Its a brand new year. What better time than this to kickstart new campaigns to drive sales to your business? 

Perhaps you are still skeptical of Facebook Marketing. Sure, you have tried it out. Place in some money, clicked a few buttons, and yet, the results do not seem to be very promising. 

Is it because of the amount of budget you’re spending? Or is Facebook advertising just not working for your niche?

In this post, I want to help you up your game on Facebook. The price of Facebook ads in Malaysia is still affordable, so I’d advise you to put it to good use. Let’s get started.

1. Do NOT use the “Boost Post” button 

Sounds counterintuitive, I know. You probably did some ‘boosting’ before and I know that because I did it too.

But here’s the thing about the “boost post” option. The objective of this method is to gain engagements on your Facebook post.

So Facebook’s algorithm will get you as many comments and likes as possible.

Sounds good. But here’s why you should avoid it.

The logic here is that people who comment and likes posts are not necessarily buyers. When you choose the boost option, your ad will be targeted to a mass audience who are known to like commenting or liking post, thus ‘engagements’.

But that usually never equal to sales. Engagement does not correlate with sales. 

So here’s my tip: Use the Facebook Ad Manager to create an ad campaign with a website visit objective. This way, Facebook will help show your ad to people who will most likely click on your ads and wait for it to load. They may not be people who enjoy commenting/liking posts – but in my experience, these people convert into sales better.

2. Never obsess over PMs 

When you see a post filled with tons of comments “PM”, especially if its one by your competitors – you may feel a little jealous.

By the way, ‘PM’ means = Private Message

Wow this person must be getting lots of sales! See below.

Wrong. In my experience, ‘PMs’ that you see on Facebook are worth nothing.

Think about it. If it only takes someone 2 seconds of his life to comment “PM” on your post – do you think he or she would actually invest more time into evaluating what you have to offer and buy?

The PMs that you see on your posts are more often than not, simply vanity metrics. They sure look good, but never good for the bank.

Don’t obsess trying to get PMs on your ads. Instead, focus on a correct ad objective to convert users into customers.

3. Always Choose Your Ad Placements

Admit it. How many times have you chosen ‘Automatic Placements’ when creating your ad campaign on Facebook?

Just like advertising with a physical billboard, the location of your ad needs to be strategic. 

When you opt for “Automatic Placements”, Facebook will push your ads to every possible placement it has – including placements like Instagram Stories.

But here’s the thing. The same ad that you use for Facebook newsfeed will not be as effective if you used it as an Instagram Stories ad.

The user behavior on the different platform, say Instagram, will be different – so you’d want to use a different ad copy and size.

Yet, there are thousands, if not hundreds of marketers using automatic placements to push their ads – wasting ad spend.

Let’s break down the different purposes of the ad placements available on Facebook: 

Instagram Placements

If you are new in the market, do not advertise on Instagram. This is because people scroll really fast on Instagram. They are there to look at pictures. If they do not know your business, your ad will be quickly scrolled past.

However, if your brand is knowned and has some traction in the market – Instagram could work for you. 

Facebook Feeds 

This is the most effective & common placement for Facebook ads is “Feeds”. It is a form of a native ad, where your ad looks just like an organic post on Facebook. This makes it non-intrusive, where it does not disturb the user’s experience scrolling through Facebook.

Your job here is to make your ad stand-out while still looking like a post. Don’t oversell here, because users scrolling on the Facebook newsfeed are looking for interesting things to look at, not to buy something.

Facebook Instant Articles 

This ad placement is slightly more disruptive, as it will pop up in between articles on Facebook. They may not work as effectively because you are disrupting users who are reading an article.

Unless your ad relates really well with the article that they’re reading, then this may be a good ad placement. You can choose to show on certain websites and articles – based on your settings in the Facebook ad manager. 

Right Column (Desktop Only)

These ads are the one that appears on the right side of your Facebook page on desktop. They appear to be quite small and people normally dismissed them, thanks to banner blindness. So you’d want to use high-contrast images here to attract users.

Right column ads are usually great for branding campaigns or retargeting ads.

Facebook Marketplace 

This is one of my least recommended ad placement, especially if your target audience is Malaysians because it is not so widely used here yet. These are ads that appear when users browses Marketplace in the Facebook app.

