Few days ago, Facebook announced changing the number of ads and company organic posts users would be exposed to in the newsfeed. If you have watched the Social Network movie you probably remember the moment when Marc Zuckerberg opposed to monetising The Facebook with ads, because they are not cool. Well, he is going back to this though again possibly. Advertising is pretty much the only way Facebook makes money, so it is unlikely that ads disappear completely ever. But like with all hot platform the competition will start getting serious and only the most relevant content will make it to the newsfeed of the right audience.
So how to ensure your ads keep showing to the right people, without bringing your costs up? Focus on narrowing down your audience. You have more tools than you imagine.
Retargeting to web visitors.
This requires installing a pixel on your website to track web visitors. Then you can show the ad to people who went on the website or pages and drive them to complete the action. You can target basket abandoners to finish a sale, encourage them to fill out a form or install an app. Having been on your website, means they already have some interest in your product. This a sure way to bring costs down.
Remarketing to subscribers and email lists.
You can create a list of emails you have collected with the consent of your users. It can be a list of buyers, newsletter subscribers, freebie collectors. You can upload this data in Facebook and it will match the emails to users already in the system. If you are using MailChimp, they recently announced you can create ads in their platform and target directly the lists you have collected there on Facebook and Google AdWords.
Lookalike audiences.
These have been around for a while now, but they have been vastly improved and bring much better results. To create lookalike audience, you must still upload a list of emails. Then they system will match these users to others who have similar interests and behaviour and create a list of completely new people. You can choose how closely you want to match your audience. If you target 1% of the population of a country then your audience will be a very close match. You can create several audiences with different percent match and then bid differently, depending how similar they are to your initial upload of emails.
All audiences are created on ad set level. You can have an ad set with a custom combination of web remarketing, email remarketing and a lookalike at the same time. To create a audience with emails, simply go to Audience, create new and choose Custom Audience or Lookalike.
If you choose Create Custom you can choose who to target – web traffic, email list, app activity, offline events (like phone calls, store registrations, purchases offline) or engagement with your Facebook account (likes, shares, follows).
If you choose a Lookalike, you can upload your list and set up how closely you would like to match your audience. The more information you have in your upload the better. Details like name, country, city, telephone, date of birth can help Facebook create a better Custom audience or Lookalike.
