5 Surprising Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Ads. If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising, be sure to check out the Facebook ad tips in our beginner’s guide to advertising on Facebook and our complete guide to social media advertising to get a firm understanding of the different types of Facebook ads and how to use them effectively. Use the Facebook Pixel to refine and optimize your ads The Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code that, once added to your website, allows you to track how visitors interact with your site and how that relates to your Facebook ad campaigns. The New York Times uses the Facebook Pixel to track readers and target them with different creative based on how engaged they already are with the newspaper’s website and how likely they are to subscribe. After implementing this customization strategy, The New York Times saw a 25 percent reduction in cost per subscription and a 2.3 times increase in volume of subscription conversions. Show an ad for the exact product someone put in their shopping cart but didn’t buy Abandoned shopping carts are an all-too-familiar problem for most online marketers. Data from eMarketer shows that a retargeting message within an hour of abandoning the cart results in a 20.3 percent conversion rate. Use all the panes in a Carousel ad to create one big, compelling image The Facebook Carousel lets you include up to 10 cards, each featuring its own photo or video, into one ad. Notice how the captions only appear when the sound is turned off, so they don’t distract from the video content for viewers watching with the sound turned on. You can target people who live within a certain distance of your location, or only target people who are in your local area right now.
You probably know by now that advertising your business on Facebook is no longer an option, no matter which demographic you’re marketing to.
There have been rumblings in the media that younger people are moving away from Facebook, making the granddaddy of social networks a site primarily for, well, granddaddies. But it’s simply not true. eMarketer recently compiled an impressive collection of statistics showing how important Facebook is to millennials—including that eight in 10 millennial Facebook users use the network daily, and that 18- to 34-year-olds identified Facebook as their primary social platform.
If you’re just getting started with Facebook advertising, be sure to check out the Facebook ad tips in our beginner’s guide to advertising on Facebook and our complete guide to social media advertising to get a firm understanding of the different types of Facebook ads and how to use them effectively.
Once you’ve got the basics under your belt, it’s time to dive into more advanced ways to optimize Facebook ads to get the most from your social media advertising investment. Here are five surprising tricks you can use to do just that.
Bonus: Download a free guide that teaches you how to turn Facebook traffic into sales in four simple steps using Hootsuite.
1. Use the Facebook Pixel to refine and optimize your ads
The Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code that, once added to your website, allows you to track how visitors interact with your site and how that relates to your Facebook ad campaigns. Its functions can be broadly broken down into measurement and optimization.
In terms of measurement, the Facebook Pixel allows you to track conversions and use Audience Insights to get aggregate demographic, location, and purchase behavior data for your website visitors as well as detailed information about how users interact with your site. It also lets you see if and how your visitors switch between devices, like a phone and desktop.
On the optimization side, the pixel ensures you show the right ads to the right people based on the actions they’re most likely to take. You can retarget people who have already visited your website, and find new people who are similar to your best customers (using lookalike audiences).
The New York Times uses the Facebook Pixel to track readers and target them with different creative based on how engaged they already are with the newspaper’s website and how likely they are to subscribe.
Occasional readers see content recommendations with articles from sections of the Times website they have already visited. These people are likely not yet ready to pay for a subscription, so the point is to encourage them to take a no-commitment action—just heading back to the paper’s website to read more content—that helps build the relationship and may lead to a sale down the road.
Readers who are slightly more engaged with the paper get offers for low-commitment free subscription products like newsletters and apps.
Regular online readers, who are much more likely to be willing to pay for a subscription, are the only ones who see ads for a paid product. The subscription offers are customized based on the topics that most interest individual readers.
After implementing this customization strategy, The New York Times saw a 25 percent reduction in…
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