If you’re a business owner with a service or product to sell, you’ve likely adopted a Facebook Ads strategy as part of your digital marketing efforts (if not, we can help change that!) You may be running and managing the ads yourself, or perhaps you’ve outsourced the task to a digital marketer or agency. Either way, it’s essential to stay abreast of the latest updates regarding Facebook Ads Manager so that you can understand how any changes may affect your ad’s performance. In this post, we’ll share the latest details on Facebook’s soon-to-come changes and let you know how to ensure you still get the best return for your ads. But first, let’s quickly go over Facebook Ads.
What Are Facebook Ads?
Facebooks Ads are promotional or sponsored pieces of content that typically involve a graphic image, photo, or video paired with accompanying text. They appear on Facebook’s social networking platform and its other sister products (such as Instagram), and they leverage Facebook’s massive database of user information. With 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019, Facebook is the biggest social network in the world. As a result, the platform has incredibly detailed data regarding user interests, behaviors, shopping habits, and much more. This allows companies and brands using their ad services to more acutely target their intended audiences, and allows Facebook Ads to easily differentiate itself from all other advertising mediums that simply can’t compete with their vast amount of data and tracking capabilities. Below are some additional points about Facebook Ads, as stated by the platform:
- Ads can appear in News Feed on desktop, News Feed on mobile, and in the right column of Facebook on desktop.
- Ad content is sometimes paired with news about social actions that your friends have taken, like liking a Page.
- Your friends might see news about the social actions you have taken in Facebook ads. This news will only be shown to your confirmed friends and will adhere to applicable privacy settings you’ve set for your account. If a photo is used, it’s your profile photo and not a photo from your photo albums.
- Facebook doesn’t sell your info to advertisers.
- Facebook actively enforces policies that help protect your experience with third-party apps and ad networks.
What’s Changing With Facebook Ads and Why?
Facebook recently announced that starting August 19th, 2019, text and aspect ratios for content that appears on Mobile News Feed will change. According to the site’s blog, “Page posts and ads on mobile will match the look and feel of the new Facebook design introduced earlier this year.” The networking giant further adds that “the changes to text, photos and videos are designed to simplify our formats and improve the consistency of our mobile experience.”
What Does This Mean?
Facebook says that this will translate to your ad’s formatting in the following ways:
- Fewer lines of primary text will show on mobile News Feed. Now only 3 lines of primary text will show on Facebook mobile News Feed, after which people will be prompted to click to view additional text.
- Maximum media height for photos and videos will reduce to 4:5 on the mobile News Feed. The tallest supported aspect ratio for images without links and for videos is now vertical (4:5). Media taller than 4:5 will be masked on Facebook mobile News Feed.
How Will This Affect Your Ads?
Facebook claims that these changes will increase your ad’s effectiveness and make it easier for advertisers to use the same assets on Facebook News Feed and Instagram feed. Mainly, the creative look and formatting of both your Facebook and Instagram ads should now be more aligned, and it should be easier to create complementary ads for the two platforms with fewer differences between the ad specs.
A whopping 93 percent of social media advertisers are using Facebook Ads.
Are you harnessing the power of Facebook? If you’d like to expand your social media marketing strategy to include Facebook Ads but don’t know where to start, contact us today. Our team is knowledgable and certified in Facebook Ads management and can take your business to new heights.
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