For many businesses, the Facebook Ads platform is the wild west. The platform is constantly evolving with updates to the algorithm, new features, and changing consumer preferences that can make or break your ad creative. As a preferred Facebook Business Partner, we’ve had a front-row seat to the changes in the platform and how they impact campaigns. In this blog post, we’re sharing our most up-to-date learnings for getting consistent results in the Facebook Ads platform.

Target In-Market Prospects

While it’s common knowledge that Facebook can target users based on their demographics, location, and platform behavior. A lesser-known tactic is to leverage interest data to find people in the market for your product or service. To leverage this data, we target Facebook and Instagram users who have visited pages or websites related to popular brands in a given industry. As an example, when creating ads for our apartment clients, we target Facebook and Instagram users who have searched for apartments on popular listing sites. This ensures communities meet equal housing opportunity advertising requirements for the industry while marketing to an audience that is more likely to convert into a lead or resident.

Allow Facebook to Manage Ad Placements

In the old days of Facebook Advertising, we manually selected placements and segmented campaigns by platform as a common practice. Today, Facebook has become more sophisticated in adapting ads to fit more than one format and they can deliver impressions intelligently across a variety of ad placements. It’s now more common for advertisers to give Facebook control over ad delivery and to use ads that fit across a variety of placements. 

The one exception to this best practice we’ve experienced is with Stories ads. While you can still run this placement with an ad designed to run in the Facebook feed, Facebook will auto-adjust your photo or video to show a blurred background at the top and bottom of the content. Since these placements are presented in a full-screen photo and video format, we recommend using a vertical video or photo designed just for Stories so your ad looks more native to viewers watching Instagram and Facebook Stories.

Avoid Optimizing Campaigns in the Learning Phase

When an ad is first launched in the Facebook Ads platform it can take a few days for Facebook to gather enough data about users’ reactions to optimize delivery. This is known as the “learning phase.” It’s best to avoid making changes while the ad is in this state. If changes are made, Facebook will reset the learning phase and keep your ad in this stage for a longer period of time. The faster you can get out of this stage the better. Once you exit this stage, Facebook will optimize your ad delivery and maximize your budget. 

Your budget and audience are both variables that impact how quickly you exit the learning phase. The larger your audience and daily budget the faster your ad will exit this stage. If you have a very small budget and a highly targeted audience, it will take Facebook longer to reach enough users to exit the learning stage. 

Update Ads Every 30-40 Days

At the same time, you don’t want to avoid updating your Facebook ads altogether. After analyzing thousands of ads we found that ads that ran for less than 15 days or over 50 days don’t perform as well as ads that run for 30-45 days. This showed us that the sweet spot for updating an ad is monthly. If you make updates too quickly you run the risk of disturbing the learning phase and you lose the momentum of Facebook’s data collection and optimizations. If you let an ad rotate for too long it can end up delivering a high volume of impressions to the same audience and become stale.

Conclusion

We hope you found these tips helpful in understanding how the Facebook ad platform works and what you can do to get the most out of the platform. For more tips like these check out How to Create Thumb-Stopping Moments, Facebook Domain Verification for iOS14, and other articles about Facebook advertising on our blog. 

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Do you ever feel like your marketing messages are getting lost in a sea of content? You have reason to feel like that since the average person sees 4,000-10,000 ads per day. While Facebook’s ad network provides advertisers with incredible tools to reach consumers across today’s most popular social media apps, it offers no guarantees that your ad will receive engagement or result in revenue-driving actions. It’s crucial for companies to create compelling ad content to get the most out of their ad dollars. To help you rise above today’s tsunami of ad content, we’re sharing five tips for creating thumb-stopping Facebook ads.

Establish Relevancy

It’s one thing to capture your customer’s attention and an entirely different thing to hold their attention. The key difference is relevance. One of the most powerful tools that Facebook offers advertisers is the ability to target an audience based on their interests and behavior. Use this feature to your advantage and create ads that show your audience you understand them. 

