What is social media advertising?
Social media advertising is when you pay a company to have them advertise on behalf of you on social media. A lot of people associate social media advertising with things like Facebook and Twitter but the truth is, there are so many more platforms out there that you can advertise on.
Marketers on social media tend to focus a lot on Facebook, but there are so many more ads you can Target on Instagram, Youtube, or Snapchat. I will therefore be looking at how to sell on other platforms than Facebook. At a high level, you are looking to make money when someone sees your ad.
They won’t have to buy your product, but they will see your ad and might click through. The more profitable the ad is, the higher it will rank and get more clicks. You will roughly see a multiplier depending on the ad network (Samsung Audience Network, Adler Analytics, etc.). This means that an ad on Facebook will get 1.1x, but a post on Snapchat might get twice as much traffic!
The reason Facebook is so popular is because advertisers find them super easy to use and productive. They are able to target the people that they want in a targeted way and it can be hard for other ad platforms to compete with that.
There are lots of other variables to consider, like marketers’ budgets or how much technical knowledge they have, but I’d like to make a quick look at the main factors.
For budget purposes, my rule of thumb is: spend £1 per thousand impressions (cpi). This is a concept that gets re-introduced in a lot of places, including here:
Essentially, what this basically means is that if you’re running an ad campaign, think of it just like you would budget to spend on advertising a product and you would divide it into thousand “impression” points. 1 cpi is roughly £0.001 and increases as you go further out.
How do you know if your social media ad campaigns are successful?
The first thing you want to do is look at your cost per impression. The cost per impression is how much your campaign costs every time someone sees your ad. The second thing you should look at is your click-through rate, which is how many times people saw your ad but didn’t click on it. The third thing you should look at is your conversion rate.
What percent of people who saw your ad went on to make a purchase.
If you check the metrics one more time, look at your CTR on your best campaign and determine whether you can make changes if your ROAS is too low. For me, a website has three things: a home page, a blog, and a adsite.
The home page is where I tell people what I do and show them what I’ve done for them. The blog is where I put content that helps my clients with their problems. And my adsite is where I set up visitors to click on my ads.
With calendar years, you need to figure out a way to account for seasonal changes. For example, one year I had a high-crack holiday season, and a low-crack holiday season in spring. Today people are coming into my site in the summertime. That’s one of the challenges of making a site like mine and making sure you’re getting the right audience consistently because they’re going to move through different conditions.
With a website, I tell students on college campuses about the classes they need and write them up for them. You need to have something for all your target markets. On college campuses, you might be writing a brochure about one thing. You might need to write an essay about another thing, and so on. You need to have something that’s different for every student.
Also, with a smartphone, the first thing that people see are ads. You need to get that right. If you get people’s attention with ads — and you want people’s attention with ads — you want the ad designs to resonate with people so they stay on your site.
What types of social media ads do businesses create?
Businesses can create ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn. These ads are most commonly based on a Facebook Pixel, which is a tool that can track your customers’ actions on your website.
Facebook then uses this information to target your customers with ads based on their activity on your website. Before we get too deep into the mechanics of creating ads on Facebook, let’s talk about the location tracking that’s occurring through the Facebook Pixel. There are two parts to this: the sales action that a user has on your website, and the relationship that these pixels have with your Facebook account.
If you don’t want your Facebook Pixel to track your customers across different websites, you should disable the Facebook Pixel in your checkout flow. This is done by adding the following code to your checkout page: That will prevent the Facebook Pixel from tracking users across all of your sites.
In most cases, yes — this is the best option. But for some businesses, they would like to be able to run ads on Google Ads as well. To do this, they need to add an ad extension to their Google Ads account. These extensions are available for most Google products, like:
That’s it. Once you set this up, your ads can be run on Google, Apple, and Facebook. If that’s all you need to get set up, good for you. The next thing you need to know is how exactly your ads are being tracked.
The main source of information Facebook uses to track users is through user IDs and cookies. These are pieces of information stored by the website you’re visiting, and intentionally stored as part of your visit. Cookies may include information about how you came to be on the site, the links you clicked on, and even information about your behavior as you use the site.
Facebook uses a Number of Analytics (NAA) that can track users across browsers and operating systems.
Where can you advertise on social media to get the biggest bang for your buck?
Typically, the best places to advertise for the biggest ROI are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Pinterest. The best thing about social media is that it’s really cheap to advertise there. If you find organic reach for a post on Facebook, it’s around 30 to 40 conversions for every £1 spent. The same thing works on Instagram — around 1 conversion for every £1 spent.
Even Google search can often underperform, but the organic amount found via Google +1 can mimic the ad cost if you focus on the right posts. However, if you are pushing timing and you wish to get high ROI, you can get the best of both worlds by using Google Ads and match synonyms (with context) to your search terms.
A simple mantra you can follow for organic search to reach Twitter followers is to “keep it simple.” It’s all about posting content that delivers a unique value to your followers, fans, and followers of your brand.
The core principle of LeverageBrand is to “leverage your demographic and local characteristics to amplify your audience’s subjective experiences with you.” Everything that can be leveraged is relevant here. So, in order to get to the right audience, show your value first before leveraging your niche to get there.
Feel free to skip straight to the section that relates to you!
Similar to the previous point, leveraging your social accounts shouldn’t be limited to Instagram and Facebook. Nor should it be limited to keywords. As LeverageBrand explains, once you have engaged your audience on multiple channels, you can leverage them all from one single post.
Google +1 is a great way to maximize your reach and reach your business in a big way. However, it’s important to understand that when you are ‘dating’ your audience, you are not looking for a long-term relationship. What you are looking for is long-term transactions.
How much does it cost to advertise on social media platforms, and what are the costs associated with creating ads?
The cost of advertising on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can range anywhere from $5 to $5,000 per day. The cost really depends on your goals and objectives. The more specific and targeted you get with your audience, the more expensive it is to get your message out there.
Like we discussed, advertisers’ budgets fluctuate depending on several factors. One of those is the amount of inventory on their platforms. Some advertisers have thousands of products to choose from.
In general, the smaller the number of products available, the higher the price per day. For instance, If you have 100 available ads on social media, when you have 100 customers wanting your product, you might expect it to cost you a few pounds per day to get those 100 customers to your landing page.
A micro-optimization tip to cut down on the intake time of the advertisements that you’re running is to only have 1–2 ads, per day. That way, it will probably take you only seconds to find the customer you’re looking for.
Other factors that affect the cost as well as the total budget include the number of pages you are displaying ads on, the engagement levels with your audience and the items available for purchase.
Depending on your audience, the cost to get an audience may vary from a few pounds to £20,000+. The client might even ask for that amount, depending on how specific and targeted they can be with their ad. Generally, however, speaking, if you know who your target audience is, and how you would reach them through social media, your cost per day will likely fall in the £10 to £20 range. Often, cost per action (CPA) is a little lower due to customers being more engaged with your ad. If you combine all of the cost per day together, your cost to run your ads might range from a few pounds to a few hundreds (sometimes even less). Again, depending on your objectives and your target audience, your cost may be even less.