Different Ways to Target Audience with Facebook Ads

Identifying a target audience and actually having your ads appear in front of them are two unique challenges. But with powerful tools like Facebook Ads available for any business owner to use, it’s never been easier to create a target audience of real users and have them see your content. Check out some strategies you can use to create target audiences with Facebook Ads.

Exclude Customers From Your Target Audience

If you want to move customers through your sales funnel and avoid wasting advertising revenue on people who’ve already made a purchase, exclude paying customers from your target audience. Instead, prioritize people who have either visited your site or added items to their shopping carts and not checked out. Use website retargeting to display ads on Facebook for visitors who have been to your site without making a purchase.

Use Facebook’s “Saved Audience” Feature

Once you know your ideal customer demographic, you can use Facebook’s “Create a Saved Audience Button” to build an audience to use in your ad campaign. The button to do this can be found on the Audiences page. You can then define your audience based on factors such as age, gender, and location.

Narrow Your Audience Further, Based on Their Likes and Interests

You can further target an audience by narrowing your search criteria — either for a Saved Audience or a Lookalike Audience — by including specific likes, interests, and even life events to create an audience. For example, an author can limit a target audience to those who like a genre or a certain book, and a jewelry company can target individuals in relationships who have an upcoming anniversary. You would never imagine the ways you can actually target people on Facebook, things can get weirdly specific!

How to Get Your Ads to Convert on Facebook

Developing strong ad campaigns on Facebook can help you drive traffic to your website, boost brand awareness, and generate conversions. Find out how to get your ads to convert on Facebook and learn how to meet your objectives.

Know Your Target Audience

No matter which type of Facebook ad campaign you’re planning to run, creating the right target audience is essential for social advertising. You can create a lookalike audience that’s similar to your existing followers, build one using relevant interests, or select one based on device usage. The specificity of options is exponential. You can target any group ranging from single mothers to home gardeners, to people in specific neighborhoods. Choose the combination of targeting that works best for you to make sure you’re targeting the right users.

Utilize Photos and Videos

Photos and videos offer a great platform for expanding brand awareness, building your audience, and even driving conversions. People scroll through timelines and newsfeeds so quickly, using a photo or video can be one of the only ways to grab the attention of people with crowded social media platforms. To get the most video views, start by choosing an eye-catching thumbnail and ensuring your video file uses the optimal aspect ratio. Try to use photos that convey your message or an emotional connection to attract attention. Because people lose interest easily, aim for a video between 15 and 30 seconds to maximize views.

Optimize Ads for Landing Page Views

Pushing traffic off Facebook and to your website is ideal if you have a high-performing landing page that creates conversions. To make the most of Facebook’s landing page views option, use a strong creative and an effective call to action (CTA) to get the high-quality traffic you want. Try out a few different versions of your landing page to make sure it gets the results you’re targeting. You can do this by creating different ad sets that include different pictures, carousel ads, and different CTA or ad copy content.

Drive Specific Actions With Website Conversions

To attract users who are primed to make a purchase, download content, or complete another type of conversion, you’ll need to tweak your audience to make it as specific as possible. Use copy with a specific CTA and test your landing page to make sure it converts effectively. Identify what your ultimate goal is and gear your ads from there.

Facebook Gets Rid of Accidental Ad Clicks

Creating and monitoring Facebook ads isn’t as easy as it might look, especially when you have to account for users accidentally clicking your ads. Find out why Facebook has taken steps to eliminate accidental ad clicks and learn what this means for advertisers.

Facebook Establishes a Two-Second Threshold for Ads

It’s happened to even the most frequent social media users. When scrolling through an article or your news feed, sometimes you accidentally click on an advertisement. In the past, Facebook levied charges for every single click-thru, even those generated by users who unintentionally clicked on the ad before returning to the original page immediately.

As of August 2017, however, that’s no longer the case. Facebook has established a two-second threshold for its Audience Network ads, which appear in non-Facebook applications. Essentially, a user clicking on one of these ads and returning back to the original page within two seconds will no longer count as a click. In the future, Facebook may shorten this length of time or even extend it to other aspects of its advertising platform.

Advertisers Can Expect More Accurate Metrics

This two-second threshold is good news for advertisers, as Facebook will no longer charge for these unintentional clicks. The benefits extend beyond budget alone, though.

Since advertisers will no longer see these accidental clicks in their reports, they can look forward to more accurate metrics. This change could help businesses improve their ad targeting, increase lead generation, and spend their budgets more wisely.

Facebook Discontinues 5,000 Ad Targeting Terms to Prevent Ad Discrimination

Facebook announced it is removing 5,000 ad targeting terms that could potentially allow for bias against different religions, races, and cultures.