Three ways to establish relevancy:

• Speak your audience’s language. Does your target audience use emojis or pop culture references when they post to social media? Try incorporating them into your ad copy.
• Address pain points. Are you promoting a product or service that makes a working professional’s life easier? Tell them how your offering can help solve specific stressors or inconveniences they face in their day-to-day life.
• Speak to objections. Are competing products or services missing the mark? Explain how your offering is different and describe how it meets the needs similar products have failed to address.

Design With Sound Off for Facebook and On for Instagram Stories

Don’t assume that all of your video viewers are watching your ad with sound on. 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound, while 60% of Instagram Stories are watched with the sound on (Instagram for Business). When creating Facebook and Instagram feed ads, show before you tell. Avoid filming video content that is solely based on a person speaking. Instead, use visual cues and copy in the ad to ensure your audience understands what your ad is trying to communicate. When designing for Instagram Stories, incorporate audio when it enhances your ad experience but similar to feed ads, don’t rely on it to communicate your message.

Design for Mobile

Most Facebook and Instagram users access these platforms on their mobile devices which means they consume content in Facebook and Instagram’s feed and in Instagram Stories. To maximize space in the mobile feed, use vertical or square video and photo ads. 

One of the most compelling aspects of Stories as an ad placement is the full-screen experience. Create vertical video content to design your ad content to fit in this ad format. This will help your content appear more native in Stories and take advantage of the visual real estate this placement offers.

Capture Attention with Color

Communicate with color. Facebook and Instagram are both visual platforms. The colors you use in your imagery, graphic design, and video can play a role in the emotions that a user experiences when they see your ad. Leverage color psychology to your advantage and select colors that elicit reactions that align with your ad message. Facebook advises that advertisers use contrasting colors to help users differentiate between your product and the background colors in your photo or video content.

Deliver Value Through the Ad Experience

The value your ad content delivers has an impact on how engaged your audience will be with your brand. What “value adds” do ad viewers find the most engaging? In a consumer survey from Sprout Social, here’s what people said was thumb-stopping: 

• 41% said the most engaging social ad content entertained them
• 37% said it offered a discount 
• 33% said it taught them something 
• 26% said it referenced their interests 
• 20% said it told a story
• 10% said it came from a brand their friends like

If you can find a way to make your ads entertaining, promote an offer, or teach your audience something, you are more likely to hold their attention and engage them with your product or service.

Conclusion 

While it’s more competitive than ever to stand out in today’s online social networks, today’s advertisers have more tools at their disposal than they ever had. Facebook’s ad platform is offering more ways to create compelling content that drives awareness and ad engagement across their family of apps. We hope you found these tips helpful and utilize the recommendations to create top-performing ad campaigns. To learn more about Facebook Advertising with Conversion Logix visit this page. 

For more Facebook ad tips watch the webinar “Harness the Power of Facebook Advertising”

The post How to Create Thumb-Stopping Facebook Ads appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Prepare for iOS 14 with Domain Verification

With the launch of iOS 14, website event tracking among Apple users on devices running iOS 14 will be limited to those who opt in to accept data tracking. In preparation for the changes iOS 14 will bring, advertisers can take steps to optimize their event tracking by verifying their domain. 

Verifying your website domain allows you to select the eight website events your business would like to track for iOS 14 users who come to your site via a Facebook or Instagram ad. Domain verification also allows you to prioritize which events are most valuable for your business to track.

Ready to verify your domain? Find steps for verifying your domain, details on how domain verification helps you track iOS users, and insights on setting up your event tracking below.

Steps to Verify Your Domain

1. Go to business.facebook.com/settings
2. Go to the left hand nav bar > Brand safety > Domains > Add > [enter your domain]
3. Copy the TXT record into your DNS records (i.e. GoDaddy)
4. In your DNS records, select the TXT type, paste your TXT record, and save. 
5. Wait 72 hours, go back into Facebook Business Manager, and then click to verify your domain (you will do this in the same location where you entered your domain Brand safety > Domains > Verify).

Additional Resources:

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/domain-verification/verifying-your-domain/
• https://www.facebook.com/business/help/286768115176155?id=199156230960298
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/domain-verification/

Domain Verification Details

Limited to eight total event types

For iOS 14 users who choose to opt in to data tracking on your website, you will only be able to track a total of eight event types for those users. What does that mean exactly? There is a list of website events that Facebook tracks when a user reaches your website via an ad (i.e. Schedule, Submit Application, Contact, etc). From the full list of website events that Facebook is capable of tracking, you are able to select only eight events to track for all iOS 14 users who opt in.

