Facebook ads are a great way to promote your business and drive potential customers to your website, as it offers a massive reach potential. Facebook has over 1.73 billion daily users at the moment, making it a major source of sales leads, brand awareness, and visibility.
Using Facebook advertising enables you to reach targeted audiences and present your brand, product or service in a format fit with the goal you have in mind. The platform offers thousands of targeting options and allows you to create specific and detailed segments within your audience.
In this post, we will go through the types of Facebook ads you can use to boost your brand’s success and better engage with your customers.
What Are Facebook Ad Objectives?
When creating a Facebook Ad, the parameters you have to input might be a bit confusing, especially for a business owner who just started going deeper into the marketing strategy details. The objective you have to select is different from the ad format. The first is related to your business goals, while the latter is more about design.
Objectives refer to what you want people to do when they see your ad. Choosing the right objective is crucial for the success of your Facebook Ad campaign, as it should reflect your company’s needs.
The three main categories of objectives that Facebook proposes to its business users are the following: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions. Each category has a number of specific objectives that you must choose from each time you create a Facebook ad. Let’s go through them and understand what each objective actually means.
Awareness
Choose objectives from this category if you need more people to find out about your brand, what you do, and what’s new in your store. At this stage, you want to publish high-quality content, images, and videos, highly engaging pieces like infographics, tutorials, or presentations of your business or industry.
- Brand Awareness: you want more people to know about your brand;
- Local Awareness: you want people in the proximity to find out about you;
- Reach: you want as many people as possible to see your ad (within your selected target audience)
Consideration
When you want people to learn more about your business and visit your website for extra information, the objectives in the “Consideration” category best fit your needs. This category is broad because it is used most often by businesses. At this stage, you already targeted the people in your audience, and you want them to be drawn to your business, ask for more information and, eventually, become your customers.
- Traffic: you need to get more visitors to your website;
- Engagement: you want people to like, share and comment your post, attend an event or claim an offer;
- App Installs: you want people to install your app;
- Video Views: you want people to watch your video;
- Lead Generation: you want more sales leads and data from potential customers you want to target later;
- Messages: you want to communicate with your customers directly
Conversions
If you want to promote your products and services to the right audience, drive more sales, and attract potential customers to your store, use a “Conversions” type of objective.
- Conversions: you want people to respond to your call to action;
- Product Catalogue Sales: you want to display your store’s products;
- Store Visits: you want more visitors to your physical store
How to Choose the Right Format for Your Ad?
As you can see, Facebook created a lot of objectives you can use in your Facebook ad campaigns. These objectives can be approached using different ad formats. Some of them are available for any type of objective you may have, while others are more specialised and can be selected only under a certain objective.
The ad formats available on Facebook are: photo, video, slideshow, carousel, canvas, and dynamic product ads. Depending on what type of content you have to promote, choose the right ad format and Facebook will do the rest for you.
Here are the most common ad types you can create by varying the objective and format of your ad. Marketers, bloggers, store owners do have the tendency to use certain combinations more than others, but we do recommend testing new things all the time, and getting out of your comfort zone to keep things fresh.
Types of Facebook Ads
1. Link Click Ads
One of the most basic, common ad types for Facebook is the link click ad. You share an external link with your Facebook audience and encourage them to click through and get rewarded (with great content, opportunities, offers, etc.). Sending users to your website through social media is a basic form of advertising nowadays.
Make sure to create an attractive ad copy that will match the content of the landing page. Do tease your audience a bit, but avoid click-baiting.
2. Video Ads
One of the best performing content on Facebook is the video post. Use videos in your ads to boost your engagement and get your message across. But you do have tó be aware of how Facebook users like to watch their videos.
For example, a lot of them watch videos with the sound off. Therefore, you must add captions, text inserts, and make your message clear with or without sound. Also, check the best practices when it comes to length, editing, and quality.
3. Lead Form Ads
Facebook makes it easier to collect data like demographics and email addresses from your customers without redirecting them to an external web page where they have to fill out a lead form.
Lead ads enable your potential customers to sign up for a newsletter, claim an offer, or do other types of actions without leaving the platform, which is a big plus. Make your ad very attractive, professional-looking, to get your users to click on your ad.
4. Boost Page Ads
The first type of ad businesses usually try out on Facebook is the boost ad. Because it is so simple to set, and Facebook gives you all the guidance you need, it usually is an easy choice for Facebook business page owners. Every time you post something on your business page, you have the option to increase the reach with a paid boost.
5. Slideshow Ads
To make your ads pop even more, Facebook lets you create slideshow ads where you can include photos, music, even videos to create a story. Try to avoid putting 5 unrelated photos together, and instead make them an integrated part of an idea. Choose the most interesting one to be the thumbnail.
6. Instant Experience (Canvas Ads)
Created exclusively for mobile users, Instant Experience ads, better known by the previous name of Canvas ads, are a superior way of advertising on the social media network. Canvas ads take up the whole screen, they are interactive, giving the user an experience similar to a website, without them leaving Facebook at all. This is why they would be a great option in a brand awareness campaign, let’s say.
7. Carousel Ads
A carousel ad contains several images or visual elements that can link to a different link each. Carousel ads are perfect for eCommerce, but they can also fit different objectives, like awareness or conversion.
8. Collection Ads
Speaking of eCommerce, it has just found its dream ad format: collection ads. They allow you to showcase many products in one ad, including whole catalogs, prices, and product links in a compact, neat space.
9. Dynamic Product Ads
One of the most advanced ad formats on Facebook are Dynamic Product Ads (DPA). DPA uses Facebook Pixel, a code generator which enables Facebook to automate the ads, and auto-populate them with information from your catalogue. Be sure to install Facebook Pixel correctly and to keep your catalogue up to date.
Need Help With Your Facebook Ads Campaign?
If you need assistance from digital marketers with a little passion for social media advertising, contact Australian Internet Advertising and get your free proposal in a matter of hours.