If you’re not sure what ad targeting is, it is a strategy for advertisers to reach certain customers based on demographics, psychographics, behavior, and interests. Simply put, when advertising using Facebook paid ads, you have a plethora of options to create campaigns that target your most valuable customers ranging from zip codes and marital status to interests such as “Latin America” or “Medicare”.

While Facebook does not categorize people by their race or ethnicity, advertisers could target people “interested in” certain cultures. For example, a person interested in “Passover” could be Jewish. Under bad practice, a person could use these targeting options to discriminate against Jewish people by not showing them ads for housing, jobs, or educational opportunities.

So why would this happen?

Advertisers must have some sort of strategy to get their ads to the most valuable customers whom will end with a conversion. Businesses are paying to get their ads to the right people, so typically they exclude certain segments from seeing their campaigns to avoid serving ads to unnecessary or redundant audiences.

Although excluding certain audiences can be a very useful tactic, Facebook has received scrutiny due to the tool’s ability to discriminate. By excluding someone interested in “mobility scooters” or “child care”, advertisers could potentially prevent disabled renters or working parents from seeing their ads.

This isn’t a subject that has been tread on lightly either. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed an official complaint against Facebook for violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing landlords and home sellers to use its advertising platform to engage in housing discrimination.

The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing transactions including print and online advertisements on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status.

According to the press release HUD distributed, Facebook’s platform violates this act by enabling advertisers to:

• Display housing ads either only to men or women.
• Not show ads to Facebook users interested in an “assistance dog,” “mobility scooter,” “accessibility” or “deaf culture.”
• Not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in “child care” or “parenting,” or show ads only to users with children above a specified age.
• To display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the “Christian Church,” “Sikhism,” “Hinduism,” or the “Bible.”
• Not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in “Latin America,” “Canada,” “Southeast Asia,” “China,” “Honduras,” or “Somalia.”
• Draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

This isn’t the first time either. The discriminatory misuse of its advertising product has been on Facebook’s radar since at least 2016, when ProPublica published an investigation on how the tech giant enabled advertisers to exclude specific groups based on race and gender, according to Gizmodo. Facebook was again found guilty of enabling this troubling practice at the end of last year—another ProPublica investigation found it was still letting housing ads on the service effectively exclude black, Jewish, and disabled users—after the company said it would no longer allow it.

Facebook has reportedly denied that the removal was in response to the HUD complaint. In Facebook’s blog post about the removal of potentially discriminatory ad targeting options,  “While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important.”

Facebook is constantly updating its platform to better cater to users and improve user experience. They plan to share more targeting updates in the coming months as they continue to refine they tools for people and businesses.

In an effort to underscore the difference between acceptable ad targeting and ad discrimination, Facebook is requiring a continuing education certification for all advertisers. In order to continue advertising on Facebook, all advertisers will be required to complete the certification.

From Facebook to Google, all advertising platforms are always evolving and as a digital marketing agency, we always strive to communicate and apply these industry updates to all our clients to ensure we are strategizing effectively.

If you have any questions about increasing your leads, ROI, and valuable customer base through social media marketing or Google Ads, give us a call for a free consultation!

The post Facebook Ads: Tools, Tricks, Updates and More! appeared first on Exults Digital Marketing Agency.

Simply put, programmatic direct advertising works like this: if you’re an advertiser (a buyer), you need ads. You buy them from a publisher (the seller) who creates the kind of content your consumers would find attractive. The system worked well in the early days of the Internet, but then there was more demand than supply, and more publishers than advertisers. To ramp up and meet publishers’ needs, ad networks formed and increased the number of available ad placements and formats.

After ad networks formed and began selling premium ads in batches, real-time bidding started. RTBs can be effective because they target a specific audience, such as only Gen Z students who are enrolled in college or moms with at least two children under the age of five. A publisher can set a predetermined price and bid on ads being auctioned off.

Programmatic advertising has become an integral part of the advertising landscape. After all, what publisher wants to pay for ads that aren’t relevant to consumers? The challenge with programmatic is that with so many sources, it has become difficult to assign value to the ads-until now.

Google Ad Manager changes the game

Google Ad Manager will offer a unified first price auction. The auction is intended to level the playing field for buyers and advertisers. Google Ads will not share bids or reset prices until an auction is won. At that time, the buyers pay the price bid for the ads. Ad Manager’s goal is to make the impression process simpler while offering more value.

