Facebook advertising, and paid social media in general, is a fantastic way to drive key results for your practice. Whether growing your community and presence on the Facebook platform itself, sending more traffic to your website, promoting an event or special offer, or getting more consultation sign-ups, Facebook ads can help you accomplish any number of different goals that are important for your practice’s success.
Facebook’s advertising platform is pretty user-friendly. It was deliberately designed to allow even the novice marketer to begin creating and running ads. However, this flat learning curve only extends so far. Beyond a certain level, the platform becomes very complex.
In fact, it is very easy to waste a lot of money if you don’t really know what you’re doing. An inexperienced advertiser that is not correctly implementing the Facebook Pixel, is not choosing the right campaigns types, is oversaturating their audience with excess and overlapping ad campaigns, or is not optimizing their existing campaigns are likely doing more harm than good.
Understanding the ins and outs of Facebook’s advertising platform, and the tools and technologies therein, is critical for success. In order to get the most mileage out of your campaigns and the best possible ROI from your advertising dollars, it pays to learn how to use all of these tools properly.
Preparing for a Successful Campaign
There are countless potential ways to utilize Facebook Ads to drive meaningful results for your practice. First and foremost, it’s important to establish what your overall practice goals are and what individual objectives need to be achieved in order to reach those goals. Or, likewise, what actions taken by an individual are valuable events to your practice.
I’m sure you’ve heard the “Rule of 7” before, which states that it takes an average of 7 touchpoints before someone buys a product or service. It’s easy to stay too narrowly focused on the end goals: leads, clients, patients, etc., and equally easy to forget that there are meaningful “conversion checkpoints” in the buying cycle. When you shift your thinking in this way, you can see how a certain action might not in itself produce a tangible return, but still contributes to results further down the funnel.
Maybe you want to run a video ad campaign featuring a great “About Our Practice” video that you had professionally produced. Creating that campaign, optimized for increasing video views average watch time, may not have a monetary value associated with it, but allows you to better target people further down the funnel and provide more relevant messaging, knowing that they’ve watched your video and are familiar with your brand. Again, there are countless possibilities herein.
Once you’ve made these determinations, you can then choose the appropriate Facebook campaign objective that will allow you to focus on those specific results. Likewise, you can better choose what content formats and ad placements are going to be most effective.
Here are a few resources that I recommend you review prior to launching any paid Facebook campaign:
- Beginner’s Guide to Advertising on Facebook
- Help: Choosing the Right Advertising Objective
- Facebook Ad Placements – Specs & Design Recommendations
- The Facebook Pixel | Facebook Business
- Facebook Advertising Policies
As I briefly mentioned, it is also of paramount importance that the Facebook Pixel is live and firing on your website. This is the only way that you can derive meaningful insights on how Facebook users are using your website and link results from ad campaigns directly with on-site events and results. The Facebook Pixel is what allows you to track and retarget website visitors. It will make all of your campaigns more effective, as it helps you to get the right message in front of the right people at the right time.
After Launch: The Initial Optimization Phase
OK, so you’ve gone through the process and have successfully created your first campaign. Your ads are now live and running. It’s easy to think that your work is done, but that is not the case. Optimization is an ongoing process!
It is apparent that ads are becoming increasingly personalized every day. It seems as though you think about something and the next minute, it pops up on your Facebook or Instagram feed.
With the increased amount of information we are able to collect from users on social platforms, marketers are benefiting greatly from the ability to create better-targeted ads. This makes the marketing world much more complex in that you can’t expect great results by simply making an ad and placing it anywhere: Optimization is integral.
Optimization is not only essential prior to a campaign’s launch; it is just as vital to analyze available data after the campaign has been running. After the initial launch of a campaign, it is crucial to analyze the results and adjust your ads accordingly to ensure its success going forward.
An important tool for this post-launch process is Facebook Ads Manager. Facebook Ads Manager offers you access to a multitude of performance metrics that have been tracked since your ad campaign was first launched.
Measuring Campaign Success
As I mentioned earlier, there are so many variables that go into making an ad successful. And, depending on the campaign objective, advertising goals may differ. Your practice can stay on track by identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as reach, likes, impressions, landing page views, clicks, etc. to measure campaign success.
Facebook Ads Manager helps with this process of comparing the actual campaign performance against the KPIs. You can easily locate the data under the “Explore” tab on the Facebook application. Within the platform, use the business account to decipher KPIs based on the campaign objective by customizing the performance columns to fit your needs.
Here is a screenshot of just a few of the metrics you can choose from:
Additionally, you are able to choose how you break down these metrics: by time, by delivery, or by action.
Creating Custom Reports
From here, you can conduct your custom analysis either within the Facebook application or in an exported Excel document. Say, for example, that you want to evaluate the success of your campaign by Time of Day. This report breaks down your KPIs by time and allows you to see when the ads generated the most leads, received the most engagement, etc.
Once you have identified the best times to schedule your ad, you can phase out those that are not contributing to the overall performance. For instance, most people are asleep from 11pm to 6am. If you have an ad running 24 hours a day, you are not going to get the best possible return on advertising spend (ROAS) during this overnight time frame.
By focusing on the hours where KPIs are highest, you are more likely to generate the best overall results for your campaign. Optimizing your campaign also enables you to save money on ads, enjoy a higher return on investment, and put more money back into your practice.
Conclusion
Technology is changing fast and will continue to impact the way you market your practice. But, it’s important not to look at this as a negative. You can also grow and change with the times. By taking advantage of all the available resources and new ways that marketers can meet the needs of their audience, your business can prosper.
Many believe that once an ad campaign is launched, their job is done, but it is not. By monitoring your campaign post-launch, you can make adjustments to optimize its impact and create more value for your target audience.
As you can see, advertising on Facebook is a robust component of any successful digital marketing strategy. However, the old adage certainly applies to this platform: “easy to learn, hard to master.” Call MyAdvice at 435.575.7470 today to see how we can help your practice!