For business owners, navigating Facebook can be like driving the autobahn – everything moves fast, and you aren’t always sure the direction you’re headed is the right one. Even more complex is Facebook’s ad manager. But fear not. Like AAA, we have the roadmap to navigate you to your destination and your audience. We’re going to give you 4 rules of the road, so you are ready when you get behind the wheel of your next ad campaign.
The Facebook Pixel is Your LoJack
If you have no idea what a facebook pixel is, your tracking is about to change drastically. This is like the Lojack of audience behavior. With just a little bit of code put on the back end of your website, you can follow every move people make to your website. You can also gain insight into why they hit the brakes on their purchase. Understanding the buying process and tracking behaviors is critical. After all, they had the directions to the purchase, but somewhere they made a U-turn. The pixel provides the data you need to create remarketing ads based on the actions these visitors have taken on your website.
Audience Insights Are Like Vanity Plates
There’s no doubt you’ve come across a car with a vanity license plate. Remember that red Corvette with the plate “FoxyMama”? Facebook’s audience insights are like a license plate. The data speaks to your unique habits, your likings, your dislikings, your online personality, and your online behaviors. Utilizing audience insights will specifically serve the purpose of discovering who your customers and fans are based on the actions they take on your page. This is where you’ll gather your data in order to create rockstar audiences that get you high reach and high engagement numbers on your ads. This is your dashboard, and you should constantly monitor it. You won’t get far until you understand these numbers and how they can be used to improve your social media strategy.
Merge Pixels and Insights to Form Custom Audiences
Without the right target audience, your ad is virtually worthless. The audience will determine the image you use for your ad, the copy you write, and the link you include. There are a few different requirements for creating an audience like age, location, and interests. From there it gets even more specific. Before creating an audience, you should already have done ample research on who is buying your product and service and what their buying journey looked like *ahem see facebook pixel*.
Look Out for Lookalike Audiences
Have you ever noticed a similarity in guys riding Harleys or the women driving VW Bugs? They might show the same attributes, and mimic the same behaviors to a degree. Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences take your buyer, that one person driving the Lamborghini, and finds similar people matching their behavior. Lookalike audiences may be the most efficient way to break into a new market and gain new visitors, fans, or buyers – because the data is based on customers that you have already sold.
Some tips on creating lookalike audiences are:
1. Create the best customer list
2. Upload it in Facebook’s custom audiences
3. Build an ad targeting Facebook’s data bank of lookalike customers.
There may not be another you out there, but there’s someone a lot like you. In fact, Facebook has found quite a few people like you.
The map to success using Facebook is a complicated one, but like GPS, if you follow the directions, you can arrive at your destination as planned. For more insights into the world of social media, follow us on Facebook.
