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.

Recently we touched base with our new Director of Ad Operations, Mark Skalla, about advances in digital marketing and how Conversion Logix is leveraging new technologies for our clients.

Mark, what new marketing technologies are you and the team working on?

We have a lot of exciting ad technologies and strategies we’re testing right now to help our clients get more leads, appointments, and sales. We’re exploring and testing dynamic display ads, exploring display networks that leverage avatars, and the ad placement opportunity in Instagram Reels. 

Let’s start with dynamic display ads and why they’re beneficial to our clients.

When a prospect searches for a multifamily apartment or senior living community there’s a lot of information they want to know—how many available units, number of bedrooms, square footage, price, etc. Our clients want to display this information in an ad, however static ads become obsolete quickly due to changes in occupancy. Recently we started testing dynamic display ads that pull property information from a client’s website, populates custom ad templates, and then launches multiple up-to-date ads. Essentially, clients will pre-qualify prospects with ad information so when the prospect schedules a tour with Schedule Genie, there is a stronger chance of closing the lease. We’re rigorously testing this ad technology and can’t wait to offer it to our clients when it’s ready to go-live.

There’s a lot of speculation about the deprecation of cookies. How is Conversion Logix preparing for this change?

Yes, there is a lot of talk about Google deprecating cookies. Although it’s several years away (end of 2023), we’re proactively exploring ways to provide the same relevant service of targeting prospects so clients continue to have access to their intended audiences. We’re currently exploring and testing the use of additional ad networks with large data sets. These networks aggregate information about people so you can market to a group versus an individual. For example, let’s say you’re interested in a one bedroom apartment in Portland, you like gardening, and you buy dog toys for your pup. These ad networks group a prospect into different data sets—someone seeking an apartment, garden enthusiast, and dog lover—then retarget groups of people who may be interested in a property, product, etc.  We’re also testing new ArtificiaI Intelligence audiences to further our reach and scale in light of the deprecation of cookies.

Instagram recently announced ad placement in Reels. Tell us more about this new ad option.

Reels invites you to create 15-second multi-clip videos with audio, effects, and new creative tools.  Conversion Logix is an early adopter of Reels ad placement which gives our clients a competitive advantage by enabling visibility on an emerging social advertising platform.   We have a talented and tenacious team that is always looking for new ad opportunities to maximize clients’ social ad spend.

Stay on the lookout for more Ahead of the Curve blog posts to learn more about Conversion Logix’s end-to-end marketing solution. To learn more about how we can enable you to accelerate lead acquisition and unveil a prospect’s journey to give you powerful insights that drive ROI, schedule a call to learn more. 

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Instagram Stories was introduced back in 2016 and since then it has taken off to become one of the most used features on Instagram. The Facebook-owned, 15-second format has allowed businesses to create engrossing and powerful advertising for a wide audience. Before jumping straight into brainstorming your quarter-minute masterpiece, let’s go over the 5 things you need to know about creating Stories ads for your apartment community.

1. Best Way to Reach Millennials and Gen Z

Millennials and Gen Zers are a huge segment of apartment renters. Instagram Stories is a great way to reach this demographic. 60% of Millennials and Gen Zers watch and post stories to their account, while 25% actively watch Stories of products and services they want to buy. Still not convinced you’ll be able to reach a younger audience with Instagram Stories? Almost two-thirds of US-based Instagrammers are 19-29 years old, a higher proportion than almost any other social media platform.

2. Higher Reach

At the end of the day, if no one sees your ad, they can’t take action. Over 500 million Instagram users watch Stories on a daily basis, and the relatively new format means you won’t be competing with as many advertisers as you would on traditional Instagram ads.

3. Powerful Targeting

Facebook has one of the most robust audience targeting tools in the industry. Marketers will be happy to know that all those powerful systems can be applied to Instagram Stories as well. You can use interests, locations, and behaviors to create the perfect audience for your ad.

4. Stories Format

Stories take up the full vertical screen on mobile devices. Only your content is viewable to the user. This allows your story viewers to be fully engrossed in your video with no distractions. Stories can take the form of a single vertical photo, a single video, or a sequence of photos or videos in a carousel format.

5. Brand Recall / Video

As with any marketing channel, video content is one of the best-performing ad formats on Instagram Stories. Tap-forward rate, which is when a user skips past your content by tapping it, is 5.65% lower with video than it is with images.  (Source: Socialinsider). Not only will more people view your story, but they will remember it too. According to Insivia, 95% of a video’s message is retained by viewers. If that still isn’t enough to persuade you, video social posts receive almost 50% more views than static images

Conclusion

Story ads are a great way to get your business in front of your audience. In only three years the story format has grown faster than anyone could have predicted. Plus, it is one of the least competitive formats to advertise on. This magic mix of a huge audience and low competition won’t last forever though, so marketers that jump on it now will have a huge head start on the competition. Need some help getting started? Schedule a consultation with our digital marketing experts today!

The post 5 Things Apartment Communities Need to Know About Stories Ads appeared first on Conversion Logix.