In short, he knows a lot about both statistics and human behaviour – two of the main pieces of the Facebook advertising puzzle.

It is a truism that in business there are fundamentally two ways to increase profit; cut costs or improve sales. I consider the rest simply smoke blowing, or at best an indirect route to the same goals. Together these two objectives comprise any business case.

‘Below the line’ are your internal concerns such as driving efficiency to reduce costs, and building resilience so that social and economic shifts don’t erode your hard work overnight.

‘Above the line’ are your customer or user-base: the outside world. Here you are driving revenue by offering customers what they want, and building trust in your brand so that people will feel at ease when buying from you.

We all know that Facebook can play a crucial role when connecting with this ‘outside world’, but understanding exactly what part it plays in the bigger picture will unlock the opportunities that can make all the difference.

7 things you are already doing (right?)

If you are working in the Facebook advertisement space, you should already be aware of some of the best practises. Below I provide a quick overview of the types of things you are already doing with your Facebook advertisement content:

1. Run multiple campaigns with a high initial CPC/CPM offer (tweak later)
2. Split test your images (use faces, bright colours, borders), headlines and copy
3. Split test your advert positioning (newsfeed vs right-hand column) and platform (mobile vs desktop)
4. Split test your demographic (age, location, gender, etc.)
5. Ruthlessly track your conversion funnel using pixels
6. Use statistical tests to finalise your decision making (hint: two-proportion z-test)
7. Reallocate budget quickly and decisively

It is very important that you do not skip these steps unless you are already working with prior information that has been established over a long period of time. In particular, pay close attention to the WHOLE of your funnel.

For example, you may observe that ‘Segment A’ of your demographic responds very well to a particular advert arrangement and you can achieve a initial Registration Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) of £2.50.

However, members of this segment do not go on and buy anything, ever! On the other hand, ‘Segment B’ may respond less well to the same advert arrangement (lower CTR, higher CPC) causing the initial Registration CAC to be £7.50. However, every member of this segment goes on and buys something, ultimately making this a very profitable campaign.

Not all segments are created equal, and more importantly, a strong performing advert arrangement may not bring in the right type of customer (e.g. a user that comes in on an ‘offer’ is likely to always require one to do anything).

Give your visitors a second chance

So we have our Facebook campaigns set-up, nicely managed through the Facebook ads tool of your choice (I use Qwaya). But Facebook is not the one-stop-shop for all your online advertisement needs.

Even if you follow all the best practices known to (wo)man, you may struggle to achieve an acceptable ROI. This is why it is so very important to appreciate how Facebook fits in with your other techniques.

Facebook can be exceptionally efficient at targeting your desired demographic and generating an identity for your brand/company. However, Facebook isn’t always the best place to close a sale.

By driving traffic to your website through Facebook advertisements, you have simply peaked the interest of a suitable member of your chosen demographic; you still need to close the sale when they aren’t browsing photos of their friend’s dog.

This is where retargeting comes in.

If you are not already remarketing/retargeting on Google Adwords, you should be. Retargeting is where you continue to advertise through the Google Display Network, only to those visitors who have seen your website before.

However, you need to go one step further than this. You should also be retargeting through the Facebook Ad Exchange network using a service like Perfect Audience (my preferred choice). Perfect Audience allows you to show your Facebook adverts specifically to those visitors that have seen your website before.

Better still, you have significant control over who sees what. For example, you can target only those users who did not create an initial account. This is like building a traditional Facebook ‘custom audience’ without having to collect any personally identifiable information.

Final note – it’s not all statistics

The combination of web retargeting and Facebook retargeting can be very fruitful. But remember, you are telling a story and portraying a brand identity. This means that all your adverts need to be consistent with one another, offering the same design/style and the same sentiment.

Next time you’re creating a host of Facebook campaigns, think about what you want to do with all those eyeballs that didn’t perform the actions you wanted, and how you can make the most out of your initial hard work.

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Connect with James on Twitter: @jmtromans

The part that is art demands a gut feeling for what works and is something that can be learned over time by gaining experience.

The part that is science on the other hand can by its nature be formalised. This is precisely what Salesforce did last year on the topic of Facebook posts, and the recommendations are still relevant.

Although knowing only how to engineer a good update won’t be sufficient for creating business value, it definitely helps. By having some tried and true guidelines to follow when composing your message, you can focus your efforts on nailing the art of it.

Hope this blueprint can be of value, and don’t hesitate to share it if you find it useful!

See also our own infographic on this topic: the Page post ads checklist

Read the original article on the Salesforce blog

Permissions to publish ads and see statistics for an ad account, target fans or run sponsored stories for a Page all revolve around the Facebook user account.

This might seem simple enough, but it tends to get a bit confusing when managing more than one Facebook user account. A quite typical setup for an agency or a freelance consultant is to be dealing with a personal Facebook user account, and one or more business accounts.

Let’s see how this works in a simple example.

Meet Joe, Karen and the Company

In this scenario we have two people and one business.

Joe is an owner of a local store

Karen is a freelance Facebook marketer

the Company is a business that among its assets has a brand

We also have three Facebook user accounts, two personal and one business. The two personal accounts are managed by Joe and Karen, respectively. The business account is managed by the Company.

The two personal accounts represent Joe and Karen on Facebook. They are regular Facebook accounts that about 1 billion people have.

The business account doesn’t really represent anything and is only an admin interface for managing things – such as Pages and ad accounts. It has no profile page and is thus not visible to other Facebook users.

Permissions for Joe, Karen and the Company (click to enlarge)

As shown in the image above, each of these user accounts owns an ad account, and Joe has granted Karen permission to use his ad account.

There are also two Facebook Pages. By definition they have no owners, they have admins.

the Local store is a Page representing Joe’s business, and is managed by the user accounts of Joe and Karen

the Brand is a Page representing the Company’s brand, and is managed by the user accounts of Karen and the Company

What this means Karen can do

Using her personal Facebook user account, Karen will be able to run ads for, as well as target the fans of, both the Local store and the Brand. Furthermore she can do this with either her own ad account or Joe’s ad account.

However, her having access to Joe’s ad account is not enough to give her permission to advertise for the Local store Page. But, since her personal user account also has been given admin status for it, she has all the permissions she needs to help Joe out with his advertising.

Furthermore, using her personal user account she cannot run ads for the Brand with the Company’s ad account. She can only publish ads to Joe’s ad account and her own ad account. This means she could run ads for the Brand in any of these two ad accounts if she wanted.

If she were given the login details to the Company’s Facebook user account she could use that login to run ads for the Brand with the Company’s ad account. This is so since that user account has access to both the Brand Page and the Company’s ad account.

