3 Things You Need to Be Doing with Facebook Ads
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Pete Schauer
Digital marketers know the advanced targeting that's at their disposal through Facebook's advertising platform. Being able to target by annual salary and which pages users are engaged with on the social network is huge in terms of finding your target audience, but there's so much more that advertisers can be doing through Facebook Ads to increase campaign performance and make sure that they're getting the most of their marketing dollars. Let's get into them. UTM Parameters Google URL BuilderIf you're a digital marketer, then you know how important it is to track the engagement from your ads, which is why you need to be using UTM parameters to track the on-site engagement of your ads within Google Analytics. Just head on over to the Google URL Builder and create your custom parameters so that you can see how users interact with your website after clicking through from an ad. Just make sure to use "Facebook" as the campaign source and then pick a campaign name that you'll be able to differentiate when looking at all campaigns in Analytics. My advice is to put "Facebook" in the campaign name so that you can easily filter and find the campaign in Analytics. By using custom UTMs, you'll be able to track the on-site time, pages per session, bounce rate, and more of your Facebook Ads, which will help to determine if your campaign is relevant and engaging to users. Facebook Conversion Tracking What's the point of running an ad campaign if you don't know what you're getting from it? You might as well just buy a billboard and hope for the best. That's if you're not utilizing Facebook's conversion tracking functionality so that you can identify and measure the success of your Facebook Ads campaign. Just like Google AdWords, Facebook has a conversion pixel that you can pull and put on your confirmation page to track conversions from your advertising campaign. Whether you're a lead generation company trying to track leads and data acquisition or an eCommerce brand looking to track sales through Facebook, you need to be using conversion pixels to track the success of your campaigns. As you start to see what's converting and what's not, you can be proactive in making educated decisions within your campaigns because of the data you're getting from your tracking. Custom Audiences: Website TrafficFacebook Custom Audience: Website Traffic Have you ever been to a website and then gone to your Facebook page and seen an ad for that website? That's called remarketing—also known as retargeting—and used to only be available through third-party companies like AdRoll and Perfect Audience. That is until Facebook developed custom audiences, and more importantly, a custom audience that lets you target by people who have been to your website before. If you've ever used remarketing through Google AdWords or AdRoll, then you're familiar with the process of putting a remarketing code/pixel on your website so that you can cookie the web browsers of users coming to your website—it's the same process with the "Website Traffic" custom audience within Facebook Ads. Once the Facebook code has been placed on your website, your list will start to populate, and you can start serving ads to users who have been to your website before, so you know they're already engaged. To dig deeper, you can segment your list by users who have been to certain pages of your website. So if they went to a product page and didn't purchase, why not hit them with a 10% off coupon in their Facebook news feed to drive that sale? It's a no brainer. Using this type of custom audience assures that you're spending your marketing dollars wisely, putting ads in front of a more engaged audience that's more likely to convert.
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