First, we’d like to remind you that there are companies that spend millions running their adverts on the platform, while there are those that spend only a dollar per day for the same — and as it turns out, majority of the companies that advertise on the platform skew towards the $1 daily budget.
Regardless of the amount of money you’re willing to spend, your aim should be on spending it really well. Instead of thinking in the lines of how much will it cost you to advertise on the platform — think in terms of what are you likely to achieve with a $100 marketing budget.
General Overview
Advertising on Facebook isn’t as plain as some people love to assume. There’s so much at play, and so much that goes into developing a basic understanding of how everything works.
By that we mean, you have to develop a deeper understanding of the kind of audience you’re targeting together with a bidding plan that will go a long way to ensure that you’re able to wring the most value out of every penny you spend advertising on the platform.
Imagine going for lunch for $30. How much is the lunch going to cost you?
That’s exactly how Facebook advertisement works. Unless you’re planning to eat more than your budget allows you to, what you spend on lunch should never cost you more than the $30 you have.
However, you might want to make sure that $30 will get you the best meal you can find. The trick can be with choosing a specific restaurant and limiting your option to a particular choice of meals.
This is in so many ways similar to how Facebook advertisement works. Meaning, the question you should be asking shouldn’t be about the cost of advertising on the platform; but how far can you stretch the budget you have, however small it is, to get the most value out of it.
There are two things involved here: i) if you take your time to understand how the platform works, and develop a clear focus and figure out a simple strategy on how to best run the ads, you’ll be surprised by how cost-effective the platform really is but ii) if you jump into it blindly, then you’ll live to resent the platform having lost all of your advertisement money with nothing of substantial value gained from it.
Costly Mistakes People Make While Advertising on Facebook
As with anything else in life, one of the gravest mistakes you can do while advertising on Facebook or any other platform for that matter is jumping straight into it without a strategy. This is a common mistake among rookie marketers that are just getting started — they simply jump into it guns blazing, with no strategy or real concept of what it is they’re doing or hope to achieve by the end of it all.
So soon or later they find themselves trapped in a hole, and with nothing they can do within their willpower to redeem themselves or salvage what’s left.
Good thing with Facebook advertisements is that it’s one of the easiest platforms to break down and figure out where to make necessary calibrations to drive big results and avoid overspending.
In which case, a closer look reveals these are the common mistakes new marketers make all the time while advertising on the platform:
- Broad Targets: Facebook gives you an option to narrow down your target to a specific audience or user base. And unless you know how to get it done right, then there isn’t much to gain by running an ad on the platform.
- They fail to implement custom audiences
- They simply run the ad without a re-targeting strategy that will be working towards raising their conversion rate.
- They run the ads blindly, having tested nothing to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Broad Targets
This is an easy trap to fall into if you’re making your first attempt to advertise on Facebook. For starters, Facebook boasts an insane amount of targeting options that are likely to leave you excited and equally confused at the same time.
Before you let your excitement push you towards making random guesses while setting up your targets, there are a number of things that you’d want to keep in mind while setting your ads to avoid wasting your impressions.
Age Range: Take your time to think about your target audience. What age range do you reckon a great majority of them fall into?
The whole idea sounds simple and self explanatory, considering the last thing you’d want at this point is for your ads to show up to random people that have nothing to do with products or services you’re offering.
Interests: Facebook gives you the option to narrow down your targets to their specific interests. However, while at it, you don’t have to be vague about the whole idea of adjusting your target audience based on what they’re big on.
For instance, where you’re targeting music enthusiasts, you’d want to narrow down to a specific demographic by focusing on a specific genre. If it’s dubstep, you’d want to make sure you’re targeting dubstep buffs and NOT just random music fans. The point is to spend a good chunk of your time refining your targeted interests. Try as much as you possibly can to make it relevant to the kind of audience you might be interested in.
In whatever you do, don’t give in to the broad-thinking mindset. You want to be sure that every single person that gets to see your ad has at least some vested interest in what it is that you’re offering.
Envision yourself as the end user. What topics do you think would be more relevant to this particular user? As you’re soon to find out, an interest that’s more specific in nature is a hundred times better than a broad interest that you randomly pulled out of thin air.
Location: it’s simple logic, you don’t want to market outside your target audience. This is particular important if your customers have to find your physical store to make a purchase.
In other words, if the bulk of your customers can be found in a particular region, don’t go on a limb to target the entire nation. This is a common mistake rookie advertisers in Singapore make all the time. This granular aspect of Facebook advertisement is what sets the platform miles apart from the rest of the platforms it’s in competition with. Just as important as specifying the location of your target audience is to mention the language of your demographic. For instance, if your core customers speak English, then be sure to use it in trimming down your targeted audience.
This is important as it also helps to define the kind of individual that would be more interested in checking you out.
Estimated Audience Reach: This is another critical filter that can mean the difference between running an effective ad campaign on Facebook or losing your hard-earned marketing cash without gaining anything of value.