According to Google Ad Manager, you can count on:

• First price auctions in simplified programmatics. Simplicity rules in selling and purchasing ads.
• Custom creatives. You still have creative control over your ads. In fact, management tools and formats can be customized more than ever.
• Native style suggestions. No advertiser wants ad copy that looks out of place. Google will recommend styles that complement websites. This feature is now live.
• What the change means

The first auction simplification of the digital advertising market will have deep ramifications for buy-side players who have relied on second auction pricing bids and sales. The good news is Google’s newest position in programmatic landscape means that ads will have an assigned value and cannot be overvalued or lowballed.

As a result, many sellers will have to put pencils to paper as they recalculate their pricing structures and strategies for selling digital ads in a fluid market. It will take a while for the dust to settle as players learn the new rules for engagement. Google Ad Manager will continue to send out updates, and the transition will be completed by the end of the year.

Until then, digital marketing agencies will be helping buyers and sellers regain a position of advantage on the playing field.

The post Google’s Ad Manager Moves to First-Price Auction appeared first on Exults Digital Marketing Agency.

Imagine being able to take the best of the shopping experiences found in Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, and then creating a spectacular mashup that resonates with consumers and encourages them to make purchases with a quick click. In essence, that’s what Google Images has done.

Where once items were displayed in isolation, they now are placed and photographed in the environment in which you would use them. Rather than look at a picture of a cup or plate against a bland, white background, you can see the place setting as it would be used: on a table. It’s a more authentic and engaging way to market products and services.

Shoppers can view multiple ads with different place settings ranging from informal to formal. The ad helps them visualize the product in their own home. With shoppable ads in Google Images, it’s all about the experience.

Shoppable ads

Shoppers turn to images first, and pictures sell products. With shoppable ads, advertisers can create a staged scenario that features several products in a single picture. The picture should suggest a lifestyle that the consumer would find appealing, and as he or she scrolls across the image, the prices appear on any of the items being offered for sale.

For now, shoppable ads are in testing mode with furniture retailers and art dealers who provide a picture of a room staged with their products. Imagine taking shoppable ads a step further.

Advertisers will be able to sell a complete experience by promoting a scenario. On a beach stands a colorful umbrella, and next to it, a few folding chairs. The children are tossing a beach ball, and a surfer is riding in to shore. As the shopper scrolls over each image in the picture, a brand and price appear. The result is a richer experience that is more likely to result in a sale.

Shoppable ads in Google Images allow consumers to identify, save and collect the images on boards they can refer to later. Suddenly, furnishing a room or even an entire home has never been easier because everything you need is right there, curated in the shoppable ads.

Showcase shopping ads

Some advertisers want to take the shopping experience to the next level, and for them, Google has created showcase ads. These ads offer multi-image formats that create a series of thumbnails you can enlarge and view full screen. The idea is to funnel sponsored content to interested consumers, encouraging them to become paying customers. The video format offers a richer context and more immersive experience for previewing a product. Through sponsorship, these showcase ads appear at the top of product keyword searches.

Shopping insights

Merging shoppable ads with Google Images makes sense. We’ve known for a long time that a picture is worth a thousand words, so it’s logical that pictures make the sale. Consumers are more likely to make a purchase after seeing an item rather than reading or hearing about it.
Most shoppers in the United States turn first to Google when making a purchase. You’ve done it, too. Now you can be there waiting for them with an immersive experience they’ll love.

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The changes came about because of the data breach of 87 million Facebook users. In 2018, the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica extrapolated data out of the profiles of Facebook users and created a political firestorm by using the stolen data to persuade the social media platform’s users. And Facebook CEO Zuckerberg’s response? “I’m sorry.”

Facebook has followed through on its promise to improve security and protect personal data, but you have to do your part, too.

Tips for updating your Facebook page

The basic privacy settings have changed. Audience selection, settings management, and tagging controls are all part of the new security updates. You can keep your Facebook page secure with some of these tips:

• Limit who can see your page. In Facebook Privacy Shortcuts, you can establish who can see your page and your profile information. Personal profiles are often limited to friends.
• Limit what you share. Every Facebook account begins with, “Fill in the blanks . . . .” Because we are task and goal-oriented we comply, often over-sharing information. Think twice about which phone number you share or the year of your birthday. Share only what you must, including tagging. You can request to review tagging before someone posts a photo of you; you also have the option to turn off facial recognition features.
• Avoid third-party apps. Apps that ask if you’d like to sign in using your Facebook account make logging in and out convenient. Interoperability is a time-saver. It’s also an opportunity for people you don’t know to see your photos and personally identifiable information, like your age and gender.

The takeaway here is to check and update your Facebook page settings regularly.