Facebook Stories 

These are ads that appear between stories you watch on Facebook. They can be made to work, but you need to design ads specifically for the placement. Never use the same ad you were going to use for the news feed here.

Because stories is in a video format, creating video ads for this placement makes more sense. 

Audience Network 

Audience network would refer to ads showing on websites or applications – out of Facebook under Facebook’s Audience Network.

Using this ad placement is tricky, because you have less control as to where it would appear. The biggest advantage of this placement is that it is affordable.

I would recommend you use this ad placement, but closely monitor your ads, and see if it brings the results you want.

Messenger

These ads will appear within your inbox and is quite effective. However, you don’t currently see many of these ads in Malaysia yet. This is good to run, but you might not have enough audience reach with it.

4. Proper Facebook Ad Delivery Will Make (or break) Your Ad Success

This can be quite confusing to new Facebook advertisers. Which options do you choose here? And yes, they are very different.

Link Clicks 

Links clicks is the recommended option by Facebook. Basically, you’re optimizing your ad to show to people who most likely will click on your ad.

However, take note because people who click on ads are not necessarily people who would wait for your landing page to load and view them.

Take for example, myself. I click on a lot of ads everyday – to look at what my competitors are doing. But that does not necessarily make me someone who will buy.

In fact, Facebook also would show the ad to people who has a historical record of mis-clicking ads.

Landing Page Views 

Because of the limitation of the above, bidding for landing page views might be more effective. However, take note that optimizing for landing page views is also more expensive.

Landing Page views are tabulated when the user clicks on your ad, and spends a slightly longer time (6 seconds and above) on your landing page – which is the way Facebook calculate valid landing page views.

I would recommend using this ad delivery option most of the time for your ads, so you are able to achieve results for your business.

Strangely enough as you run more ads, Facebook ad algorithm will begin learning about your preferred audiences and find the right audience that is genuinely interested in your ads.

Impressions 

Similar to how the right column placement works, this would be effective if you are working on a branding campaign, in a case where you want to reach as many people as possible, then repeatedly expose them to your product so that they will have your brand in their minds.

Daily Unique Reach 

This optimization option would be preferred if you’d like to reach a large audience but ensure your ads are not shown too much. For example, uou can choose to show your ad once to your targeted audience every 5 days.

In other words, you want your brand burnt into the minds of your potential customers, but don’t want to annoy them by showing the ads too many times

This would be a preferred optimization option for branding campaigns, but more suited for a campaign that goes on for a longer time, say 1 or 2 months. 

5. Game Changing Tip: Optimize your ad as early as possible! 

The final tip for this post.

Most marketers who run Facebook ads would leave it to run for a few days, before coming back to check on its performance, cost per click, results, etc and then do necessary optimization.

Here’s a trick: Check in as early as 1 or 2 hours after your ad has gone live and optimize it.

Why is this important? 

When you first publish an ad, Facebook’s algorithm put the ad out on all the “premium spots” where people would see it. It does this to gauge the quality and relevancy of your ad by tracking the number of people responding to it. The algorithm then decides if your ad deserves to stay in the “premium spots” or if it should be deprioritized.

Here’s the cool thing about optimizing your ads early. When you tweak your ads early, it will continuously stay in the “premium spots” on Facebook, where Facebook is learning about your ad – thus providing a higher chance for your ad to maximise its potential.  

I’ll recommend this if you’re handling just a handful of Facebook campaigns. However as you scale your ad campaigns, you might not be able to use this trick for each ad campaigns you launch.

Where to go from here

What would be your next Facebook advertising strategy from here?

What I’ve shared would give you an understanding of how Facebook algorithm works and what you can do to take advantage of it.

If you like to take it further, check out our newly launched online Facebook advertising course in Malaysia, Facebook Ad Dive.

It’s a comprehensive online program where the team at LEAD and myself have put a lot of time and work into – to teach you how to run profitable ad campaigns from start to end with Facebook.

---

Have questions about Facebook advertising or digital marketing? Comment below and let’s discuss.

Also, don’t forget to join the conversion on Facebook and subscribe to our YouTube channel, for more videos on digital marketing, web development and data science.