Another way for her to do this would be for the Company to share access to its ad account with her Facebook user.

It all revolves around the Facebook user

If this seems confusing, don’t worry. All you need to remember is that all permissions revolve around the Facebook user account – be it a personal or a business account.

To run ads for a specific Page using a specific ad account, your Facebook user must have access to both the Page and the ad account.

If you’d like more of a step by step walkthrough we’ve also created a presentation that goes through this scenario, and you can find it in our resource section and on SlideShare.

—

If you’re a professional advertiser depending on more than one Facebook user account, Qwaya might be for you.

Take a closer look and start your free trial from our Pricing page

Icons from Martin Berube, IconCreme

Traffic from Facebook to a website essentially belong in one of two categories:

Organic – meaning you don’t pay directly for the traffic

Paid – meaning the source of the traffic is ads

In both the case of organic and paid traffic, you in fact do pay for it one way or the other. But I’ll come back to that.

Before moving on I should note that I won’t discuss website visits not directly attributable to Facebook in this post. If you want to read more about that, please see our blog post Why we value engagement on Facebook.

Now, let’s start with looking at how you can get organic visits to your website from Facebook.

Content, content, content

Facebook, YouTube, Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia… Have you ever thought about what the most visited sites on the Internet have in common? They all revolve around content.

Sure, Facebook is about social connections, but at the centre of the Facebook user experience is content sharing. Be it content living in the world of Facebook, such as status updates and photos, or content that live elsewhere, such as videos on YouTube and blog posts like the one you’re reading right now.

If links to a particular piece of content living on your website gets shared wildly on Facebook, it goes without saying that you’ll get your fair share of visitors.

It’s highly unlikely that content perceived as non-interesting would receive a lot of sharing action on Facebook, so it comes down to figuring out what your target audience perceives as quality content.

But let’s say you’ve done your homework and know what your target customers find valuable. You’ve also started putting resources towards generating that content, then how do you make sure it gets discovered and shared?

There are a few ways, and I’ll describe the two that from my experience are the most effective.

1. Do the work yourself and push it out

Your Facebook page is a fantastic distribution channel for whatever you want to distribute. Think of it as your own printing press, radio tower or satellite. Respectively, your fans are your readers, your listeners or your viewers.

Since you’re publishing awesome material on your website that’s perfectly aligned with your audience, all you need to do is make it available to them. Do this by posting links to it via page posts, including a short explanation as to why this is good stuff.

2. Let your existing visitors help out

If your Facebook page is a channel for content distribution, the content itself can be a magnet for visitor attraction. Maybe not the best analogy, but hopefully I’ll manage to make it clear.

By installing Facebook share plugins, e.g., like buttons, on your website you’re effectively enabling every visitor to become a publisher of your content. As they hit these buttons, links to your website are distributed within their Facebook friend network, which in turn attracts more visitors to you.

These buttons are unlikely to be used if your content sucks however, or if they are placed where they are hard to see. Therefore, again, make sure to create content that your audience will love – and make it obvious how they can share it.

Leverage your content with advertising

The visits gained by the tactics described above are free in the sense that you won’t receive a bill from Facebook charging you for clicks or impressions. However, I still argue there are costs involved – most notably the time spent on content creation.

Advertising on Facebook is therefore a sound investment since it puts leverage on your content, dramatically increasing its distribution.

And as it happens, some of Facebook’s myriad of ad formats are designed specifically for content distribution:

Page post ads

Also known as promoted posts, these are your actual page posts but with a budget attached for increased distribution. When a page post is promoted it can be delivered in the News feed to whatever audience you prefer.

Sponsored stories related to page posts and domains

These are stories generated by people liking or commenting on your page posts, by interacting with your social plugins, or by posting links to your website in their status updates. Just as for page post ads, sponsored stories are simply organic stories with a budget attached for increased distribution. They reach friends of people generating the stories in their News feeds.

Provided that the post or story at hand contains a link to your website, these ad formats work extremely well towards delivering visitors to your website. And they are cheap.

Clicks on sponsored content in the News feed often cost as little as ten times less than regular ads on the right-hand side of Facebook – provided that the content is any good.

News feed placement means your content is delivered exactly where people’s attention is, and since it’s tailored to your audience, they can’t help but follow the link to find out more.

This results in very high click-through rates, which in turn means very low costs per click.

Awesome content + Massive distribution = Lots of visitors

So the science is pretty simple:

1. Make sure you understand what makes your target customers tick
2. Create content accordingly
3. Publish on your website
4. Push links via your Facebook page and encourage people to share
5. Leverage by sponsoring
6. Repeat

You might be asking yourself why I haven’t mentioned Facebook’s standard offsite ads. After all, they are designed specifically for sending traffic from Facebook to another website.

Two reasons:

1. You knew about them already (if not, see our guide)
2. They are put to better use for time-specific campaigns

The point with this post is to discuss how Facebook can be a sustainable, always on, source of visitors. Basing your marketing on content creation have great long-term effects that are not achievable by buying traffic with regular display advertising.

The long-term effects I’m referring to are improved rank on search engines as links are being created pointing to your website, and a continuous inflow of organic visits from Facebook as your content keeps getting shared.

Provided that you also tag the links you share you’ll also be able to learn what kind of content works best for you. This is the key to perfecting the process of creating content that really resonates with your target customers, and at the end of the day means more business to you.

And lastly, taking a stab at trying to make sense of the title of this post, we tend to behave like flocks.

If we find something good it’s just a matter of time before it spreads among our peers. This is how websites climb in rank on Google, how videos become viral on YouTube and how content on your website gets shared on Facebook.

For that to happen people must find your content, value it and be encouraged to share it.

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If you don’t agree, or think I missed something, please feel free to let me know in the comments!

I argue that engagement, in a Facebook context, is people consuming your content or interacting with your brand.

Engagement can therefore take many forms and shapes on Facebook. Some are what Facebook calls Actions and are directly measurable. A few examples:

• Someone liking your page or your post
• Someone enlarging a photo in your post
• Someone clicking a link in your post
• Someone commenting on you post
• Someone RSVPing to your event

I’d also argue that someone reading your update, without liking, sharing or commenting on it counts as engagement – although it’s not measurable.

Depending on the form engagement takes, its value is more or less obvious. In the case of clicks on links to your website, to a product or pricing page for instance, I think it’s quite clear. The person clicking the link becomes a lead, albeit in a weak sense of the term.

