GEORGE: Alright everybody, welcome to today’s podcast, where I am with Justin Wong from my office and we are going to talk a bit about how to get the most out of your Facebook advertising. I think Facebook has really transformed the way business-to-consumer advertising works, how you can reach audiences, and how some business-to-business advertising works too. I think it’s a key component of the current marketing landscape and how we help our clients grow their businesses. So we’ve got Justin here who is our expert at Facebook advertising and has been working with us for a few years. He’s been learning the back end and the evolution of Facebook advertising, but one of the challenges with Facebook is that it’s constantly changing and I think that’s part of what we have to talk about, so welcome Justin.
JUSTIN: Hello.
GEORGE: So let’s first talk about the benefits of Facebook compared to say regular advertising, and by regular I mean traditional printer, radio, etc.
JUSTIN: One of the things that Facebook does really well is how many people it can target. Basically anyone who has a Facebook account or an Instagram account or even uses their phone a lot will be a recipient of Facebook ads. They can really have a level of pinpoint targeting that isn’t available to other forms of traditional advertising. For example, we can target demographics, age, gender, interests, what pages you like, what pages you don’t like, that sort of thing and that’s all very easy to do for a marketer. Another thing is the cost effectiveness of Facebook. You’re getting all that for maybe a couple of hundred bucks a month, anywhere between $300 to $1,000 a month.
GEORGE: Per market or…
JUSTIN: Per market. You can hit a significant number of people; usually reach is at least 20,000 – 30,000 unique people.
GEORGE: And to do that traditionally, to reach 10,000 people, could be thousands of dollars just for one impression.
JUSTIN: Exactly. Talking about impressions, because everything is digital, you can actually track all the actions people take regarding your ad. If someone looks at the ad, if someone doesn’t look at the ad, how long they looked at it – a video for example, whether they clicked on the page link, whether they clicked on post link, how many comments, all that information is available for you. So you can look at the ad afterwards, you can see how it did and see whether it was successful or not and all in a very clear manner that is not that readily available for other forms of marketing and advertising. And, if you are not sure about a design or copy, Facebook lets you split test for free. So you can create maybe six or seven variations of an ad and just have them go out at once to the same audience and Facebook will automatically determine which one is the most popular and that one will get a larger allocation of the budget.
GEORGE: How does it do that? How does it know which one is doing better? And what if you don’t agree?
JUSTIN: Well, our opinion as marketers is always going to be biased; there’s always one that we think is going to be perfect but the customer is always right in this sense. If people like one ad over another one, Facebook will know that because of the number of clicks, number of impressions, and so on. How many times somebody actually liked the ad, the more they like or dislike it, how many times people mark it as spam, all these things contribute to which add performs better.
GEORGE: And so unlike, say Google, where you have to do it manually yourself and you split test then you decide which one was the most effective, with Facebook it does this on its own. Can you still do that with Facebook: manually split test and choose which ad works best?
JUSTIN: You can still do that. Basically how it works is you can setup a campaign, inside a campaign you can set up a target market. So any ad inside that target market would be split tested, but if you want both the ads to just have an equal amount of spending, you can set all that out easily. It’s just how your campaign is run, and all of that is available for you.
GEORGE: Let’s talk a bit about the different kinds of ads that you can do on Facebook, because I think a lot of people see all sorts of things on Facebook and then don’t realize which is what and what’s being paid for. So let’s talk about some of the different kinds of ads that you can do on Facebook, from maybe a priority point-of-view or the most predictable ones perhaps?
JUSTIN: Sure. The important thing about so many different types of ads is that marketers and businesses have so many different needs, for example, engagement ads are not going to be the same as a call-to-action ad. So we’ll go for the most simple one which is a link click ad. This is an ad with an image, some text at the top, and some text at the bottom. The primary goal of this ad is to get someone to click on it that’s what the ad is automatically optimized to do, you’re not going to get many comments or likes that’s not important for this sort of ad, that’s not the point rather. The point is to get people to click your ad, so the metric you want to be looking for is cost per click, number of clicks, click through rate, etc. Those are all primary metrics for this type of ad. This is the most common type of ad, whether it’s to a landing page or to your website or to a sales page, this is the type of ad you want to do. The next most common one is a boosted post also known as a promoted post or a sponsored story, and this is an actual post you make either as a person or as a business on your page and then you just take that post and you can use money to boost it to a much larger audience. So the benefit of this type of ad is that they are very engaging. The point of it is to get people to like, comment, or share. For example, if you are running contest, you know people will comment the right answer to this question and then they are entered into a draw or something like that – that’s what boosted posts are really effective at.
GEORGE: So instead of expecting, you know, social organic when you put a post up and then just waiting and hoping people will share it, you put money into it and immediately get reach to an audience through a boosted post.