One event type per engagement

Though you have the ability to track a total of eight different event types, due to iOS 14’s more stringent data policy, you will only be able to track one event type per engagement. That means each time a user visits your website via a Facebook or Instagram ad, you will only be able to track one event that they complete. If a user triggers a “Find Location” event, “Contact” event, and “Schedule” event in a single session on your website, only one of those events will be tracked.

In light of these limitations, Facebook is allowing advertisers to prioritize events. You will now be able to rank your eight events by the value they bring to your business. If multiple events are triggered, Facebook will record the event highest on your prioritization list. 

In the previous example where a “Find Location” event, “Contact” event, and “Schedule” event are all triggered, Facebook would reference your prioritization list. Let’s say that your prioritization list is as follows: 

1. Submit Application
2. Schedule
3. Lead
4. Contact
5. Subscribe
6. Find Location
7. View Content
8. Search

In this scenario, Facebook would only track the “Schedule” event. 

Event Selection and Prioritization

Choosing your events is a crucial, but fairly straightforward process. You should select the eight events that provide the most value to your business. After initial setup, you can change which eight events you decide to track or reprioritize your events. However, making changes to your event selection and prioritization will cause your ads to pause for 3 days. Avoiding long pauses in your campaign is vital for campaign health, so we advise carefully choosing and prioritizing your events so you can get it right the first time. 

Need help setting up your events? We’ve got you covered.

If you are a Conversion Logix client, we will work with your team to select the best eight events and set them up for you. Please reach out to your account manager. 

If you are not a Conversion Logix client, we are happy to answer questions you have about tracking events from Facebook traffic and getting the most from your social ad spend. Schedule a call anytime.

The post Facebook Domain Verification for iOS 14 Update appeared first on Conversion Logix.

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced that in iOS14, app developers will be required to prompt their users to opt-in to targeted advertising, rather than requiring an opt-out option instead. 

This sent shockwaves throughout the tech industry among advertising platforms, online publishers, and app developers.

What Does This Mean for Advertisers?

If mobile app users do not opt into online behavior tracking, ad targeting reliant on this data will become less relevant and ad rates will likely drop as a consequence. In 2017 Apple launched a similar change to its Safari browser and publishers saw ad rates decline for Safari users by 60% in the two years following the change.

Who Will Be Impacted by iOS 14?

Facebook announced that this would have a significant impact on its audience network revenue, potentially decreasing it by 50%. 

While it sounds like a doom and gloom scenario for advertisers, the change isn’t likely to have as big of an impact on Facebook advertising in industries outside of app development.

Facebook’s audience network is driven by mobile in-app ad placements, and is used heavily by developers to target mobile app users using Facebook’s “app download” campaigns. One of the most common use cases for audience network targeting is mobile game advertising where game developers target gamers inside of popular mobile apps.

The groups that will be hit the hardest by this change will be publishers and app developers who make most of their revenue selling ad placements and advertisers in the mobile app space who utilize audience network targeting to reach their target audience in Facebook.

While advertisers outside of mobile app development use Facebook’s audience network to reach their target audience across a wider variety of ad placements, this type of targeting makes up a much smaller portion of their overall campaign. Most of the impressions delivered on Facebook’s ad platform are delivered across placements in Facebook’s collection of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger).

How Will This Affect Conversion Logix Advertisers?

At Conversion Logix, we don’t see this change having a significant impact on our campaigns. 91% of all of our ad impressions are delivered outside of Audience Network. Most of our ad placements within Facebook and Instagram go to users scrolling the feed. 

Following the announcement from Apple, Facebook said it will not elect to collect Apple’s identifier for advertisers (IDFA) on their own apps on iOS 14 devices. This means that app users on Facebook’s apps won’t see the message asking users to opt in to be tracked across apps and websites owned by other companies. In place of this Facebook is releasing an “Off Facebook Activity feature” which gives users a summary of the information other apps have sent Facebook and presents them with the option to disconnect future off Facebook activity from their account. Users can elect to disconnect from all outside activity or remove specific apps and websites. 

