice job of explaining things and providing customer support. I recommend that you try pretty much anything Facebook puts out to help businesses because it’s usually really great stuff. Let me hear from you in the comments about how you’re using these new Facebook Audience tools with your pages.