3 lessons on Facebook Ads: Engagement, traffic and creativity

30 de Julio de 2018

Thanks to a study on the use of Facebook Ads by brands, we understand that engagement, traffic and creativity are the 3 key ingredients for any digital campaign.

Time has shown that advertising on digital platforms not only offers a greater return on investment, but also hands to advertisers some hypersegmentation options unthinkable in offline advertising.

Despite the widespread view that Facebook is reaching its end in favor of Instagram, especially among new generations, the fact is that both platforms share the same ad manager, so Zuckerberg's company continues to lead the online advertising industry together with Google.

In addition to the advanced audience segmentation options, Facebook Ads also offers us different types of campaigns depending on our advertising objective, the most popular of which are:

• Engagement & interaction with posts.
• Traffic atraction to our website.
• Video views.
• Attracting new followers.
• Conversions: When we want the user to perform a certain action, such as buying a product.
• Brand awareness or branding.  
• Lead Generation

But which ones work best, and what kind of goals do brands pursue in their digital campaigns? Metricool has carried out a study in which it analyses the data extracted from more than 140.000 campaigns to determine the main objectives of brands on Facebook Ads. We've extracted 3 lessons from this study:

ENGAGEMENT IS KING

Most of the campaigns carried out on Facebook Ads aim to generate interactions with the brand's publications, that is to say, the brands prioritize engagement with their followers over any other objective.

This is not surprising due to the nature of social networks. In addition, this trend is reinforced after Facebook 's algorithm update earlier this year, causing a great fall of organic reach on brand publications. This way, having a large community of followers isn't synonymous of having a large reach anymore, unless we have a budget for this type of campaigns.

In second place we find traffic campaigns and in the third place video reproductions, which are just another type of interaction with publication.

TRAFFIC OVER BRANDING

When it comes to digital campaigns, brands prefer to set easily quantifiable targets that allow them to measure ROI in a medium to short term. In this way, we see that brand recognition campaigns are relegated to a second level (despite offering cheaper prints) below campaigns that seek to capture traffic or even direct sales.

In other words, advertisers believe that Facebook Ads is a good platform for campaigns that seek a specific action or response from the user.

CREATIVITY IS THE SEED OF SUCCESS

Even if you use a great segmentation, choose the right target and dedicate the necessary investment to your campaign, it will never be successful unless you previously dedicate the necessary time and budget to have a good creativity that awakens in your consumer the curiosity or need to perform the action you are looking for.

If the seed is not fertile, there is no point in watering it every day. Choose your seed well before launching a new digital campaign, always.