What is Facebook advertising, how does it work, who should use it and why is it important to include it in the media plan?
Today, thanks to Facebook advertising , now part of the larger Meta advertising system, an ad can potentially reach 2.93 billion people : over 35% of the world's population. In addition, the platform's active user base is constantly growing, albeit more slowly than in the past.
What is Facebook advertising?
Facebook ads are paid posts that companies use to promote their products and/or services to users on the social media. You can target users based on:
Demographic data;
Position;
Interests;
Behaviors;
More profile information.
The way it works is very simple: companies set an advertising budget , daily or total, and the platform shows the ads to those it considers as potentially interested people based on the assets (copy and creative of the ads) and their behaviors in real time . This is possible thanks to machine learning algorithms, which understand, follow and record every single action of the users.
Unless otherwise specified when creating your campaign, Facebook ads appear in multiple placements: user feeds, Facebook Stories, Messenger, Marketplace, and more. They are distinguished from organic posts by the “Sponsored” tag under the page name and additional features, such as Call to Action buttons.
How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook?
There is no precise answer to this question. The cost of listings varies based on several factors, among which we can highlight:
Campaign objective , for example, generally speaking, interaction objective ads cost less than those structured for lead generation;
Audience targeting , where it is usually more expensive to reach an extremely narrow audience than a larger one;
Industry competitiveness , with costs typically increasing based on how many competitors are trying to reach the same audience;
Time of year , for example November and December, with Black Friday and Christmas approaching, you may see an increase in costs.
However, a potential daily budget can be calculated based on the cost per result , according to the following formula:
(Cost per result x 50) : 7 = daily budget
Since the system optimizes after recording about 50 events, we tend to multiply by 50 in order to find an ideal daily budget to start from. Obviously, this is a hypothetical basis, which will then have to vary based on the KPI.
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How Facebook Advertising Works
The first thing to do when creating a Facebook campaign is to identify a budget to allocate to it, taking into account the objective with which you are creating it. The CPM, in fact, can vary significantly based on the objective, taking into account that, generally speaking, a conversion has a higher cost than an interaction .
Meta has recently simplified campaign objectives , reducing their number. When creating a campaign on Facebook you can choose between:
awareness , which allows you to reach the greatest number of people who might remember that specific advert;
traffic , to redirect people to a destination outside of Meta , such as a website or application;
interaction , useful when you want to improve user engagement with a given content;
contacts , to be used to collect contacts via messages, form registration or calls;
app promotion , to encourage the download of an application ;
sales , to identify all those people who are most likely to purchase the promoted products/services.
As already mentioned, the CPM is extremely variable based on the objective and to reduce costs it is essential to identify the correct one , as well as it is essential to work day after day on the necessary optimizations. Once the objective has been chosen, various parameters will then need to be set, including:
budget , at the campaign or ad group level as needed;
