Is Facebook paid advertising worth it?

With over 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides a massive platform for businesses to showcase their products and services to a vast audience. But is Facebook paid advertising worth the investment? Let's delve deeper to understand its potential.

Understanding the benefits of paid social media advertising

Paid social media advertising, including Facebook, offers several key benefits for businesses. Firstly, it provides businesses with unparalleled reach. With billions of active users, Facebook allows businesses to tap into a massive audience and significantly expand their brand's visibility. This increased reach can lead to higher brand recognition and exposure, ultimately driving more organic traffic to the business's website.

Secondly, Facebook paid advertising enables businesses to target their ads with precision. By utilizing Facebook's extensive user data, businesses can narrow down their target audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. This level of targeting ensures that businesses are reaching the right people, maximizing the chances of converting them into customers. 

Lastly, Facebook paid ads offer measurable results. Unlike traditional advertising methods, where it is challenging to track the effectiveness of an ad campaign, Facebook provides businesses with detailed analytics and insights. These metrics allow businesses to monitor the performance of their ads, identify areas for improvement, and optimize their campaigns for better results. 

What is the success rate of Facebook ads?

To truly understand the potential of Facebook paid advertising, let's take a look at some noteworthy statistics. According to a survey conducted by Hootsuite, Facebook ads have an average click-through rate (CTR) of 0.90%, which is significantly higher than the average CTR for display ads (0.46%). This indicates that Facebook ads are more effective at capturing users' attention and driving them to take action.

Furthermore, Facebook's ad targeting capabilities are unparalleled. Approximately 94% of marketers use Facebook for ad targeting, making it the most popular social media platform for this purpose. The ability to precisely target specific audience segments ensures that businesses can reach the right people with their ads, increasing the chances of conversion.

Moreover, Facebook ads are cost-effective. The average cost per click (CPC) for Facebook ads is $1.72, making it a more affordable option compared to other advertising channels. This affordability allows businesses with various budget sizes to leverage Facebook paid advertising and compete with larger players in their industry.

How to create effective Facebook paid advertising campaigns

Creating effective Facebook paid advertising campaigns requires careful planning and execution. Here are some essential steps to follow:

1. Define your campaign objectives: Before diving into creating ads, clearly define your goals. Whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or generating leads, having a well-defined objective will guide your campaign strategy.

2. Identify your target audience: Utilize Facebook's targeting capabilities to identify your ideal customer demographics, interests, and behaviors. The more specific you can be, the better you can tailor your ads to resonate with your target audience.

3. Craft compelling ad content: Create attention-grabbing and engaging ad content that speaks directly to your target audience. Use persuasive language, captivating visuals, and a clear call to action to encourage users to take the desired action.

4. Monitor and optimize: Regularly monitor the performance of your ads using Facebook's analytics and insights. Identify which ads are performing well and which ones need improvement. Make data-driven optimizations to maximize your campaign's effectiveness.

Facebook offers businesses a powerful and cost-effective way to reach target audiences, increase brand visibility, and drive conversions. Providing businesses with the tools they need to create successful ad campaigns. By following best practices and continuously optimizing campaigns, businesses can unlock the full potential of Facebook paid advertising. 

So, is Facebook paid advertising worth the investment? Our answer is a resounding yes. Contact us today to get started and take your business to new heights with Facebook paid advertising.

How To Measure The Effectiveness of a Digital Marketing Campaign

Success is obviously the goal of any marketing campaign, but what is success? Well, that depends on the company and what they’re trying to achieve. Today we’ll take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign(s).

The End Goal

Ask yourself: “what is the end goal?” Be honest, too. For 90% or more of businesses the end goal is profit. This is generally simplified into Return on Investment (ROI) to isolate a campaign for analysis.

Now this is not always the case. Sometimes (on rare occasions) a non-profit will want to market. Perhaps a rich journeyman will start a new venture and not really care about it’s success, only that it sees eyes. The end goal doesn’t matter; only that you identify it and be honest with yourself.