For other forms of engagement, such as viewing a photo or reading a post, I make little distinction between these and the viewing of an ad on TV. They’re not identical, sure, but the value they create are of the same kind.

An ad on TV has the power to position a brand, as well as create and reinforce awareness. A video, text update, or photo on Facebook has the same power. Of course the formats are different and I’d agree with TV being more impactful in that it occupies more of your senses – which is also reflected in the difference in pricing.

However, if you agree with engagement on Facebook being akin to views of TV ads, and provided that you value ads on TV, the value of engagement should be obvious.

The Qwaya case: It starts with this blog

We try to practice what we preach and we “re-launched” this blog in August 2012. As we did that we started using Facebook as the main distribution channel for our content. The content in our blog posts sum up our experiences from marketing Qwaya on Facebook, combined with past experiences and that of companies we work with.

There are plenty of Facebook metrics to look at when measuring the results of marketing activities on the platform. One that in a good way sums up how well you’re doing in terms of distributing content your audience finds valuable is the Viral reach. It’s a measure of how many people saw your brand in an update from a friend.

Or to quote Facebook, Viral reach is:

The number of people who saw your Page or one of its posts from a story published by a friend. These stories include liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Wall, liking, commenting on or sharing one of your Page posts, answering a Question you posted, RSVPing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page or checking in at your Place. (Unique Users)

Of course this says nothing of the sentiment of the stories, and in a worst case scenario your Viral reach could skyrocket, while all posts about your brand are negative. If this happens you would probably know about it though.

In our case the Viral reach has increased with around 16,500% since we started actively working with Facebook as a distribution channel for our content. The values in the graph above are indexed, and I should add that our Viral reach in April 2012 was rather low.

Translating engagement into website visits

Ok, so Viral reach is a metric for gauging content quality in terms of engagement. But how does this translate into more substantial values?

If taking a look at our website analytics, the inflow of visitors from Facebook has increased dramatically since we started working actively with marketing activities aiming to increase engagement around our brand.

This is especially true if including paid traffic, and we always sponsor our posts in order to maximize reach for the content we’ve spent resources on creating.

For the graph below however, paid traffic from Facebook is excluded in order to show only the visits attributable to earned reach. The values have been indexed.

Organic traffic from Facebook has increased with almost 800%, although I’ll admit that this too started at somewhat low volumes.

This starts getting really interesting when comparing the organic Facebook traffic with Direct traffic. That is, visits to our website where the visitor has typed in “www.qwaya.com” in their browser URL field, or a URL to any other page on our site.

I argue that the change in Direct traffic volume over time is a good measure for brand awareness, provided that the ratio between new and repeat visits stay at the same level. In our case it has. If anything the share of new visitors has increased slightly.

Before we launched this blog and started putting resources towards using Facebook as a distribution channel for our content, our inflow of Direct traffic was fairly flat.

As shown in the above graph, the inflow of Direct traffic has increased with almost 100% since the launch of this blog.

Putting resources towards creating engaging content and distributing it via Facebook is the one major measure we’ve taken, and I’m certain it’s the main driver behind our lift in Direct traffic.

Or brand awareness, if you will.

So if you’re looking to get your brand out there but been debating whether to put resources towards Facebook marketing, I hope this blog post at least has made you think twice.

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To read more about how to build a Facebook presence, see our blog post Why should people follow me on Facebook?

Last week we published a blog post discussing Facebook ads from a high level perspective. The main point being that an ad on Facebook is one of two things: it’s an Ad or a Sponsored story.

That’s a categorization of ad formats and is hopefully helpful when thinking about how to pick the right ad types before the launch of a campaign.

But what if we take another step back and think about what a Facebook ad is from a more conceptual point of view?

Marketing in context

Advertising on Facebook is changing. Or maybe Facebook is changing advertising.

Either way, from a high-level perspective, advertising on Facebook is moving quickly towards what can be called contextual format and delivery. This is the way search advertising on Google works: ads look like the organic content, and are delivered in context.

Or put simply: the sponsored links, just like the organic search results, are answers to search queries.

In the world of Facebook this is equivalent to ads being delivered in the News feed in the same format as organic content. An organic page post from a brand can be turned into a page post ad, and an organic story about a brand can be turned into a sponsored story.

The format and content of an organic post or story is not changed by sponsoring it. The only thing affected is the distribution.

So why is contextual format and delivery important? It means that the marketing message is delivered exactly where the audience’s attention is, and in the format they’re geared towards consuming at that point in time.

This changes how advertisers (or rather, marketers) must think about Facebook as a marketing channel. With their message in the same feed as the organic Facebook content, the content the marketer puts out there must provide value equal to the organic content. Otherwise it will be perceived as spam.

This is a huge challenge for many companies, since it’s quite hard to compete with posts from people’s friends in terms of relevancy and their innate ability to intrigue. I don’t think there are any shortcuts though. As more and more brands become publishers of sorts it comes down to figuring out what kind of content resonates with the target audience.

Of course, sponsored stories are posts from people’s friends and thereby come with a degree of relevancy by default. But how are they created in the first place? Via content from the brand.

Facebook ads are sponsored content

What is a Facebook ad then? As far as advertising in the News feed goes, a Facebook ad is sponsored content. It can be content created by brands (ads), or content created through the interaction of a person and a brand (sponsored stories).

This change will take some time for both people and brands to get used to, but I really believe it’s for the better. Brands are punished for distributing bad content, and the only sustainable strategy will be to create and share with the preferences of the audience in mind. As the saying goes:

People don’t hate advertising. They hate bad advertising.

So as a marketer, ask yourself:

How can I create content that’s valuable for my audience?

And:

How do I ensure to deliver that value to them?

By nailing that process on Facebook, higher business values will follow.

First of all, Facebook essentially has two ad formats: Ads and Sponsored stories. Unfortunately ads is bit of an ambiguous term, but that’s what they’re called.

If you were to add up all different variations of these two you’d end up with lots of different ad types, but I think that’s missing the point.

What’s important: Ads and Sponsored stories.

Ads are the voice of you – the marketer – while Sponsored stories are the voice of all the people interacting with your brand on Facebook.

Adverts in the ads category are thus created by you. You control the content of the ad and also to whom it is delivered. Examples of ad types in this category are

• Standard ads – the classic ads on the right hand side of Facebook
• Page post ads – organic page posts which have been promoted

In the case of sponsored stories, the content is the organic story. Therefore, the content of the sponsored story depends on what kind of story you’re sponsoring. Examples are stories about

• People liking your page
• Checking in at your place
• Using your app

A sponsored story can only be delivered to friends of the person who created the story. That is, just like how organic stories work. You would never see a story created by someone you’re not Facebook friends with in your News feed, just like you would never see a sponsored story from that person.