At the end of Facebook’s announcement to partners, they said they expect less impact to their own advertising business, and will remain committed to supporting advertisers and publishers through these updates. 

While we may see a ripple effect of prices increasing across Facebook ad placements outside of audience network, the impact should be minimal. 

When Will the Change Take Place?

Apple originally announced that this change would take effect when iOS14 launches in October, but after hearing from Facebook and other publishers, it decided to push the effective date until 2021. 

Additional Sources

Vox

Ad Exchanger

Ars Technica

The post Facebook’s Response to iOS 14 and How it Will Impact Advertisers appeared first on Conversion Logix.

You have an amazing website, you have a great sales team, and you are providing leads with a compelling way to engage with your community online, but your units are still sitting vacant. What’s missing and how do you fix it? It’s at this point in the process that leasing teams turn to internet listing sites to bring in traffic. They look to these listings as a solution to their vacancy problem. After all, this is where people go when they look for an apartment, this must be the best place to get leads, right? So you make sure your community posts listings across popular listing sites and then you wait for the leads to come in the door.

If you’ve tried this and aren’t getting the leads you were hoping for or paid way too much to advertise across these sites without great results, know that listsings aren’t the only way or the best way to target apartment seekers online.

In Facebook’s ad platform you can target the same types of people in your local area who are searching for an apartment but with more targeting options, more ad formats and greater control over the cost of the ads and the landing page experience. 

Who Should You Target in Facebook Ads?

Facebook is one of the most powerful ad platforms out there. Not only does Facebook know who is in the market for an apartment, the platform can tell which apartment seekers have a pet, whether they like to eat at fancy restaurants or cook at home, and if they love to work out at the gym. When you advertise to apartment seekers using Facebook’s ad platform you can promote your apartment community using a variety of detailed targeting options across Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook’s Audience Network.

Inside the Facebook ad platform, you can specifically target people in a local area who are searching for apartments on internet listing sites while mixing in all sorts of interest and behavior-based targeting to find the right audience for your community. These are some of the most popular apartment listing sites that are available as targeting options inside Facebook’s ad platform.

• Apartments.com
• Apartment Guide
• Zillow
• HotPads
• Apartment List
• Zumper
• Rent.com

Attributes You Can’t Target in Facebook Ads

Due to fair housing laws, there are several things apartment communities either cannot or should not use to target apartment seekers online. These targeting options extend beyond Facebook ads but Facebook has become one of the first platforms to preventively restrict advertisers from targeting people in a way that violates fair housing laws. Here are some of the targeting options you either cannot or should not use in your Facebook ad campaign.

• Gender
• Age
• Income
• Educational Status and University Attended
• Family Status
• Zipcode (you can still target people in a 15-mile radius)

Get the Best Results for Your Budget

After running thousands of apartment ads on the platform we’ve come to learn what works and what doesn’t. Successful apartment ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram require a thoughtful blend of in-market and interest-based targeting while keeping the audience size and targeting costs in line with the budget a community has on the platform. Targeting strategies have varying costs and some interests and in-market strategies have proven to be more successful than others. As Facebook grows its platform, new targeting options and improvements to old targeting options become available. Advertisers who’ve achieved this level of scale are able to apply the lessons they’ve learned and the tests they’ve run to give your community a leg up on the platform.

While ILS sites often require lofty budgets for advertising and present your ad next to competing properties in your area, Facebook and Instagram give you many ad formats and placement options for you to capture your prospect’s attention and keep them on your website, rather than one that markets your competitors. Facebook makes it possible to reach the people who visit listing sites in a more targeted way while using optimization strategies that help you see better results for your budget. Bidding strategies and conversion tracking can help play a role in getting communities a better return on their ad spend.

The Post-Ad Experience

Once you start generating engagement from your Facebook ad, you can send these prospects to specific pages on your website, prompt them to schedule a tour and add these leads to an email list or retarget them on the Facebook platform. We’ve seen success by using interstitials that prompt people to claim an offer or schedule a tour after clicking an ad. By sending people to your website where you control the post-ad click experience, your community has more tools at their disposal to convert prospects into leads, tours, and leases.

