Facebook Ads: The Rising Dark Horse of Paid Advertising
Since the launch of Facebook Ads, the social media giant has left not only his arch rival Google, but also the end-customer in split — Which should I invest in for my business?
Though Google Adwords serves to 2.6 billion searches each month but connecting with them from a marketing standpoint isn’t always easy. For brands, especially the ones just starting out, throwing in huge sums of money in an effort to drive people to their website is too much of a task.
Enters, Facebook Advertisements.
With Facebook now becoming a home to 1.18 billion daily active users, Facebook ads can be the ideal cost effective solution for you.
HOW? Let’s see and find out.
The Two-Faced PPC Campaign: Facebook Ads Vs Google Adwords
That’s the average amount of time a user spends each day on Facebook. Which by the way, is nearly double of what we splurge on the next social platform i.e. (you guessed it right) Google! Further, users spend more time on Facebook than all major mobile properties combined.
Processing over 40,000 searches every second, Google can help you with the immediate sales but it’s Facebook that gets all the brownie points when it comes to brand awareness and lead generation.
The final verdict: AdWords helps you find new customers, while Facebook Ads help new customers find you.
Facebook Adverts: The Silver Bullet of Social Paid Advertising
Facebook offers some of the most powerful, innovative and advanced ad units and targeting. But they present it in a way that makes it easy for marketers to execute. Ads are built around your goals, which makes getting started easy for newbie marketers.
Let’s dive into some of their best tech for your business.
Facebook puts heavy duty technology to work to help you reach and connect with the most valuable users for your business with its audience expansion tool: Lookalike Audiences.
Lookalike Audiences uses machine learning to help find you valuable potential customers who are similar to your site visitors or are already in your CRM. So you can upload a list of your most valued customers and have Facebook hunt them down for you.
Facebook is also rolling out better slick ad units such as Lead Ads, Instagram Ads and Canvas.
Lead Ads help promote your event and allow users to sign up using pre-populated data which skyrocket conversion rates which actually makes the ads more effective for your business. News and information site, theSkimm used Facebook Lead Ads to attract new subscribers for its daily newsletter, seeing a 22% increase in lead quality at a cost per acquisition of just $1-2.
Canvas and Instagram ads are a storyteller’s dream. They expand into beautiful pieces of creative ads that allow you to leave a great marketing impact with strong CTAs.
What the Future Holds for Facebook Ads
For the big picture, Facebook is now focusing more on solutions that will help small businesses and startup companies incorporating the latest technologies for their ads.
#1. Video Ads
If video and video ads aren’t yet a part of your marketing strategy, now is a good time to consider it.
Facebook is already making videos mainstream, looking to steal more of your time and attention away from TV and movies. Add to these video solutions some powerful video ads, it would be easy to imagine a future where Facebook is the most watched video channel, larger than the cable and even YouTube.
#2. Messaging Ads
Messaging is an area that is growing like wildfire and quickly replacing email, text and voice calls for millions of people every day.
Globally, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp dominate the mobile messaging app space. As their popularity continues to grow, these messengers are larger an untapped resource for Facebook in terms of ads.
#3. Virtual Reality Ads
In 2014, Facebook bought Oculus Rift — the leader in virtual reality technology. This along with its play into video puts Facebook in a better position to lead this format as a new ad powered revenue stream.
The Bottom Line
What have your experiences with Facebook Advertising been like? We’d very much enjoy reading of your adventures in the comments below.