Facebook Now Offers Targeted Ads, ROI Tracking Tool, and CPM Bidding Tool
Last year Elton discussed why social media ads might be something to add to your mix. With high print advertising rates and smaller marketing budgets, it’s important for building product marketers to consider the new tools Facebook has to offer. It’s worth a look at these options to see if they fit into your marketing strategy. Recently Facebook added three new features including:
- Targeted ads
- A ROI tracking tool
- An optimized CPM bidding tool
New – Facebook Targeted Ads
- Targeted ads allow advertisers to target customers by uploading their emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs. Facebook refers to these lists as Custom Audiences from customer files, matched with secure, hashed identifiers. You can also build Lookalike Audiences to find new people similar to your best customers in the same country. Building product companies can target their advertisements to the list of customers they have along with target prospects. This allows marketers to connect with contacts and build stronger customer relationships. Building product marketers are able to target segments with a personalized message based on whether they are a customer or prospect. In addition, this provides companies a new way to gain Facebook fans from current customers and gain leads from prospects.
New – ROI Tracking Tool
- The tracking tool allows companies to track conversions to their external pages and measure results like sales, leads, and downloads. Marketers are able to see how ads perform after clicking on the ad and being driven to the company’s landing page. Facebook’s unified pixel, introduced to replace the older conversion pixel, supports standard events like Lead, Purchase, and CompleteRegistration. Placing the pixel sitewide and firing events enables consistent conversion reporting and optimization in Ads Manager for accuracy and scale. With the new tracking, marketers can monitor segments that positively respond to certain messaging to gauge future ad messaging. Building product marketers can track the results by adding the code on the post-click landing page like a thank-you page.
New – CPM Bidding Tool
- Facebook allows marketers to manage their campaigns with CPM, cost per thousand impressions, bidding tool by setting an advertising goal. Optimized CPM uses delivery optimization to show ads to people most likely to meet your goal across your defined audience. When the objective is conversions or leads, bidding remains CPM-based while delivery prioritizes higher-probability actions. By entering whether your company wants more Facebook page likes, sales, leads, etc., Facebook will adjust the CPM ads to target those who are more likely to achieve this goal. If the goal were to gain more leads, Facebook would show the ad to your target audience of prospects rather than the audience that is likely to like your company page.
With the new features Facebook offers, it is simple to measure the campaign return on investment in one platform. By not taking advantage of the latest ad technology, you could be missing the chance to build a stronger relationship with customers or gain new prospects. As Elton mentioned in a post earlier this year about utilizing social media ads in the building products industry, it is a small risk to invest in Facebook ads since people everywhere are engaging with social media.