You can still fine-tune and segment your audience however, using the same targeting criteria as for ads. Use interests, age, gender, location and so on to reach the right people among those eligible to see your sponsored stories.

The practical difference between Ads and Sponsored stories

Practically, the distinction between ads and sponsored stories is quite significant. Generally speaking, I’d say ads are used to start a process of some kind, and sponsored stories to reinforce that process.

Take page posts as an example: turning them into page post ads sets you up for achieving reach, and with that comes engagement, provided that your content is any good.

Sponsoring stories about people liking, commenting or sharing your posts amplifies that engagement, but they are useless unless you have some baseline of engagement to sponsor. This in turn depends on reach, which is why you need page post ads to start with.

The same logic applies to Facebook apps. Without people using an app it’s impossible to sponsor stories generated by it, since there won’t be any. Running ads is the way forward to help people find the app and start using it.

But if you have great organic reach for your page posts you don’t need page post ads, and if you already have lots of engagement then no need for sponsored stories, right? True, at least to some extent. I do however think this scenario is fairly uncommon.

Even for brands with massive follower bases that have high organic reach and engagement, I’d like to examine the effect of sponsored stories to see the degree of amplification they could achieve. The effect of sponsored stories is for obvious reasons dependant on how many organic stories there are.

Final note: This post has focused a lot on engagement, and it’s a term thrown around a lot. It’s probably worth noting that it’s rarely (never?) the higher objective. It’s a means to an end, but more about that in another post.

[Update]

See Why we value engagement on Facebook for a follow up to this discussion.

-  -  -

I hope this quick run-through has provided at least some clarity on how to think about the different ad types. If you want to read about the different ad formats in more detail, see our Guide to Facebook ads.

We advertised one of our own page posts containing a short text and a link to one of our blog posts:

It was delivered to people with relevant interests that are friends of fans of our Facebook page and the bid type was set to Optimized CPM (optimize for reach). The advertised page post was targeted to 16 countries and split up into 16 campaigns – one for each country. We split it up this way in order to be able to control budgets for different markets, as our reach varies with country.

The ads ran for 7 days with an average frequency of one, meaning that each person in our target audience that saw the ad, on average saw it once.

Objectives

The long term objective for our Facebook marketing activities is to attract new customers, and one of the ways we go about doing this is via our company blog. As we publish new content we market it on Facebook through page posts that we turn into page post ads.

Attracting new customers this way is a process that takes time, as a big part of the people that sign up for our service don’t do it during their first interaction with us. Therefore, measuring the results from a campaign like this one is not primarily a matter of new signups attributed to clicks on the page post ads.

There are a few interesting metrics we like to look at, such as link clicks (clicks on a link in the post), page likes (likes of our Facebook page), page post likes (likes of the post), and page post comments (comments on the post). These are all summarized as actions. The value of link clicks is quite self-explanatory, page likes increases our reach, and page post likes and comments improve our EdgeRank (and reach for sponsored stories related to the post).

When evaluating how successful an ad is in terms of actions, I have been debating which metric to use in order to best capture the real performance. I am starting to settle on the actions to reach ratio, since this describes how many people engaged with our content out of the amount of people that saw it.

This is in essence a conversion rate, which usually is defined as conversions over clicks. In the case of actions however, a click is likely to be an action (e.g., likes of the post) why basing it on clicks would risk skewing the data. For instance, if you’re running a page like sponsored story and you receive likes for your page directly from the sponsored story, those likes will be reported both as actions and clicks.

Results

Although the dataset was rather small, it gave some interesting results.

• 2.5X greater reach on desktop
• 3X greater CTR on mobile
• 1.5X greater actions to reach ratio on mobile

The actions to reach metric seems low and deserves a comment. Clicks were about 10.5X the amount of link clicks reported, and Google Analytics tells me that the amount of visitors from the page posts were about 10X of the link clicks reported. Since most clicks on a page post ad are actions per definition the actions metric is understated.

That said, what’s most interesting here is the difference between the two placements, why the understated actions to reach ratio is not really an issue in the case of this study.

We saw a substantially higher response rate on mobile than desktop judging from CTR and the amount of actions taken relative to the reach, which in turn drives the cost per action down for ads running on mobile.

The 2.5X reach on desktop is not very surprising, given that people still tend to access Facebook via the desktop to a greater extent than via mobile in most of our target markets. The greater reach resulted in almost 2X more actions in absolute measures, despite the lower actions to reach ratio.

Key takeaways

The main takeaways from this small study depend on what kind of business you’re running and what your objectives are.

When to target Mobile

Based on these results the main reasons for allocating your budget towards mobile would be:

• Your primary objective is engagement on Facebook (likes, comments, shares)

And in more general terms:

• You want to reach mobile users specifically (e.g., you deliver a mobile service or want to reach people on the go)

When to target Desktop

Based on the results, the main reason for allocating budget towards desktop is:

• Your primary objective is reach

And in more general terms:

• You want to reach desktop users specifically (e.g., your post contains a link and your landing page is not optimized for mobile)

The general conclusions (reaching mobile or desktop users specifically) might seem obvious. The reason for including them here is that I see quite a few examples of brands that don’t seem to think about this but rather just fire away.

A specific and recent example is a post from a company promoting a mobile app which reached me on my desktop. It lacked a link to follow for installing it, or a description for how to go about. It’s probably fair to say that they would have received better results by targeting mobile devices specifically.

In our specific case, the takeaways are as follows:

Based on this study, ads running on mobile have a higher engagement rate and are a more effective way for improving our EdgeRank. This lowers our advertising costs and at the same time increases our reach for sponsored stories related to the posts.

However, even though the mobile placements came with a higher actions to reach ratio, that is not enough for making us run our campaigns on mobile only. Here’s why:

People are more likely to share our content when visiting us on their desktops (thus creating more incoming traffic), and the vast majority of new signups come from desktop users. Focusing only on mobile placements would therefore not optimize for the value generated by the advertising, even though the actions to reach ratio speaks in the favor of mobile.

Also, reach is important to us and with a 2.5X higher reach on desktop it makes sense to include those placements. Going beyond the reach on mobile and including desktop placements will therefore be part of the setup for future campaigns.

Will this change how we conduct our paid Facebook marketing?

In the case of page post ads with links to our website, no. We will continue to include mobile and desktop placements to combine the engagement wins on mobile with the greater reach on desktop.