Don’t ignore the reach — where you suspect your estimated reach is blown out, play around with the different variable as you attempt to narrow down your audience into specifics. And while at it, you’ll want to keep your eyes on the meter as you make necessary adjustments to the target audience you’ve set.
Testing the Facebook Ads You Run
Before you rush into running your Facebook ads officially, take your sweet time to test out your strategy and weigh in on its effectiveness. The last thing you want to do is to throw in your entire marketing budget in a strategy you’re NOT sure of or cannot make near-accurate estimations on the expected results.
Don’t throw your marketing money into an unproven marketing campaign, whether it’s on Facebook or any other platform.
The last thing you want to do is to wager all your marketing money on something you’re NOT sure of. Learn to shift your thoughts from result-oriented to one that will be more focused on testing different things out.
Instead of taking a full dive into the water, draw your feet first as you slowly move the rest of the body — and it’s only after you’re completely sure of how cold the results can get that you can go ahead and take a full plunge.
What Facebook Charges you for?
Facebook has different types of advertisements, each of which charges you for impressions. You pay to run any of the ads, whether or NOT the impressions earned translate to a conversion.
Also featured on the ads are ten different objectives that define your Call to Action (CTA). For instance, you have an option to “boost your posts,” “get people to claim your offer”, and to “get installs of your app” to mention a few. Each of these objective is optimized for a specific course of action like claim offers, page likes, or installs.
Worth mentioning is that while some of these objectives will be charging you for the impressions created, some of them charge you for specific course of actions.
But when you look at it closely — what’s the value of running an ad that will be charging you for both impressions and conversions, when there’s an alternative ad that’s solely focused in getting you more impressions or conversion?
Well, that’s where things get murkier. For starters, you have to consider the fact that Facebook advertisement costs vary greatly. Speaking of which, ads with impression and conversion charges will be charging you a lot less for impressions — and that’s because it will be compensating for the exorbitant conversion pricing.
On the other end, impression-based objectives aren’t nearly as converting as conversion-based ones. Meaning you have to spend more on them to chock a conversion out of them, otherwise you’ll be wasting your ad money with nothing substantial to show at the end of it all.
When Does Facebook Charge You?
Facebook may appear like a simple platform that anyone can easily navigate and figure it out, but it certainly isn’t. This is particular the case when you look at their charging system and the criteria they used to determine when exactly you’ll be charged and how much.
In other words, the system has a complex billing threshold.
This billing threshold only applies when you’re using a tentative payment method such as credit card, PayPal, or debit card. However, if you’re using direct debit, where your ad account links directly to your bank account, then Facebook doesn’t see the need to impose a billing threshold.
And whether or NOT you have a billing threshold, Facebook will still be charging you at the end of the month for the outstanding balance.
You also have an option to manually adjust your billing threshold by choosing from five preset levels, $25, $50, $250, $500 and $750.
What this means is that you’ll be charged immediately upon hitting the threshold you’ve selected. So should you set your billing threshold to $25 and you end up spending $30 worth of ads, $25 will be deducted from your account first,, while the remaining $5 will have to wait until you get to $50 for the next $25 to be deducted.
There’s nothing complicated about changing your billing threshold; all you have to do is head to the ad manager on Facebook and click on billing, followed by billing threshold. Once done, you can go ahead and click on manage to change the threshold amount and that’s pretty much like it.
Campaign Spending Limits
Facebook has another option for setting up the spending limit. However, this option only applies if you’re using a Google chrome app called Facebook Ads Power. You’re encouraged to use this app regardless, whether or NOT you’re interested in setting up a spending limit to your campaign.
The tool can be a bit complicated to use, but it’s extremely important if you’re hoping to start making the most out of your ad campaigns.
The campaign spending limit operates a whole lot like lifetime spending limit. The only difference is that this limit is usually set at an ad level, and it’s only applicable at the campaign level.
In other words, it’s a limit set to prevent you from overspending on a campaign, and NOT on an account as with the lifetime spending limit.
Maximum Spend Limits
Facebook is flexible enough to accommodate all kinds and sizes of business — starting with small businesses that can only part away with $1 per day for the campaigns to muti-billion companies such as Coca-Cola that have millions to spend on a single campaign.
This means you’re the person to decide how much you’ll be spending per campaign as the platform doesn’t mention any discernible maximum limit. So as long as you have the money to run the ads, Facebook will keep on running them, and it’s upon you to play around with the tool and features they’ve provided to make sure you’re wringing the most value out of your campaign money.
The Take away
Posting your ads on Facebook has got less to do with the kind of money you’re willing to invest on the platform and more with the quality of the campaigns you run. Of course, you’ll want to spend more to reach more people, but unless you’ve tested your strategy to figure out what works best for your business, then you can’t be sure if the campaign aligns well enough with your business goals.
For more information regarding Facebook ads and how to stretch your dollar and make it reach further, you’re hereby asked to contact MediaOne today with your query or help with running your Facebook ad Campaigns.
