What is Facebook Advertising? Benefits and Examples

These social platforms have a lot of information about users, and advertisers can use it to their advantage to create very accurate targeting in their campaigns. Any consumer reading this can rest assured, your information is 100% confidential.

If your brand is not yet using this type of advertising, you are missing a great opportunity to connect with your audience. With over 2 billion active users, Facebook represents enormous reach potential, making it one of the most interesting networks to start experimenting with your ads. Furthermore, it is one of the most customizable and visual solutions, all with a very low CPC. To encourage you to try, in this article I want to share with you a guide to Facebook advertising, its benefits, and one of our success stories.

What is Facebook Advertising or Facebook Ads?

Facebook, the most popular social network worldwide, has a powerful advertising platform with endless options, so many that it's normal to feel overwhelmed at first contact, from the option to do remarketing to improve your e-commerce revenue to getting more leads for your landing page. But don't worry: we'll explain the possibilities step by step.

The first thing you need to know is that you can display your ads in four different placements:

• Within Facebook itself. Ads will be displayed integrated into the user's News Feed, alongside their friends' posts, as well as in the right-hand column.
• On Facebook Messenger. Facebook's newest advertising option is launching ads through its Messenger chatbots for brands. To avoid spam, these ads can only be published in conversations already initiated by the user.
• On Instagram. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram led to the integration of both advertising platforms, opening up a world of possibilities.
• On Audience Network. This network allows you to extend advertising campaigns beyond Facebook, reaching selected audiences through apps, mobile websites, Instant Articles, and videos.

In all cases, ads can be displayed on both mobile devices and computers. Additionally, it's possible to create a single ad for multiple platforms.

Another important classification for understanding Facebook advertising is advertising objectives. When creating a new ad through its tool, you will need to select an objective for your campaign. These are grouped into three main categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Within awareness, we can select the following options:

• Post Engagement: To promote your business page posts.
• Page Likes: To increase your follower base.
• Local Awareness: To advertise your business to people nearby.
• Brand Awareness: To reach people most likely to be interested in it.
• Reach: To reach the largest possible number of users.

The consideration section has the following objectives:

• Website Clicks: To drive users to a destination on or off Facebook.
• App Installs: To get more users for your mobile app.
• Event Responses: To reach further with your events.
• Video Views: To promote your audiovisual content.
• Lead Generation: To capture lead data, such as email addresses of people interested in your business.

And finally, within conversion, we have the following types of ads:

• Website Conversions: To contribute to your overall conversion goals, such as online sales.
• App Engagement: To get users to interact with your app.
• Offer Claims: To promote your offer.
• Catalog Sales: To automatically display products from your catalog based on the target audience.
• Store Traffic: To get more people to walk through your store's door.

Another factor to consider when unraveling the world of Facebook Ads is that there are several possible ad formats:

• Photo Ads: A simple, yet very visual format.
• Video Ads: Uses images, sound, and motion to tell your brand's story.
• Carousel: Displays multiple videos or images in a single ad.
• Slideshow: Lightweight video ads that allow you to connect with people on different connection speeds.
• Canvas: A personalized and fast-loading mobile advertising experience.

If you consider all the possible combinations of the above options, you will quickly see the enormous potential of Facebook Ads to adapt to all types of brands and situations.

How to Create the Right Targeting on Facebook Ads

Over a billion people use Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network daily. You might think that finding the audience interested in your brand is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the good news is that you have many targeting options at your disposal.

When selecting your audience on Facebook, you have three main options:

• Core Audiences. This option allows you to manually select your audience based on various characteristics: demographics, location, interests, and behaviors.
• Custom Audiences. In addition to reaching new users, Facebook Ads can be a great tool for reaching people you already know. With custom audiences, you can find your current contacts and customers on Facebook through three sources: current and potential customers, visitors to your website, or users of your mobile app. This way, you can create campaigns aimed at strengthening your relationship with them and encouraging conversions.
• Lookalike Audiences. This option allows you to expand your reach by finding users who are similar to your customers or contacts. This way, you can leverage the full power of statistics to increase the potential success of your ads.

Facebook Advertising is Mobile

According to US data, one out of every five minutes users spend on their mobile devices is dedicated to Facebook or Instagram. Facebook's advertising solution is perfectly adapted to the mobile format and allows you to run specific campaigns for these devices, but its advantages don't end there: it also has a format specifically created for mobile, Canvas.

Thanks to Canvas, it's possible to create immersive ads with great flexibility. Facebook Canvas ads include full-screen video and images, as well as text and call-to-action buttons. The user can swipe through the entire space, tilt images, and zoom in, fully immersing themselves in your brand's story. Canvas ads are full-screen and load ten times faster than standard mobile websites.

Measuring Results with Facebook Ads

As expected from such a comprehensive advertising tool, Facebook Ads offers advanced options for checking the performance of your ads.

Broadly speaking, Facebook's measurement tools allow you to investigate the following data about your campaigns:

• Audience Results: Who you are reaching and how they respond. You can check this through ad reports, the Ads Insights API, and Atlas reach and campaign reports, which measure campaign performance across different publishers, devices, apps, and browsers.
• Brand Results: Through its brand lift surveys, Facebook allows you to compare the response of people who have seen your ad with that of users who have not been reached by it.
• Sales Results: To measure conversions, Facebook provides conversion lift measurement tools, Atlas attribution reports, mobile measurement partnerships, and offline conversion tracking.

Facebook Advertising Success Story: Groupalia

To conclude this guide, I'd like to share our experience with Facebook Ads through a case study from Cyberclick related to optimizing images on social media.

When we create digital advertising campaigns, every element of the ad is crucial. In the case of Facebook, we are reaching users with common interests, but who may not necessarily know our brand. To grab their attention, images are crucial.

Therefore, we conducted an experiment with one of our clients, Groupalia, comparing ads with images that followed the brand's brandbook versus images optimized according to the following guidelines:

• Work with strong contrasts and eye-catching colors that stand out against the network's background, such as orange, yellow, or red.
• Do not use excessive filters, as they detract from the image's impact.
• Seek a legible and balanced composition.
• Include discounts and reduced prices in the image.

The result was that, with identical investment, images with the above approach achieved up to a 35% higher CTR. And even better, the ROI in terms of sales and revenue was more than double in the ads using these images. So when launching your first Facebook campaign, don't miss out on these tips!