5 Tips To Rock Facebook Ads With In 2012

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A lot of affiliate marketers have been expressing their frustrations with high CPC’s with Facebook Ads here in Quarter 4. That really is consistent with almost every traffic source out there. It tends to just be more expensive to advertise in the heaviest of all holiday seasons. However, if you’re kicking back and gearing up for the 1st of the Year, it’s time to get serious and start doing some research while putting together a dominant strategy to kick off 2012 the right way with Facebook Ads. Here’s 5 tips you can use to rock Facebook Ads with in the upcoming year:
1. Images Will Still Reign Supreme – By far the most important factor in your ad-copy is images. Images are what divert the eyes of Facebook users and get them to divert their attention over to your ad. It’s essential that you choose one that reflects your landing page, product, service, or offer. You want to make sure that it’s relevant to what you have to sell. However, don’t be afraid to step outside the box here and split test some random/generic/wacky images. I’ve seen crazy things with just totally unrelated images and if you want my opinion, the funnier-looking they are, the better. To keep images going, make sure to have at least 10 ready to go behind them and once you establish yourself a little formula for what’s working and what’s not, just take the ones that are working and submit them for approval. Once they’re approved, then you can pause, start, restart, test and split-test the best ones against each other. Once you have an ad that is achieving much higher than the Facebook minimum (the Facebook average CTR at the moment is 0.02%), then you’ll start up a couple of more ads and see if they beat it. If they can beat it, that’s awesome. Just pause the first one and keep testing against the next best one.

2. Freshness Remains King – With Social Media Advertising especially on Facebook I’ve found that good campaign ad images typically last around 3-5 days before I have to really start dwelling down and switching them up. Depending on the campaign, your time will vary but if you’re like me and you plan for worst case scenarios in advertising, then you Facebook ad campaigns should be bundled up and ready to go with image assets weighing heavily on your mind. Keep your images fresh will keep your ads from becoming stale and hopefully your CTR from falling.

3. CTR Is And Will Always Be The Deciding Factor – Anyone who has ever advertised on Facebook knows that to get cheap clicks, you have to achieve a high CTR. This obviously comes from not only the two tips stressed above but also your headline and ad text. CTR is the determining factor on Facebook on who sticks around and who doesn’t. No ad service wants to serve ads that their users don’t want to click on. You should just plan on having plenty of ads lined up and ready to go and once you start advertising, just set a new goal on how many more ads you want to keep creating. This is called “chaining” and trust me, by keeping a consistent pace, you won’t have to pause/restart as much and you will have a less of a headache on batch approvals of ads.

4. Demographics Remain Critical For Laser Targeting Your Ads:

Picture your ideal customer:

How old is he/she?
What does he/she like to do in her free time?
Where does he/she work?
In what city does he/she live?

Facebook lets you target these specifics and more. Use keywords, age, gender, location, sexual preference, marital status, employer to pre-qualify your audience and target them specifically. Keywords here are not the same as they are in Google AdWords. You need to use keywords that people might add to their profile to explain their interests, hobbies, etc.

5. Always Be Testing – The key to keeping any advertising campaign alive is to always be testing. Testing will allow you to “daisy-chain” newer, fresh ads behind lower performing, stale ads. This is the best way I’ve found to keep a campaign live. It’s not easy, it’s work. Testing separates the good affiliates from the great ones and it keeps the great ones in line with consistent campaigns always bringing in the revenue. I would suggest A/B Split Testing first before getting too aggressive with making changes to your campaigns. A/B testing is where you make very subtle changes to the ad, image, and headline on Facebook. You would also make very small changes on your landing page and have visitors rotated between the two pages. This option takes longer but gives you more specific results.

If frustration occurs, or you just feel the need to switch it up then other testing option is making more radical changes to your campaign. Examples of this would be to use an entirely different type of image with the headline and copy you are running or vice versa, you could switch out the headline and copy with the current image. This option for testing is supposed to help you get faster results as you take the one that has the best results and then try something else. However, it’s nearly a 360 turn in the way you are advertising so it can go south on you really quick. The important thing is that you keep testing.

No doubt about it though, Facebook Ads will still be huge and as they are set to open up their mobile ad platform in 2012 there will be even more options to advertiser from as they keep developing the world’s largest social network.

About the Author: Ruck is the Co-Author of IMGrind and Former CEO of the Convert2Media Affiliate Network. For over a half-decade I've been living the digital life of being an Affiliate, Advertiser, Network Owner, Advisor and Public Speaker. I hate chocolate but love beef jerky. You can find me rambling on Twitter @ruck

[honeycomb99]

Very good article :D read it thoroughly ... Informative one ... Applicable to anyone :D