In the case of running page post ads without links (e.g., text statuses, photos) and on tight budgets, we will focus on mobile placements to benefit from the higher action to reach ratio.

If you have any questions or thoughts related to this, please shout out in the comments!

This infographic hopefully provides enough reasons to why you should start thinking about Facebook from a mobile perspective – and how this shift affects your business.

Enjoy!

Want this on your blog? Embed it with the code below!

<a href="http://www.qwaya.com/blog/2012-11-15/facebook-on-mobile-infographic/"><img src="http://www.qwaya.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/facebook-mobile-infographic.jpg" alt="" /></a>

This is especially important today since a lot of people are moving away from desktop usage, to using Facebook from their mobile devices – which only supports ads in the news feed.

You can now decide for yourself where you wish to show certain ads to users. To be more specific, where you wish to show your sponsored stories and page posts ads. This feature goes under the illustrative name “Placements”.

But before going into how this feature works, let’s take a quick look at what sponsored stories and page post ads are.

Defining sponsored stories and page post ads

Generally these two ad formats are more engaging than traditional ads, and are based on different actions taken by users or brands within the Facebook ecosystem. The first type is called sponsored stories and are “action based” in the sense that they are derived from actions people take (e.g., liking a Facebook page). The sponsored story looks like an organic story, but since it is sponsored it is not affected by EdgeRank in the same way an organic story is.

Sponsored stories generally have higher engagement rates than “normal” ads. This is quite logical since they tell a story about what someone else, maybe even your best friend, is doing. This creates trust, interest and engagement – if my friends are using a certain Facebook application and I see that in my newsfeed, the chances are high I click on the ad to learn why my best friend is using this particular app.

The second type is called page post ads and are just what they sound like; they are ads derived from posts made by a Facebook page. Brands or marketers can use these to increase the likelihood of reaching everyone in their fan base, and even to reach beyond it.

This is becoming increasingly important since the competition for being seen in friends’ news feeds is getting tougher all the time. The news feed can only show so much and update so often, and it is a crowded place with increased activity by friends, pages and apps competing for news feed placements.

Working with placements

The beauty of the placement feature is that you can decide where on the Facebook platform you wish to show these two ad types. If you’re primarily looking to get the maximum reach then no need to think further – default is all placements.

However, if you are promoting your website with page post ads and you know it’s a poor user experience on mobile devices, you probably want to exclude all mobile placements. Another case would be if you’re promoting your mobile app – excluding desktop placements would probably make sense.

You can set your placement to target news feed only (on desktop, mobile or both) which generally have higher engagement rates. This will limit your reach though as you’re not using the full available inventory.

So depending on what you’re marketing and what your objectives are, you will find that working with different placements will make sense. If you’re serious about squeezing out everything from your advertising budget you would probably want to split up your ad campaigns between different placements and bid differently for each. With that level of control, you’re setting yourself up for maximum return on your ad spend for each available placement.

To start working with placements in Qwaya, go to the “Set targeting” tab and you will find the available placement options in the “New targeting” popup.

If you have any questions or comments in regards to this, feel free to leave them below in the comments!

You might be thinking “Why on earth would I want to do that?”. And sure, it might seem to make little sense at first glance, but fact of the matter is that giving your current fans an easy out of your updates serves a few important purposes.

You position your brand as more likable

Informing your fans about how to avoid seeing your updates in the News feed adds to your credibility, positioning you as honest and transparent (because you are, right?). It’s comparable to having an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of your email news letter. If you don’t let people know how they can opt out, you’re in the danger zone of being perceived as spam.

And no, all Facebook users don’t know how to do this. Sure, some might think of unliking your page, but that’s not enough to get rid of you completely. In order to do that they would also have to make sure to “Hide all stories from [Your page]”.

It increases the return on your ad spend

Provided that you sponsor your page posts targeting your existing fans (you should!), I’m pretty sure you’d want to reach the people truly interested in what you have to say. If they are not, it is unlikely they will spend money with you, so why spend money on reaching them?

I think it’s safe to say that the money previously spent on reaching the part of your fans uninterested in your content is put to better use by reaching new people more likely to engage with you.

It forces you to share stuff that’s actually valuable

In my opinion, this is the most important reason. As pointed out in previous posts, people follow you on Facebook in order to get something out of it. You are to blame if they don’t, sorry to say. Given that you agree, you probably also like the idea of getting clear incentives for putting resources towards this.

I have personally been opting out from quite a few news letters recently. While I appreciate the companies that make it dead simple (by confirming my unsubscribing with a simple landing page, no more to it), I’m surprised how few ask me why I’m opting out. Surely the purpose of the news letter is to engage with me and convert me to a paying customer. So if this objective has failed, why not ask why? This is the easiest way to get better and start creating content that would actually be valuable to me.

You can do that on Facebook, with a slightly different execution. Unfortunately you can’t ask people why they unlike your page as they do it, but you can ask your existing fans what kind of content they would like you to share. If you do however, make sure to follow up on it. Of course it wouldn’t make sense to run wild with every request, but at least communicate that you’ve taken part of the feedback and that you’re going adjust the content you share according to what your fans want – and to what makes sense for you.

Feel free to use one of our latest Facebook posts

A few days back, we posted a simple “How to get rid of us” via our Facebook page. You’ll find it below, and you’re more than welcome to use it if you find it helpful.

Happy marketing!

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Let’s start with a quick recap. The core is your existing customers. These are people that already spend money with you, or have shown purchasing intent (by signing up for a mailing list for instance). The potentials are just what they sound like – people that have good potential for converting into customers.

Divide your target audience into Core and Potentials to structure your efforts in
effectively attracting the right people to like your Facebook page.

When you’ve attracted the majority of your core it’s time to move on to your potentials. I define them as people who fit your defined relevant interests AND have one or more friends that already follows you.

It will of course be the case that some people that would be your exact target audience don’t indicate this on Facebook through their likes and interests. Also, people obviously don’t have to have a friend among your current customers in order to start spending money with you – but if they do, your marketing efforts will become much easier. Therefore, I prefer to keep it this way when establishing the Facebook follower base. As your follower base grows, so will the amount of people you can reach through the connections you’ve already made.

It is time to start looking at advertising

To attract your core the most effective way is probably utilising Custom Audiences. If that isn’t a viable option for you then don’t worry. Since you know who your customers are you already have a good way of reaching them, as pointed out in the previous post. When it comes to reaching your potentials on the other hand, you’ll find that Facebook’s ad offering is exactly what you need. By putting some leverage on the interaction you’ve started with your core followers, reaching out to your potentials is both easy and effective.

