Are you keeping up with Facebook advertising trends? Want to know which Facebook ad placements you should focus on?
How can marketers make the most of these trends to create successful Facebook campaigns?
Let's find out what these trends are and how to approach them!
1. Rising Facebook Advertising Costs
Facebook advertising costs have been rising for several years due to a number of key factors:
Supply and demand
There are currently over 6 million advertisers on Facebook. This indicates both the supply and the demand for advertising.
Seasonal Traffic
In the New Year’s time, an increase in advertising on platforms is especially noticeable. This is when many marketers with seasonal business spend their money, which leads to an increase in costs every year for those of us who are engaged in advertising all year round. But this is the nature of business; if we want to play in this sandbox, we must be prepared to pay for it.
Politics
The next year, 2020, is the United States election year. In every city, state and country, there are people who are going to use Facebook ads. Candidates collect money, and the platform on which they are likely to spend it in the first place is Facebook.
If you see a higher price than usual for your ads, politics is one of the reasons for this.
Ad quality
Another reason for poor ad performance may be that, frankly, your ads are simply not very good.
The algorithm encourages advertisers who provide a good user experience because this is what Facebook and Instagram always want. Platforms want to ensure the convenience of working with users, because advertisers are not their customers, and users yes. They know that if the number of users decreases, advertising will also decrease, so the platform protects the user experience at all costs.
Most of this experience is that platforms want advertisers to approach things from a positive rather than a negative point of view. This is why there are so many advertising policies: the algorithm wants to show relevant ads to the right people. The more you can use Facebook’s targeting capabilities in your messages and creatives, the better your ads will be and the more the algorithm will reward you.
Lifetime cost
If we can somehow calculate the true value of the client, and not just the cost of acquiring the client, this may allow us to survive some of these costly storms.
Every time we show ads, it’s a numbers game. If your CPC doubles from $ 4 to $ 8, but you know that this customer’s value is $ 50, you don’t sweat a lot, because you know what the numbers are. When people do not know what these numbers are in their business, everything becomes really scary. It also allows you to answer the question: “What advertising budget should I spend on Facebook ads?” This is a million dollar question.
The real answer to this question comes when you know what your costs are for acquiring a client or what is its value for a lifetime buyer.
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2. Mobile devices - first of all
You should think about mobile devices first when creating your ads.
Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that the total percentage of ad revenue on Facebook’s mobile devices is over 90%. People access Facebook and Instagram on their mobile devices in unprecedented numbers. So, from the point of view of advertising, we must first create our advertising, focusing on mobile devices.
Ad Image
Image has always been important in advertising, but it has never been more important than it is now, especially on mobile devices. Our task is for users to stop and view our ads, rather than scroll through it without noticing.
A few months ago, Facebook announced that they standardize image sizes in all ad placements, so we don’t need to create different image variations. A 5: 4 ratio (vertical; slightly higher than the width) is standard, but the square also works very well on mobile devices, whether it's an image or video.
Ad Length
When Facebook standardized these image sizes, they expanded the image a bit. This, in turn, reduced the number of lines above the image on mobile devices. This means that you’d better get people's attention in the first two lines of your ad text.
In the Advertising Manager, you can view each advertisement that you make. You can customize the look of the ad for each placement, which is really important. You can even make it a version for mobile devices and computers. On the desktop, they also have "... see more", but before that you will get more lines than in the mobile application.
Text placement
The title and subtitle below the image are placed in advertisements for desktop computers and laptops, but not on mobile devices. This is called a news feed description, which is intended only for desktop computers.
What is really interesting for mobile ads is if you have a call to action button (for example, Learn more), it can cut off part of your headline. Be sure to preview what your ad will look like so you can see exactly where this headline might be cropped.
For the most part, ads work better when there is a CTA button (action button
When you select All Placements, this allows Facebook to show your ads everywhere, including Instagram.
If you use all placements, look at the distribution of placements in the Ad Manager and check where your ads appear.
Video
Instagram Stories ads are really where they are. There are so many offers, and advertisers are still very new to this placement, so the cost of stories is still low.
Ads appear between subscription histories. A standard ad in Instagram Stories takes 15 seconds, but you can do this in the form of a carousel advertisement, which can be up to three panels long and lasts 45 seconds. Your 45-second video can be cut into a 15-second video that Facebook will make, or you can be creative and create different panels where one is built on top of the other.
