Facebook Advertising: 10 Truths for SEO and PPC Pros

So, you’re an experienced paid search or organic SEM professional who wants to tap into the power of Facebook self-serve advertising to expand your reach. It’s a great idea to broaden your horizon and campaign potential, however there’s a a couple of truths that you need to realise before getting started:

1. It’s Display Advertising, Not Search
   With the risk of starting off by stating the obvious it’s the first important truth that you need to get your head around before reading the rest of the list.
2. People Aren’t Necessarily Interested in your Product or Service
   Unlike search were you know that someone typing in a particular phrase has some type of interest and intent towards your product, with Facebook this is very different as the user might just have entered the awareness stage of the buying cycle (AIDA). Although you can target Facebook users with keywords, they are not actively typing in those keywords, but instead they are matched against users interests (such as movies, music, groups etc…). Your second targeting option is through demographics which is where Facebook really outshines many of its rivals and particularly search engines. That said, because of the different user mindset compared to search you need to consider this when planning your campaign to achieve clicks and return on investment.
3. Your Click Through Rate (CTR) is Going to be Low compared to Search
   Working in paid search makes you quickly start to obsess about your CTR. You need to do the same with Facebook advertising, but be aware that it is likely going to be in the 0.x% area due to point number 2. CTR is however key to campaign success as you’ll see below.
4. High CTR is Key
   As Facebook uses your advert CTR and bid to recalculate to what it calls an eCPM, if your ad is simply not performing you will, similarly to AdWords, be penalised with a higher cost and get fewer impressions.
5. There’s No Fancy Desktop Editor, Public API or Even a Decent Web Interface
   Although there’s an invite-only beta of Facebook self-serve API for strategic partners, most marketers will for now have to do with the web interface. It does its thing, but workflow wise it’s not yet very well optimised or intuitive. However, looking at the recent developments and talking to the Facebook team, my expectations are that it will evolve fairly swiftly into something much more usable and productive.
6. Facebook Self-serve Takes Time, a Lot of Time
   Due to the previous point it will take you a decent amount of time to launch an initial highly targeted campaign (e.g. one line per age group/gender/location/interest), but the fun really starts once you have to do the daily micro management by tweaking individual advert ‘lines’ by pulling reports and navigate around to amend bids. This is actually the main pain point for many advertisers and reason not to bother with Facebook after a few few struggling trials – it just takes too much time and opportunity cost as those internal resources could be better spent optimising other campaigns. Facebook is aware of this, and hence putting a lot of resources into improving the advertiser experience.
7. If  It Goes Terribly Wrong, Just Start Over
   If your CTR falls too low and your campaign gets penalised with higher CPC, there’s typically little chance to bring down the costs and impressions back up again. Due to the inner workings of the Facebook advertising engine, at this point you’re better of recreating the campaign from scratch to start off with a lower CPC.
8. Your old PPC Ad Copy Won’t Work
   People hanging out on Facebook are in a very different mindset compared to that of those actively using a search engine. There’s typically little point in putting “keywords” in ad copy titles as per PPC best practice, but instead using creativity in order to stand out and drive clicks and conversions. E.g. for a DVD rental company instead of using a typical PPC ad copy approach for the title line such as “Cheap DVD Rentals”, it would be advisable to test a different approach such as “Nothing to Watch on TV?” which may connect better with someone bored out of their mind on a Sunday evening aimlessly browsing Facebook. And as with all marketing efforts, there’s only one way to find out; tweak, measure, evaluate and repeat.
9. Smiling People Gets you Clicks
   As simple as that, people like to click on ads with attractive smiling people. If you for example sell mobile sim cards, don’t put an image of a plain sim card in the advert but instead a smiling person talking on the phone (who’s similar to your target demographics). I bet a pint at your local this approach will earn you better CTR, which will lead to a lower CPC and better campaign performance (as long as you manage to keep your conversion rate strong). Of course you don’t want to go overboard and if you try to be too ‘creative’ and show some skin, you’re very likely to see your advert CTR shoot through the roof, get flagged internally at Facebook and ultimately disapproved as they have quite stringent rules on what your ad copies can look like.
10. Facebook is Keen to Get You Onboard
    Facebook is undoubtedly one of the hottest web services out there, but is yet to make much money out of its platform. This is a situation that they want to change, and hence it has a very attentive account management team that is happy to share insights and tips to get you started. If you can commit some resources for a trial campaign, I’m sure the guys will be happy for you to get in touch. And if you’re in London, you should go over for a meeting at their plush new Carnaby Street offices (and don’t miss the free vending machine). Use the resources at hand!

The above is based on my own experience as well as conversations with other online marketers using Facebook. As the article is targeted to search marketers, anyone already working in display advertising should find most of the above quite obvious, but for SEM’s it can sometimes be difficult to break out of the “PPC way of thinking”.

Hope you enjoyed the read, please leave a comment if you have any other valuable tips, insights or comments, and if you feel it worthy please do re-tweet using the button below.

Related posts:

1. Display Advertising is Not the New Search
2. Facebook Automatically Broadens Age Targeting
3. The Flawed Concept of PPC Account History
4. Why You Should Care About Real-Time Search

Tagged as: facebook, ppc, seo