Do this by turning your best page posts into page post ads, and by keeping page like and post comment stories always on. But, don’t forget your targeting. You still want to reach the right people, so work with defining (and refining) your targeting profiles to make sure they match your desired audience.

By working this way, where you start with the most relevant people and expand from there, you’ll get the most bang for your buck. Besides starting interacting with the people most likely to spend money with you, there’s another reason to why this is a good way of going about. This is due to the nature of a social network like Facebook, where the smaller follower base you have, the greater the unique reach per person in it. This becomes evident when taking a look at a (although rather small) set of pages, and is shown in the chart below.

Number of fans vs. Reach per fan

Reach per fan is defined as the number of users you can reach in a given country, by targeting
people in that country that are friends of your current fans, divided by the number of current fans in that country. This follows the assumption that a given user has the majority of her
friends in the country where she lives.

As you keep gaining more likes for your Facebook page, each new person will (on average) contribute with less previously unreachable people than the last one. And this of course makes a lot of sense. If you take a set of Facebook users within your target audience, it is unlikely that they have no common friends (unless you keep the number small, and pick users from different parts of the world). The more likes you gain, the less each new one will contribute in terms of unique friends.

When you start out you have rather limited reach and by growing from your core you set yourself up for reaching relevant people more effectively. People tend to engage a lot more with stories that come with an endorsement from a friend (a like, a comment, a share…), so by making sure you’re spending your advertising budget on impressions of that kind, you’re setting yourself up for a better payoff.

It comes down to starting at the right end

So, the approach I’ve tried to outline here is all about attracting the right people as followers of your Facebook page, mainly due to these reasons:

• The resources you put into creating content and interacting with your followers are spent on reaching people that ultimately spend money with you
• The money you spend on advertising will get you impressions and clicks from people that ultimately spend money with you

Simply put:
By ensuring you build your Facebook following from a base of people that are your real customers, you’re in a much better position to scale up your Facebook marketing efforts in a cost-efficient manner – that at the end of the day translates into a positive return on your investment.

If you don’t agree with this, or have any insights of your own, please feel free to share them in the comments!

And why is this important? Well, my take is that it’s not simply a case of the more the merrier – not for all brands. Sure, if virtually everyone is in your target audience then no need to worry. But, if you’re somewhat niched (which I think most companies are), then it actually makes more sense to aim for attracting the right people, rather than just anyone.

In order to reach all the people in your target audience, you will most likely find yourself spending a bit of money. Provided that you do, you’d surely prefer to spend it where it makes the most sense.

Think of it as if it was your AdWords budget

Say you’re buying traffic on any of the big search engines. It would be highly unlikely that you’d spend your budget on just any keyword, as long as you got traffic. You’d obviously like to spend it on the search queries that make the most sense for your business. If you are sensitive about conversion rates you’d keep your keyword portfolio narrow. If you’re looking for impact you might want to keep it broader, and spend more on the keywords that truly define your business.

The same logic applies to Facebook marketing.

If you are marketing a niche product or service – say, dog food for instance – it would make little sense to spend time and money on reaching people allergic to dogs, people who don’t like dogs, or people who simply would never think of getting a dog.

And in order to be clear, I’m talking about building a fan base here, not buying traffic to your website. In the latter case few would argue I’m sure, but as far as acquiring likes for Facebook pages goes I’ve seen plenty of examples where marketers simply forget this and just go for as many likes as they can possibly get.

But isn’t many likes better than few likes?

Well I for one would much rather have 10 000 people liking my Facebook page that are in my defined target audience (or are already paying customers!) than 100 000 random people. Besides the fact that I wouldn’t have been too happy on spending time and resources on reaching those random people and converting them to followers in the first place, there are a few more reasons to why this is a more attractive case:

• I’m more confident the resources I’m spending on creating content and interacting with my followers will have an impact on my revenue, by increasing retention and converting followers to customers
• The money I’m spending on Page Post Ads and Sponsored Stories are spent on reaching the right people, as opposed to just anyone
• I am less likely to get negative feedback from people seeing my content in their News Feed, thus retaining a better EdgeRank

Therefore, I’d argue that more is not necessarily merrier – again, it’s rather a case of finding the right people.

Start by working your core

When thinking about the people liking a Facebook page I like to divide them into the core and the potentials. The core are people that have already converted to customers, or have shown clear signs of purchasing intent with you (e.g. by signing up for your newsletter or contacting you directly). The potentials are just what they sound like – people that have good potential for converting into customers (more about them later).

Divide your target audience into Core and Potentials to structure your efforts in
effectively attracting the right people to like your Facebook page.

The idea behind this is to make it a bit easier to figure out how to reach the right people, thus giving you something tangible to work with. As you get going and know your fan base better you might want to refine your segments, just as you might want to change how you segment customers over time.

I suggest you start working on your core – that way you will find it a lot easier to expand in the right way, and ultimately achieve a bigger impact on your revenue.

You probably have a pretty good idea of who your customers are. With this I mean returning customers, which obviously is easy if you’re running some form of subscription service. If your business is of the kind where people buy things irregularly you might still have a customer database, a mailing list or something of that sort. Either way, take a look at those people – that’s your core.

Ideally, you want all of those people to like and thereby start following your Facebook page, primarily to improve retention and to build a solid platform from where to grow.

However, although Facebook is HUGE, it is unlikely that everyone in your customer database have a Facebook account. To get a feeling for how big your core is, take a look at the geographical distribution of your customers (if possible) and then multiply it with the Facebook penetration for the corresponding regions/countries/cities (which is accessible via Facebook’s ad targeting). Not perfect, but it will give you a decent idea.

Reach out and let them know they have the opportunity to keep up with you on Facebook. Don’t forget to tell them why though! Keep reaching out to these people in the channels you have access to – your newsletter, invoices, logged in mode on your website, your physical locations – whatever channels make sense for you.

One great way to see how you’re doing, if you have have implemented Facebook connect for logging in on your website, is checking whether your logged in visitors also like your Facebook page.

After you’ve managed to attract a big part of your core you’re in a good position to start extracting some real value from your Facebook marketing. It is your real customers you’re communicating with, so make sure to provide them with valuable content and to learn from them. Done the right way you will affect their perception of your brand positively, and ultimately how long they stay and how much money they spend with you.

With a solid base of core followers in place it’s time to start thinking about your potentials. This will be covered in the follow-up to this post, which we’ll publish next week.

Please feel free to share any feedback you might have on this topic. If you think of it differently I’d love to hear about it!

Enjoy!

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Below you can find some of the key features we have released lately to improve the Qwaya experience. We hope you have all found your way back to business as usual after the summer months!