When you run ads on Instagram Stories, you don’t have to have 10,000 followers to get the Swipe Up swipe feature. But it’s important to indicate with an icon that the user can go to the service or product page.
3. Video ads on Facebook
The news of the importance of using videos on platforms like Facebook or Instagram is not new. In the not-so-distant future, Facebook will become even more video-oriented.
The amount of video that is used daily on platforms like Facebook and Instagram is simply amazing. As advertisers, you should take advantage of how people love to consume content. We must create video ads for everything that we sell, and first of all remember about mobile devices.
Video duration
Test the video. The length of the video depends on what you offer and what you are trying to achieve with the video.
You can advertise on Instagram Stories and then run the same ad on Facebook Stories. In an Instagram feed, video ads used to be limited to 60 seconds, just like regular video files, but they recently increased this ad duration to 120 seconds.
Video Captions
Video ads often start with muffled sound, so you need to create a video that catches people's attention when the sound is turned off. If you are talking in a video or there is voice-overs, then you need to add subtitles so that someone who watches without sound knows what is happening anyway.
Text in video
The rule that still images should contain no more than 20% of the text in the ads also applies to animated text in the video. You can take a still image and add animated text to select it in the ribbon, but the text size should occupy no more than 20% of the image.
Video quality
You still want high-quality video, but these days the iPhone has amazing cameras. In the end, you can create videos that people are used to seeing organically on their channels.
In nine cases out of 10, people simply grab their phones and create videos. As we approach 2020, we are more inclined to do a little more to stand out. Therefore, serious companies are hiring video production specialists.
Live video
Turning live video into advertising remains very effective. Live video is often longer, but again, you can check different lengths. Regardless of whether you are broadcasting fast with some tips or updates or teaching within 30 minutes, it all comes down to the purpose of the video. What are you trying to achieve and why are you doing this? Who are you talking to? This long video can be a good remarketing video for those who have watched one of your previous videos.
Video Engagement Custom Audiences
One amazing feature is that we can attract an audience of people who watch a certain percentage of our video. If we have a 2-minute video, and someone watches 75% of it, this is a very interested person. We can create individual audiences from those people who watch a certain percentage of our videos.
4. Facebook Campaign Budget Optimization
Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) is not new. This has been discussed before. But Facebook said that now this will become the standard way we set our advertising budgets for campaigns. People panicked because they had not yet used this feature.
Budgets have traditionally been defined at the ad set level. If you run a campaign with the goal of "Conversion" and you have five different sets of ads for five different targeting groups, and you want to spend $ 100 a day, you usually set a budget for each set of ads - in this case, $ 20. So, five ad sets for $ 20 a day for $ 100. That's how everyone has been doing this for a long time.
As soon as your ad gains views - you can optimize it - you delete ineffective ones and raise bids on effective ads. With CBO, we now set the budget at the campaign level, and the Facebook algorithm automatically optimizes advertising costs and distributes them depending on which sets of ads and ads are effective.
Ideally, if AI does its job, it should be easier for those of us who manage advertising. In September, CBO became the way to optimize the default budget for everyone who has already used it. For those who did not use CBO, this transition was delayed until February 2020. Facebook will still let you set your budget at the ad set level, even if you use CBO.
The real question here is, do we trust the Facebook advertising algorithm to do the work that people used to do? AI is learning, which means it is quite possible that he will learn how to optimize advertising better than people.
5. Optimization of placement
When you select All placements on Facebook and Instagram, it is understood that the algorithm will find your potential buyer where the results will be. That is, those places that work better and will be selected by the algorithm.
Maybe someone will find you in the Instagram news feed in the morning, then in the afternoon they will see you in the Facebook news feed, and in the evening they will watch “Stories”. The algorithm is designed to find where your users and clients are located, depending on the platform and time.
6. Content Optimization
The Facebook AI comes to a point where you can just give it a headline and it will pick a winner. There will be a day when we simply say: “These are all my assets, Facebook; go spend my money. " We are closer to this than people think, and that’s good.
You can still test multiple versions of your headlines, advertisements, and images; create different variations; and see which ones work best. But in the end, the AI will become so good that it will offer options for you.
This article will be useful both for SMM marketers who specialize in Facebook, and for business owners who are interested in the processes that lead to success. Futureinapps has a staff of SMM marketers who can promote your brand, product or service on all social platforms. We are always up to date with the latest news in SMM. Follow us on Facebook and Yandex. Zen - interesting news every day.
