Tag Archive for: facebook advertising

Facebook update that will help REDUCE the cost of your ads

Making your ads relevant to your target audience is important. The obvious reasons are to get engagement and conversions, but also because Facebook charges less amount per click if your ad’s relevancy score is high (on a score of 1-10).

If Facebook’s algorithm gives your ad a low relevancy score, it is difficult to identify why it’s not relevant. Is it the design of the ad and text? Is it the wrong target audience? Or perhaps it’s the actual offer?

Facebook says:

“Relevance score is calculated based on the positive and negative feedback we expect an ad to receive from its target audience. The more positive interactions we expect an ad to receive, the higher the ad’s relevance score will be. (Positive indicators vary depending on the ad’s objective, but may include video views, conversions, etc.) The more times we expect people to hide or report an ad, the lower its score will be.”

Well, now Facebook says that this single metric doesn’t provide enough guidance on what needs to be improved in order to increase an ad’s relevancy score.

So Facebook is changing this relevancy score metric to more detailed indicators:

Quality ranking

How your ad’s perceived quality compared with ads competing for the same audience.
Improve the ad creative – design and text in the ad.

Engagement rate ranking

How your ad’s expected engagement rate compared with ads competing for the same audience.
Improve the targeting of your ad.

Conversion rate ranking

How your ad’s expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimisation goal and competed for the same audience.
Improve the offer and call to action button. Then perhaps the landing page your ad links to if there is one.

This change also means you’re not having to change all different aspects of your ad which means you won’t know which change improved the ranking (or increased the engagements and conversions).

Facebook is always updating its advertising tools and refinements to help businesses generate better results. While they do this to help Facebook, it also benefits you to generate better results.

Facebook’s new ad performance metrics will be rolled out over the next few weeks, with relevance score being removed as of April 30th.

7 recent Facebook changes affecting Facebook advertisers

In the past few months, Facebook has made a lot of changes. These include:

  • News feed updates
  • Control the ads you see
  • Blocking ad blockers
  • New video metrics
  • Redesigned pages
  • Custom audiences based on time on websites
  • Updates to lead ads
News feed updates

Showing more personally informative stories

Your news feed will now favour stories that are “personally informative”; determined by your own actions.

What is “informative”? Generally, anything that is related to your interests, contains news about the world around you, and engages people in broader discussions. Facebook says:

“That could be anything from recipes, to local issues, to global current events. The stories rate as informative and help create a new prediction about how informative we think you’ll find each story.”

Facebook then looks at how that story might be “personally” relevant to you:

  • What is your relationship with the person who clicked on it?
  • What do you click on, comment on, and share?

This adjustment could bring back some of the reach and engagement that news and media companies lost during other news feed changes.

Control the ads you see

Facebook has officially announced improved control over the ads you see. You can now view what interests advertisers can use to target you with ads via your ad preferences. You can remove or add interests to improve the relevance of ads you see.

This does not mean that users can completely opt out of ads, it just means they have more control of what ads they see.

Blocking ad blockers

In the same announcement as controlling the ads you see, Facebook also announced that ad blocker software would no longer work when users accessed the social network from desktops:

“As we offer more powerful controls, we’ll also begin showing ads on Facebook desktop for people who currently use ad blocking software.”

If you aren’t aware, software like Adblock Plus has been created for people to add a plugin to hide ads from their newsfeed. This certainly affected Facebook’s revenues, but it also impacts the advertisers who leverage its audience to drive their business.

Within two days, Adblock Plus came up with a workaround – although Facebook immediately addressed it. This is like a cat-and-mouse game between the two companies, but one where Facebook is the cat.

How does this affect advertisers? Well if Facebook is successful, it means increasing distribution on desktop placements. With increased distribution, costs may lower.

New video metrics

Facebook has brought out several new metrics to help publishers measure the impact of their videos.

Audience demographics

Publishers can now see metrics for minutes viewed by gender and age, as well as geographic locations. In each case, they can compare demographic engagement of a video to that of the typical video posted by that page.

View engagement with live video

Publishers get a graphical view of engagement as it happens during a video. See at which points there are the most reactions, comments or shares.

Video viewing from shares

Publishers now have access to reports of views and minutes views from their original video from those connected to the page, versus those who viewed it from a share.

Redesigned pages

After testing changes to the page layout all year, Facebook has made an official update. Here are the main changes to expect:

Updated layout

Your profile picture no longer overlaps with your cover photo. So if you’ve done something creative that links the two, this is a heads up – your profile picture is now positioned on its own at the top left of the page.

The cover photo dimensions are the same (828px x 315px) with the profile picture being square (160px x 160px). The page name and username are now underneath the profile photo instead of being an overlay on top of the cover photo.

More prominent buttons

If you’re using the call-to-action button, it is now bigger, brighter and more prominent.

Improved navigation

Tabs now appear as a list of links down the left hand side.

Overall, this design is much cleaner. Other items that were on the left side previously are now on the right. Facebook has also removed ads from the right side of pages.

Custom audiences based on time on websites

An exciting update: publishers can now create audiences of people who are most active on their websites.

This was previously only available through the ads API, but some advertisers now have access via the Facebook Ads Manager interface.

Updates to lead ads

These are the following updates to lead ads:

Download links in Power Editor and Ads Manager: One complaint from advertisers is not knowing how to find the lead once lead ads are running. They are otherwise buried within the Facebook page publisher tools.

Download only new leads: Instead of having to download the entire file again, advertisers will now have the ability to download only the new leads captured during a specific date range.

Lead ad custom audiences generated automatically: Facebook recently introduced lead ad custom audiences. These are brilliant, allowing advertisers to create audiences who have opened, submitted or opened but didn’t submit a form. But now these people will be generated automatically.

Scrollable forms: A user engaging with a lead ad form used to need to click multiple times before submitting. But now with the scrollable form, Facebook say this will result in an improved user experience and a higher conversion rate.

Not all of these updates are available to everybody yet. But they will be soon!

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