Yes, we all want to be friends and have a long-lasting partnership that makes life easier on everyone, but never take your eyes off the prize of what you’re trying to accomplish. Because at the end of the day that’s the common thread linking you.

Now for the hard part:

What If I Don’t Have eCommerce Tracking?

This is the single most common disconnect we see. You want to measure return on investment directly, which requires seeing exactly how much revenue SEO has generated. However, this is impossible to track with complete accuracy. That’s a tough one for the ‘numbers’ people to handle. SEO requires a bit of trust and you have to put some pieces together, that’s just a matter of fact. Unless you have eCommerce Tracking and a payment portal and only accept online transactions then you’re going to be stuck with some guess work.

Get As Close As You Can

If you don’t have eCommerce tracking, measure leads. This includes phone calls, form submissions and anything else that brings in a potential buyer. Then measure your ‘close rate’ for these leads and simply apply it to the number of leads from that channel. This is the most common method used and either involves some simple Goal or Event Tracking.

If you don’t have a form and your site is purely informational, that’s where it gets trickier. After leads, should they be unavailable, we would simply measure Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings. These are always measurable, so there should be no situation where you can’t use these as a baseline.

To review: Return on Investment > Revenue > Leads > Organic Traffic + Keyword Rankings

In any of these events, Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings should be reported clearly because they’re always an important part of the equation.

Want to start a Digital Marketing Campaign with an experienced set of agency-level freelancers who will report all of this for you? Reach out to us!

What's The Difference Between SEO and PPC?

One of the most common questions we see in the digital marketing world is simply: what’s the difference between SEO and PPC? This one’s fairly straightforward and best explained using the tomato analogy.

When You Need Targeted Traffic Immediately

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click Marketing and is controlled using Google Ads or Bing Adcenter, though Google is far more widely used due to the extra volume that Google has. It’s an excellent channel (in my opinion the second best behind SEO) and gives you some benefits but has some downsides associated for it. Let’s use the tomato analogy as an example:

Say you need tomatoes. You can grow them or you can go to the market and buy them. If you go to the market and buy them then you’re able to choose the shape and size as well as exactly how many you want and how much you want to spend. The downside? You have to pay for every single tomato.

This is equivalent to PPC. We can control the traffic that comes in with great detail (including even age, gender and income levels). We can also press start as soon as it’s set up and get you running quickly and it’s great for gap fillers (nights that need filling in a hotel, for example) and also works great as a long-term strategy to pair with SEO. However, it is not sustainable. If you turn off that campaign or cut the spend, all that traffic disappears overnight as well.

Our other marketing channel compliments this strategy perfectly.

From Seed To Farm

Back to the tomato analogy, but let’s look at the other method this time.

If you have a bit of time to spare and want your own huge, sustainable farm full of tomatoes then you can plant seeds in the ground. These seeds need to be watered and fed and there will be both rainy days and sunny days, but if you keep nurturing the crops then you’ll get a mostly self-sustaining farm of tomatoes. You may not be able to carefully control the shape and size of them, but they’ll be in the ballpark.

This is akin to SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Our work doing SEO will take 3-6 months to start taking off and will be based off percentage increases. A 50% increase of 20 users is 10 users, while a 50% increase of 10,000 users is 5,000 users, meaning growth tends to seem slower right at the start. However, if you have an SEO tackling things every month then you’ll eventually have a steady stream of people coming in through the channel.

SEO is simply the strongest digital marketing channel and it’s generally not very close. It has the best engagement, the best conversion rates, the best everything. The only downside is that it’s slow and inflexible and takes a while to build. Even if you quit SEO down the road and take a break from it, the traffic won’t disappear. It might taper off slowly, but it will have a much higher ‘floor’ so to speak.

So What’s The Strategy?

If you desperately need traffic right now (particularly startups), then go with PPC. You can always get SEO rolling later, but SEO isn’t very useful if your company doesn’t survive long enough.

Not worried about short-term survival? Prioritize SEO. This channel will get you the long-term success if you stick with it and grow it up.

We understand how tough the world of digital marketing is to navigate as a business owner (we’ve heard it from plenty of them), so reach out if you need guidance on where to go next using the form below.