Excel export

Our improved Excel export function allows you to export graphs and formated report tables.

Exporting graphs also means exporting all data points, which gives a great dataset to analyze your campaigns on a granular level.

Read more >>

Timely analytics stats

Knowing what ad generated what sale is crucial for most advertisers. This helps you optimize ads to impact your bottom line revenues.

We have have updated our Google analytics conversion tracking to be updated every 15 minutes. This means we pull the data from Google Analytics every 15 minutes and present it to you in our reporting down to ad level – all to help you optimize on sales.

Group and sort

Advertisers running campaigns with many ads quickly understand the importance of being able to group and sort ads. This helps you analyze what combination of copy, images, targeting and bid levels bring the best results.

We now support advanced grouping and sorting within your grouping – in order to help you understand what works best for you.

Read more >>

New improved Statistics views – with memory!

We’ve made some changes to the predefined statistics view to make them more useful. A big addition is also that they now come with a memory, so if you do changes to what data to show, those changes won’t be lost next time you visit Qwaya.

We hope this will help you save time and get a better understanding for how your ads are performing!

New blog

Our blog has a completely new face. You can now filter all our blog posts in two different categories, Qwaya news and Strategy & Tactics. You can also filter to read blog posts from different authors. We hope that this will be your go to place for Facebook marketing insights!

(although I guess if you are reading this you probably already figured this one out)

That’s all – if you have any feedback on these changes feel free to fire away!

Let’s start with a quick recap of how Optimized CPM works within the Qwaya app. As an advertiser you have the option to let Facebook optimize the delivery of your ads to reach any of the following goals:

• Actions
• Clicks
• Reach
• Social impressions

This means, that if you’re primarily evaluating your advertising efforts based on the amount of generated actions, you’d choose Optimize for actions. If you’re interested in clicks – Optimize for clicks, and so on. And all this seems pretty straightforward right?

Well as it turns out, the basis for this optimization algorithm is what Facebook knows about their users. Some are more prone to install apps and like Facebook pages than others, and if you choose Optimize for actions, Facebook will focus on delivering ad impressions to the more “action oriented” kind of users.

Do you want “likers” or actually interested people?

I’m going to focus on advertising for Facebook pages here, and I’m assuming that most advertisers choose Optimize for actions over the other alternatives – I know I did when starting to experiment with this. And although it actually works great for accumulating likes, I’m not convinced this is the best way for building a sustainable base of Facebook fans.

Depending on what you’re looking to accomplish with your Facebook presence, I’d suggest taking a moment to think about whether Optimize for actions actually makes sense for you. If you’re only interested in amassing as many likes as possible for your Facebook page – then think no further and just fire away.

If you on the other hand are more interested in attracting your specific target audience, there might be better options. Since Optimize for actions will make sure you get great visibility among people you might want to call “likers” (that is, people who like to like, so to speak), you risk ending up with a fan base of quite a few irrelevant people – unless you keep your targeting very specific.

It is not unlikely for this kind of Facebook users to be liking a couple of thousand pages. How many of those pages do you think will get a chance to show their content in the news feed of a liker? Not many would be my answer, not unless you manage to build up the user’s affinity with you substantially.

Therefore; if you decide to use Optimize for actions, make sure your targeting is narrow – to really capture the people you want as followers.

However, if you’re confident that the content you’re promoting is so interesting that you’ll get some action even from people that usually don’t click on stuff or like pages, I’d suggest trying Optimize for reach or Optimize for social impressions. That way you’re telling Facebook your aim is not actions or clicks but visibility, thus giving everyone in your target audience an even chance to decide whether you are worth interacting with or not – ultimately improving the odds of attracting the people you are actually looking for.

It’s still early days though and more findings will most likely surface. If we have anything to share on the topic we’ll make sure to keep you posted.

If you have any experiences of your own, you’re more than welcome to let us know in the comments!

Ok, so I hear this a lot, that brands want more followers on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media property they have. Now I totally understand where they are coming from, as it seems like a good indicator for how well they’re doing in their social media marketing activities. I too have been part of building a few follower bases and sure – it’s really nice to see that number growing.

However, when you think about it, the only time the growing of that number is of any good is if it’s got some correlation with coming closer to reaching your business goals. I might be kicking in an open door here, but before going onto answering the question I felt that needed to be said.

So, in order to figure out the how, I’d advise starting with the why.

Why do I want followers on Facebook?

You might want to focus on increasing the retention of your current customers, which is often the case for subscription business models, e.g. credit cards, insurances, subscription video on demand, subscription music on demand, etc. Or, maybe you’re retention rate is already great (or doesn’t apply to you in this way) so your main focus is bringing in new customers. Another scenario would be launching something new, so per definition you don’t have any customers, but you’re obviously looking to get some.

The most common case however, is probably a combination of retaining customers as well gaining new ones. Luckily they don’t have to be conflicting, as long as you keep your objectives in mind.

Once you’ve figured out why you want people to follow you, you’ll be able to answer the question “Why should people follow me on Facebook?”. And that is the whole key to building a large, sustainable follower base – which will help you reach your business goals.

How can I get more followers on Facebook?

I’m fully aware I’m not the first one to say this, but marketing via social media is all about engagement. If you want people to start following you, and ultimately spend money with you and spread your brand’s message to their peers, you simply have to give them something in return.

So, people should follow you on Facebook because they get something out of it. Think about why you’re on Facebook in the first place and create content accordingly. Depending on your objectives you might want to offer them great deals on your products or services, share industry insights, share tips and tricks that is relevant for your area of business (or rather, for that of your customers), entertain them with fun and/or interesting content. Whatever you do, ask yourself if the kind of content you share with your followers are of any value to them. If not, don’t bother.

What kind of content?

If your customers have the opportunity to spend money with you online, you obviously want to direct traffic to your website. Do so by posting good, original content there, and then let people know about it on Facebook. The same goes for great deals and promotions. I promise you’ll find this to be a very cost-effective way of attracting more business in the long run.

NB: In the start it will take a fair bit of resources, so factoring in the hours you’re spending, the ROI will most likely be negative off the bat, but as you get that process going and reach an increasingly larger audience you’ll see the payoff.

If you’re a brick and mortar business I’d suggest you use Facebook for strengthening bonds to existing and soon-to-be customers by educating and entertaining them on Facebook. Anything that’s memorable, fun or interesting (and still on-brand) is a go. So are great deals and promotions. Also, utilise your offline presence to get people to connect with you on Facebook and keep engaging with them there. An easy way is to just let people visiting your store know that you have a Facebook page and that they should start following you (using a sign, for instance).