Learn More About Facebook Ads

Whether you need a larger audience or a smaller more qualified one, Facebook’s ad platform gives you an wider array of customization options and offers a more powerful platform for advertising than internet listing sites. When your current traffic level isn’t cutting it and you need to generate leads quickly, targeting apartment seekers on Facebook and Instagram can help your community reach their leasing goals faster. If you’re interested in learning more about Facebook advertising for apartments, check out some of the insights we’ve shared in these blog posts.

Boost Posts vs. Ads on Facebook & Instagram

Carousel Ads vs. Single Image Ads on Facebook & Instagram

Other Ways to Target Apartment Seekers Online

Facebook and Instagram aren’t the only platforms that let you target apartment seekers with visual rich media. Display targeting and YouTube advertising both offer audience targeting options that let you promote your community across popular websites. YouTube advertising makes it possible to target people on YouTube who are searching for an apartment in Google and Display platforms let you target in-market apartment segments that pull in interest, website browsing and search data to find new prospects for your apartment community. 

While Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube offer powerful advertising opportunities, they limit you to the placements within their platform (or partner network in the case of Facebook’s Audience Network). Display advertising makes it possible to reach people on a much bigger network of websites which helps you promote your community in your area in more online spaces and to a bigger audience. If you are interested in learning more about how we use Display advertising to generate leads for apartment communities stay tuned for our upcoming Display Advertising article where we share the industry-leading tracking and optimization techniques we’ve used over the past few years to build superior Display advertising campaigns.

The post How to Target Apartment Seekers on Facebook and Instagram appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Gone are the days of reaching everyone in your social network on Facebook and Instagram. It’s not uncommon for businesses to reach only 2-4% of their fans on Facebook with each organic post. Businesses looking to extend their reach on the world’s most popular social networks have two choices to get their message in front of potential customers: boost posts or run Facebook Ads campaigns. While boosting posts might be a great solution for social media influencers and bloggers looking to build up engagement rates or get more blog post views, most businesses are looking for a greater return on investment from these networks. If you’re a business looking to use social media to generate sales, you should be running Facebook Ads, here’s why.

What are “Boosted Posts”?

Companies that create a business page on Facebook or a business account on Instagram, have the option to promote an existing or new post as a boosted post. These posts then show up in the Facebook or Instagram newsfeed as a sponsored post.

Boost posts give you the ability to select targeting parameters (demographic, location, and interest targeting), a budget, a CTA, an objective, and the length of time you want the post to run for.

What’s the difference between boost posts and Facebook ads?

Facebook ads offer a much more robust set of features and better performance than boost posts. These are some of the critical differences between the two.

• Ads manager allows you to select different ad formats. Using Facebook and Instagram ads you can choose to show a single image, carousel, video, or slideshow ad.
• Your ad placements go beyond the newsfeed. Advertisers have the ability to show ads in Stories, Facebook Marketplace, in the right-hand column, in Instant Articles, within videos, and in Messenger. Boost posts only show up in the newsfeed.
• Boost posts only offer three objectives: post engagement, messages, or website visits. Facebook ads offer a multitude of objectives. Some of the more popular ones are website traffic, leads, conversions, and video views. When you select one of these objectives Facebook will deliver your ad the users who are more likely to take your desired action.
• Advertisers can use a pixel installed on your company website that communicates with ads manager to create retargeting campaigns. These campaigns allow you to send an ad to warmer leads who’ve already visited your website.
• In Facebook ads, you can create look-a-like audiences. Facebook can take an audience or list of customers and find people on Facebook similar to this group to send your ad to.
• Ads manager gives companies in-depth reporting.
• Ads give you the option to run A/B tests.

Why ads are worth the investment.

Boost posts are designed to help Facebook and Instagram users expand their reach on the platform. They aren’t designed to be used as a robust and highly targeted advertising solution for businesses looking to generate leads and conversions.

The multitude of targeting, testing, optimization, and format options that are available with Facebook and Instagram ads lead to better ad performance and better tracking than boost posts. The money you invest in these two types of campaigns is the same. The real difference is that one boosts your vanity metrics and the other makes it easier to generate meaningful business results.

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