The Anatomy of Effective Facebook Ads
If you work for a small business or nonprofit and are looking for new ways to create more traffic to your website, you might have thought about paying for a Facebook Ad. You might have immediately wondered, however: what makes for effective Facebook ads? Before committing yourself, there are a few things you might want to think about, especially if you’ve never created an ad on Facebook before. Below, we’ve broken down some of the key elements of an effective Facebook Ad in order to help you get started.
Part #1 of Effective Facebook Ads: Compelling Ad Copy
You find yourself in a tough situation when writing a Facebook Ad: you want to create an ad that explains your product or service while also making sure that it does not have too much text.
Understanding the right amount of text that will entice users to quickly read and click on your ad is key. What this amounts to in a Facebook Ad are two key text components: headlines and ad text. Thanks to research done by Adspresso, we’ve learned that the average headline text for a Facebook Ad is about 5 words long, and the average ad text is about 19 words long, a little bit shorter than Facebook’s own recommendation of 25 words long. Keeping your text short, sweet, and to the point can be a more effective approach in getting consumers to click on your ad.
You want consumers to get enough information about what it is they’re about to click on without forcing them to read too much.
The ad doesn’t end with the headline and ad text, however: creating a call-to-action is a huge part of an effective ad, as well.
Part #2 of Effective Facebook Ads: Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
Effective Facebook ads should have prominent and easy to understand calls-to-action or CTAs. What is a call-to-action? As we explained in one of our previous blog posts, a CTA can be understood as:
A directive that you want website visitors to complete. CTAs should be simple, understandable, and easy for website visitors to execute. Depending on your goals for your website, you may choose to employ a variety of CTAs, including:
- Subscribe [to our listserv, newsletter, blog]
- Download [our app, our free toolkit]
- Find Us [on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram]
- Contact Us [via email, phone]
Engage! The Importance of Using Calls to Action (CTAs) on Your Website
For an ad, the goal might be a little more urgent than simply getting somebody to download or contact your company. A CTA on an ad might look something more like “Click here for 10% off your next purchase” to get new potential customers to click on your ad and buy your product or service.
You want to convince them to click on your ad because they can get something out of it, especially if you want them to click on that ad now and not go looking through your website later. Using CTA’s to create a sense of urgency can help create that immediate stimulus and response.
Part #3 of Effective Facebook Ads: Audience Targeting
Last but not least, knowing your audience is key.
You might have the most effective image and most persuasive ad copy, but if your ad isn’t targeting the right people, nobody will click on it. This is where Facebook Ad Targeting really helps you hone in on the best people to show your ad to.
Facebook Ads allow you to customize who will see your ads, including by age, gender, location, interests, etc. These are a few of the many demographics you can use to get a better response rate for your ads.
If you don’t already know your organization’s target demographics, Facebook can help you find that out, too! If you run your Facebook Page, you can click on the “Insights” tab and click on “People” to view information about the people that already follow your page.
In the example below, we can see that the vast majority (44%) of the people who follow this page identify as women and are in the age range of 35-44.
Additionally, we can also learn through scrolling through more of the Insights tab the locations that many of the followers list on their Facebook pages. This could help us create an ad that targets people of a certain age in a certain location who tend to be female. This makes it more likely that those people will click on your ad then if you just run an ad targeting everyone (which, of course, really targets no one).
There are many more nuances to creating a Facebook Ad, such as the different templates that Facebook suggests, and the different ways you might write for different demographics. Thinking about your headline and ad text, your call-to-action, and your audience can go a long way toward getting new followers to click on your ads.
