Meta is one of the biggest advertising channels in the world and it's not a coincidence. With 2.89 billion active users in 2021 and vast targeting options,
Meta is an essential marketing channel for e-commerce and many other businesses.
In this blog post I'll go through how Meta advertising works and why you should invest in Meta ads if you have an online business.
Basics: Paid social vs organic
Advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat is often referred to as paid social. Almost every e-commerce business has a paid social strategy as part of their marketing plans as they know it is where they will find their audiences.
It is not to be confused with the organic presence, which is the unpaid account and brand profile you create on these platforms and it generally serves as your store display.
How does Meta ads work?
When you're advertising with Meta you're able to show your ads to your target audiences across Facebook's ad inventory. This covers Facebook itself, Instagram and Facebook's audience network - which is the display inventory in mobile apps.
Before we dive into the details keep in mind that it is actually a quite straightforward process to advertise on Meta and it's not as complicated as it may look. Once you start to understand the dynamics and know your way around the platform, the rest is pretty much machine learning doing the optimisations on your desired advertising scenarios.
In a few simple steps, this is how Meta advertising works:
- Create an account: You will need to create a business manager account with Meta, and install the Meta pixel on your website to make sure you are measuring the results.
- Select a Goal: When you're creating a campaign you tell Meta what you want to achieve as a result of your ads, this is your goal for that campaign. Whether it's brand awareness, traffic, leads or purchases you need to select the most accurate goal in your setup because it is exactly what the campaign will deliver.
- Manage Your Budget: Decide how much you want to spend and determine either a daily or a lifetime budget.
- Targeting: This is really where Meta outranks its competitors. You can find people based on their interests (brands, celebrities, hobbies, products etc.), demographics, location, their behaviour and whether they have interacted with your business previously or not. Facebook's algorithm itself is also quite powerful, many advertisers are doing broad targeting and not bothering with interest targeting at all.
- Create Content: Your ads can be single images, carousel images, videos or a combination of those. Your target audience can see your ads in their feed while they're scrolling down, in between stories or reels, or on any other placement that Meta offers. Remember to select the most accurate call-to-action button for your ads and send them to a landing page where they can find your offer without much hassle.
- Measure results and optimize: Because you have installed the pixel, you will be able to see what actions your audience coming from Meta took on your website. Ultimately if you are an e-commerce company you will be looking for purchase conversions and your ROAS. You can calculate your ROAS with the following formula: 'Purchase value'/'Ad spend'. This will tell you how much you have generated in revenue for each $1 you've spent. Based on this you can decide which audiences and ads to keep and which ones to pause.
5 reasons why you should advertise on Meta
- Meta ads work, they absolutely do. Even if you are unsure about the targeting, leave it at broad match and it will find the right audience as long as you are measuring results. It is the simplest way for online businesses to find new customers and attract to their online stores.
- Spend as much or less as you want. You are in full control of your budget and can stop the ad spend any time you want to, there is no commitment. You can change your budget based on seasonality or how your overall sales are doing.
- Your next customer is on Meta and it's up to you to find them. The targeting options can be as specific as you want: the influencers, celebrities, brands, products they like, to name a few. I'll create a new blog post detailing the targeting strategies for online businesses and will link it here soon.
- Meta allows you to reach out to your existing audiences such as your website visitors, cart abandoners, email subscribers and many more to run retargeting campaigns. Any audience interaction you have, you can retarget them through Meta ads.
- It is fairly simple to create ads, especially if you already have an Instagram account for your business, you can leverage some of your top performing content to run as ads. If not you can always use your product photography or even find a stock image (licensed) that fits into your brand story.
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