But, don’t do the classic mistake of not telling people why the should follow you. A simple “Like us on Facebook!” does not provide a reason for liking your Facebook page.

In terms of what content to post, it might be hard to determine what your customers actually find valuable – and that’s fine. Fortunately Facebook gives you great data on what kind of content reaches the most users and what kind turned out to be the most engaging. So experimenting with what works is the way forward.

A word or two about EdgeRank:

Facebook marketing centres around News Feed and I’m surprised how many marketers actually think they get tons of visits to their Facebook page. You might be the exception and if so well done, but take a look at how many visits your page gets and you’ll probably see that the visits to your Facebook page is nothing compared to your reach in News Feed.

Conclusion; optimise for News Feed.

Since there are too many stories created by any given user’s friends to show it all in News Feed, Facebook lets the EdgeRank algorithm determine what stories to show. Although I don’t know with perfect detail how it works, what I can say is that the main components are Affinity x Weight x Recency.

Affinity is the strength of a given user’s bond to another user or Facebook object (App, Page, etc). This is determined by how much interest the user shows, by visiting the profile page, liking stories, commenting, and so on.

Weight is a news feed story attribute, determining how important a given story is. A story is “heavier” if it’s got lots of likes, comments and shares. Also, some story types are heavier by default than others. For instance, photos are heavier than links, that in turn are heavier than plain text.

Recency is quite self-explanatory – it’s the time that’s passed since the story’s creation. The more recent the story is, the higher the recency score.

Ideally, you want followers to show great interest in your Page (high affinity), lots of engagement with your posts (high weight, and high contribution to affinity) and a fairly high posting frequency (to maintain a high recency). Try to avoid spamming your followers though.

I’m doing all that but I’m still struggling with reach?

Now, provided that you know why you have a Facbook page, and why people should follow you, you’re in great shape for giving them a good experience. However, unless you’re already a well known brand, or are in the business of creating viral videos and memes, you will probably find your follower growth rate rather slow – even if you’re sharing the best content in your industry.

Enter advertising.

To accelerate the growth of your follower base and expand the spread of your message beyond a subset of your followers (on average your posts will reach just shy of a fifth of your followers), I strongly advise utilising the various ad formats Facebook has to offer. This way you can offset EdgeRank and ensure you get the visibility you’re looking for with users that haven’t yet had the chance to really starting building up their affinity with you.

Page post ads have proven to be a great way to both make sure your existing followers see your updates and provide them with a chance to engage with it, as well as to reach out to new followers. Add sponsored page and post like stories to the mix and you’re applying good leverage to the great content you’re already posting.

So, in order to sum things up:

• Figure out why you’re on Facebook in the first place
• Think through what value people will get from following you
• Work on creating great content, and iterate when you see what works
• Build your follower base and amplify your presence with sponsored stories and ads

I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments! Do you agree? Do you think of it in any other way? Let us know!

This is often due to ad fatigue, and it means your ads have become tired. Essentially there are two reasons to why this is happening.

1. People usually don’t click on the same ad twice

People who are interested in your message will tend to click on the ad one of the first few times they see it. And once they have clicked they are unlikely to be interested in clicking on the same ad again even if they keep seeing it many more times.

2. Facebook likes fresh ads

As an ad gets old Facebook will grant it fewer impressions, forcing you to pay more for showing that same creative over and over again. Also, your CTR will typically decline over time (see reason 1), which is a signal of your ad being less interesting. This is therefore punished by Facebook by allowing fewer impressions at your current spend level.

(Another possible reason can be that you max bid is out dated? Perhaps there are new advertisers who entered the market ready to pay more for clicks from the same targeting population you have chosen.)

In essence, Facebook advertising is no different from other forms of advertising – it comes down to relevancy. Users “vote” on ads via their clicks, and as the click-through rate drops (and the ad gets less “votes”) this is a signal to Facebook that the ad is becoming uninteresting.

Showing the same message to the same people repeatedly will make it irrelevant to them. Facebook knows this and protects users by punishing lazy advertisers. Since Facebook depends on their advertising for revenue it’s in their interest to make sure the ads are relevant to the users, and this is one way of accomplishing that.

So what can you do about it?

• Be creative  – change your ads over time with new content and images
• Rotate the ads in each campaign – with Qwaya you can rotate the ads every day in each campaign to make sure Facebook gives all your ads the same chance to perform before being shut down by the Facebook optimization algorithm
• Change max bid  – someone else might have entered the market ready to pay more. By increasing the max bid you can compete with them. If your CTR is high enough you might be able to lower the max bid again once you get traction and show Facebook your ads are performing great
• Create more campaigns with less ads – Use our splitting feature to create many campaigns with fewer ads in each. When you have fewer ads in each campaign, Facebook will give all your ads combined a better chance to perform. You’re thus not putting all your eggs in one basket

Do you have experiences from combating ad fatigue? We’d love to hear – tell us in the comments!

Now you can also choose to split your targeting profiles based on Interests and Relationships. It works just like the previously released feature – just check the “Split by” checkbox next to the targeting criteria of your preference, and Qwaya will do the work for you.

So, when could this be useful? Well, it’s probably fair to say that in some cases interests are a more effective way of segmenting your advertising than, say, age. A parallel could be drawn to search advertising, where the core is interest based segmentation via keywords. You don’t split up your ads based on gender or age, but rather on interests – that is, the search queries people use which in turn indicate what they are interested in finding.

When advertising on Facebook you might want to segment your target audience based on their interest for your competitors, or if you are a retailer of outdoors equipment maybe you want different ad creatives for your hikers, trekkers, climbers and mountainbikers. Also, you might find that some of these interest groups are more likely to purchase your products or engage with your brand.

And this brings us to the next reason as to why splitting is a good idea: the opportunity to learn about your audience. If you are the outdoors retailer mentioned above, and you find that climbers are your most engaged fans you could focus more on satisfying their needs. Or maybe you find that it’d make more sense for you to try and reposition your brand to resonate more with the hikers in your audience.

The appropriate course of action obviously depends on your business, but in addition to creating a campaign structure that is a lot easier to optimize, you’ll also get lots of interesting data from where you can make your future marketing decisions!

NB: In order to avoid performance issues, as well as avoid creating unmanageable campaign structures we’re limiting the amount of targeting profiles to 50.

We are happy to share it with you – It covers pretty much everything related to Facebook advertising and should give you a good idea of all the amazing opportunities there are with Facebook advertising in general.

As always – please feel free to come with feedback!

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