Advanced Advertising Tactics

Like any type of advertising, you can test your ads’ effectiveness and tweak them based on the results in order to get them to work more efficiently.

The interactive nature of some of Facebook’s ads can be your greatest asset. Sometimes the smallest tweaks can make a huge impact.

Getting People to Like You

That Like button on Facebook is like crack to a Facebook marketer. The beautiful thing about the Like button is when someone clicks on it, he or she is added to a list that you can see. Short term, it’s just a number that keeps climbing—but long term, it is a marketing list of people who can see your brand. The potential is the ability to market to people who are already captivated by your brand that want your products.

Facebook inserts the Like icon beneath every ad (see Figure 15.12). When users click on this link, they automatically Like your page and become a fan without even visiting it. The best part is that when they take this kind of action, you are not charged for a click.

FEEDBACK

If you choose to push your ad to an external URL, you will not be given the option of displaying the Like link on your ad.

So how do you get them to click that Like button and not the ad? There’s no foolproof way to do this, but if you place content in the ad that directs people to Like by clicking on the Like link below, you will have a better chance of these kind of conversions.

An example ad might read as follows:

Using Images to Draw People In

Use this section to upload an image for your ad. The image should be related to your product/service, and, to make it even more compelling, it should also be related to your title/body text for the ad.

WATCH OUT

Be careful if you decide to play the sex game in ads. By placing pictures of attractive women, you probably will get more clicks and Likes. The downside is that this often brings random nontargeted traffic.

You are limited to the size of the image that you can post on Facebook, so you want to be sure to choose an image that is clearly visible when it is small. The dimensions are limited to 110×80 pixels. Additionally, the file size of the image cannot exceed 5MB.

Also, here are some ideas that might help you to select great images that scream “click on me”:

WATCH OUT

Make sure to pre-size your images in a photo program like Photoshop or a free tool like Picnik.com before uploading. If you upload an image that’s not to scale, Facebook will resize it, but the focal point of the image might get lost in the automatic resize.

In the many ads we’ve run over the years, we have had the greatest success with ads that feature the following types of images:

Logos have worked very well with branded companies that people may recognize from multi-exposure in more than Facebook ads. The dogs and cupcakes we’ve run have been aimed at attracting women from their 30s to 50s.

You just never know what’s going to generate a click, so we encourage you to play with and test your ads per your given business.

Writing Effective Ads

Images are particularly important because you’re limited to 135 characters of text, and that text is a relatively small 11-point font.

Still, you do need to write copy for your ads. In Chapter 5, we encouraged you to divide your content among these categories:

We recommend using the same breakdowns when writing ad copy. Just because you’re writing ads doesn’t mean they have to be all marketing all the time. The most compelling marketing does not come off as selling, and so it follows that the most compelling ads shouldn’t come off as ads.

Have you ever read a really compelling magazine article that you didn’t notice was an ad until the very end? Maybe at the top or bottom of the page it was identified as a special advertising section. It was an ad, but disguised as content. This is how you want some of your ads to read. Not all of them, mind you, but a majority of them.

In order for you to make a connection to the people reading the ads, you need to relate to them on their level and in their language.