Other advice for online safety and privacy

Do you really need to know what kind of dragon you’d be in a fantasy world or what color defines your personality? Online quizzes intrigue you to find out. Unfortunately, they also analyze and sell your user data, harvesting it for other purposes- mainly to sell to advertisers. That’s exactly how Cambridge Analytica operated. Everyone has a responsibility to protect their individual data. While your page may be safe, you likely have followers whose pages are not safe from prying eyes.

Failure to maintain account security can be costly. Of the millions of accounts breached last year, three million were in Europe, where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) protects the data of individuals. As a result, Facebook will have to pay 4% of its annual global revenue in penalties, or about $1.63 billion.

Should you stay or should you go?

Keeping up with the continuous privacy setting changes in Facebook may seem like a lot of work, and it is. By this point, you may be wondering why you have a Facebook page at all. You wouldn’t be alone: Playboy, Mozilla, SpaceX, Pep Boys, and Sonos have paused or deleted their Facebook pages. The security concerns over private data prompted these companies to walk away from this popular advertising platform.

You might not want to be too hasty in separating yourself from Facebook. After all, Facebook remains one of the most affordable advertising platforms for small businesses. The average cost per click (CPC) is $1.86 – less than a cup of coffee. Many businesses spend only a few hundred dollars per month on Facebook ads, and they’re happy with the results. Furthermore, almost no one places more relevant ads in front of consumers than this tool.

There’s another reason to keep your Facebook page: the new security settings are in place. Follow the steps to update your page, and then check it regularly. Stay on social media and stay safe!

The post Updating with Facebook’s Latest Privacy Settings appeared first on Exults Digital Marketing Agency.

1. Offer a Mobile App

Offering a mobile app for your customer base adds another dimension of awareness in the marketplace. You don’t need an industry-leading app, but simply having one adds a lot of value to your overall marketing push. Keep in mind, an app may not be perfect for every industry.

2. Text marketing

Engaging in a casual and friendly text marketing campaign can effectively market your products when on a limited budget. Everyone has a smartphone nowadays, so reaching large population segments shouldn’t be a problem.

3. Create a Mobile-ready Website

A poorly optimized website for mobile devices will leave mobile users frustrated and unable to take advantage of the products you are offering. Ensure a mobile-friendly website is created that supports those on a mobile device. In addition, Google and other search engines are taking preference mobile sites because it is estimated that 60% of users on the web are using a mobile device.

4. Add a Mobile Payment Option

For a comprehensive mobile buying experience, mobile payments must be added. It would be unacceptable if the buyer was ready to buy but could not do so because there needs to be more functionality.

Is your website mobile-friendly? Give us a call, and we’d be happy to bring you into this mobile world!

FAQs

What is mobile marketing?

Mobile marketing refers to advertising activities promoting products and services through mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones. The marketing campaigns are designed to cater to an individual’s location by utilizing modern mobile technology features such as location services.

What are some popular mobile marketing methods?

Mobile marketing strategies encompass several crucial types, including SMS, social media, location-based, proximity, and in-app marketing.

What is mobile marketing vs digital marketing?

Digital marketing refers to utilizing digital channels, such as websites, social media, search engine advertising, and email, to connect with customers and promote products or services. Mobile marketing is a subset of digital marketing that focuses on reaching customers who use mobile devices to access information.

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In an attempt to make the mobile ad “unskippable” 3 versions were created:

The Original:

The control in the experiment. 30-second video starring 3 guys who grab the Mountain Dew drink, start dancing, and everything in the setting joins in on the dancing.

The Big Punch:

Re-cut of video that starts with bold product shot and countdown, signaling that something cool will happen. Viewers are dropped into the middle of the action and the story unfolds from there.

Pure Fun:

Re-cut of video that drops viewers into the middle of the action with no music or any real sense of what exactly is happening. Music kicks in and ad shows different dancing elements; it is significantly longer than the first 2 ads at 1 minute 33 seconds

Findings:

The view -through rates for all 3 ads were about the same when looking at the views from desktop computers, however, this was not the case with mobile. The “Pure Fun” video with no conventional  story-line or structure was viewed at a 26% higher rate than the other 2 cuts on mobile.

This experiment suggests that it may be time to look past our ideas of customary ads when it comes to mobile. The experiment has shown us that we can make an impact with longer and richer stories; more or less, content that does not necessarily feel like an ad.  Unlike on desktops where the shorter and quicker the ads are, the better, mobile ads prove to be more successful when they are longer, richer and even a bit stranger, luring the viewer in to watch more.

To read the full article click here.

Below is the third and most successful “Pure Fun” video. What are your thoughts on this ad?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=32&v=l–keZ4aOdE

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