The #1 Reason Your Facebook Advertising Isn’t Working – And How to Fix It
January 3, 2018
Facebook is the single most enticing public-use platform for advertisers since the advent of the television. Engagement levels on the platform itself are astronomical; billions of people use Facebook worldwide.
However, many businesses come to us complaining of low ROI on their Facebook advertising efforts. They’re putting their message out there, but they’re not meeting their branding, lead-generation or sales goals.
And they’re unhappy because Facebook advertising gets expensive fast. Yes, there are a lot of people on Facebook. But that often translates into traffic and exposure to audiences that don’t move the conversion needle at all.
So here is the problem: You’re not being picky enough about your audience targeting. You need to refine your audiences so you are only hitting on people who deliver ROI on your campaign.
This is a common problem because more than 90% of the time, advertisers’ budgets are smaller than the massive audiences Facebook will let them target. Many businesses think they’re narrowing their targets sufficiently by using the demographic targeting they used in the past.
However, a national target audience of married women ages 25-35 with a household income of greater than 100k a year is a large, relatively imprecise audience on Facebook.
In fact, unless you’re narrowing down a custom audience (for example, using an email subscription list to create an audience then narrowing the campaign based on location), you’re unlikely to target on Facebook just based on demographics. You’ll need to delve into the interest-based targeting.
Interest-Based Targeting on Facebook
In exchange for letting people use Facebook’s features for free, Facebook tracks everyone’s activities. Every page you like, app you use, or post you share is recorded.
This allows Facebook to create interest-based profiles of users that are applied on the advertising platform. At this point, there are thousands of topics you can base a campaign on, based on these targeting parameters:
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What people share on their timelines
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Apps they use
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Ads they click
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Pages they engage with
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Activities people engage in on and off Facebook related to things like their device usage, purchase behaviors or intents, and travel preferences
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Demographics like age, gender and location
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The mobile device they use and the speed of their network connection
Based on these actions, you can target just about any behavior or interest.
Say, for example, you want to sell a Thai inspired grilling marinade for chicken. This is how you could break down your interest targeting:
In this case, we’ve targeted people who like hot chicken, grilling, and Thai cuisine. The people in this audience must have an interest or behavior that includes each of these. We’ve also excluded people with behaviors indicating they are vegetarians.
The potential reach in the US for people over the age of 20 is 10,000 (you can see the audience size indicator on the right).
Say, however, we find that our marinade is also good on tofu. We can add tofu as an interest with chicken, so people interested in hot chicken or tofu are included. We remove the exclusion of vegetarians, and the audience size increases to 53,000 people.
Now, if we just target people who have an interest in Thai cuisine and grilling, the audience is 1,700,000. If we target people who have purchase behavior related to grilling, the audience size is 77,000,000.
Based on our experience, a campaign to 77 million people is simply too general to be successful. A campaign of 1.7 million would require an enormous use-it-or-lose-it budget.
Tips On Narrowing Your Audience
There are a lot of factors that affect how you target your audiences. Facebook states:
Important: When narrowing your audience, be careful to not make it too specific. Doing so can lead to an audience that’s too small to be effective. Keep in mind that within any target audience you create, we automatically try to find the people likely to get you the result you told us to optimize for in ad set creation. Because of this, you don’t have to worry about refining too much. Monitor the “Audience Definition” panel to the right of your audience creation options. If the indicator needle is in the red section of the dial, make your audience broader.
What this means is that the goal of your campaign also affects how the ad is delivered. If the goal is to get people to convert on your website, Facebook’s algorithm will try to deliver ads to people who tend to buy products from Facebook ads. With that type of conversion, you can target a larger, broader audience because Facebook itself is going to limit exposure to people likely to act on your goal.
If your goal is to get people to like a post with a recipe using your marinade, you’ll want a narrower audience because the goal is easier to convert. If you target a large audience with only general criteria in the detailed targeting, you’ll burn through your budget connecting with people who only have a cursory interest in your product.
Facebook advertising is filled with potential, but it is undeniably complicated. If you need help, contact our social media management team. If you know who you want to target, we can make sure the system is set up correctly to reach them within your budget.
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