JUSTIN: Exactly. And if you don’t boost it, the chances of someone who doesn’t already like you seeing that post is really low, like Facebook kind of throttles organic reach.
GEORGE: Intentionally, what is the organic stuff on a page for business, what on average for organic, like if they put a post-up there, how many people are they reaching?
JUSTIN: Honestly, like I’ll say less than 5%; 5% of their total pool.
GEORGE: That’s just people that like them. You know that’s amazing I think to a lot of people that think, “Oh, well if they liked me they should see every single post”.
JUSTIN: Well, I mean, thinking about it from the other side right, if you are just a regular consumer, you don’t want to see every single post from every business you’ve ever liked. You kind of want to see the highlights. So if your post does well and your post is very well liked, Facebook understands this and will share it to more people. If no one really cares about your post then Facebook is going to use it cloudier them up (isn’t going to use it to clutter them up). So the better your posts are, the more people will see it, but even then it’s very tricky to get to that level of people liking your ad. Also, you know Facebook wants more advertising revenue, so by throttling organic reach, advertisers and marketers are forced to advertise with them.
GEORGE: Right, they see the value and still as you said 200 or 300 bucks a month is within reach of most certainly small businesses, but even if you think about how many markets you’re doing, it’s a very effective way to get to that audience.
JUSTIN: Exactly.
GEORGE: What are some of the other ads that you can do on Facebook?
JUSTIN: Right, another one that’s really good is a video ad. So videos, unless you turn it off or have a good ad blocker, videos are auto-playing when you go down your news feed. That’s really effective in catching someone’s attention and getting them to watch. Boosted post video ads are primarily about reach, they are about getting your brand to as many people as possible and it’s great because videos are engaging, videos are attention grabbing, and if people stay and watch your video they don’t need to click anything. Facebook tracks all of that, so at the end of the day you can see how many people actually watched through your video and how long they watched your video and all that. So yeah, if you wanted to just have a cooperate video or a promotional video, Facebook advertising is very good in this regard. So those are the three main ads that most small businesses use or know of, but there are a couple of other ones that are still effective, one in particular is the conversion pixel ad.
GEORGE: Sounds complicated.
JUSTIN: It is complicated but it’s very effective. So let’s say you have a landing page and you wanted someone to…
GEORGE: So what’s a landing page, for those people who don’t know what that is?
JUSTIN: Right. So basically it’s a sales page. It’s a one-page sales page and the entire point of that is to get people to sign up for a newsletter or to buy a product or to make them get an app.
GEORGE: So it’s specific to one thing that you are selling as a business.
JUSTIN: Exactly. So a pixel is just like a little dot, a little piece of code, that you add to a page and Facebook can track anyone who visits that page.
GEORGE: So you put that somewhere on your landing page, which you can build with other software and you’ve just got to figure that out. It’s probably easy to figure that out, there’s got to be a video you can watch on Facebook about pixels and…
JUSTIN: Yeah, once you understand that just a bit, it’s a lot more complicated than this, it seems more complicated than this rather, but…
GEORGE: But the value is significant.
JUSTIN: Oh yes. It’s not just putting it on the landing page itself, you’re putting it on the thank you page. So whenever anyone fills out the form, they get a thank you and Facebook knows that. So what this does is, let’s say 100 people went to your landing page right from that ad, and one person registered, Facebook knows who registered and they look at all the characteristics of that person, the demographics, the age and so on and then Facebook realizes this is the type of person who likes your ad. Then instead of just continuing to send your ad to the normal demographics, they’ll use that new information and target people who are similar to the people who filled out your ad. So we found this to be very effective in getting conversions for a landing page, where as link click ads are a little more straightforward but they are not as effective. So with your text ad, if you’re comfortable with copying and pasting code, I highly recommend trying a conversion pixel.
GEORGE: Interesting, what else? Anything else on the ads side?
JUSTIN: Oh yeah, we’ll do one more and this is called local ads and these ads are for small businesses. Basically, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, you can set up a local ad and it lets you target – so you can choose how far away from your location you want to target. So let’s say you can target everyone two miles from your store and instead of an ad going to a page or anything you can either have it so it has a “call me” button. Then this button can just call your number or it’ll open up on Google Maps and then tells you how to get to your location. So if you’re a small business, this is the perfect type of ad.
GEORGE: You are listening to the Marketing Managers podcast and I’m here with Justin Wong from Curve Communications and myself George Affleck and we are talking about Facebook and how to maximize the value of Facebook. Justin, one of the things that we are talking about with small businesses and medium size businesses, or business-to-consumer or business-to-business. I think we found that generally business-to-consumer works very effectively for Facebook but business-to-business is a bit more complicated. I guess we’ll get into the audience next because this podcast is for marketing managers and they could be for consumer products or for business-to-business products and services. So I just want to talk a bit about how do we figure out an audience and reach that audience, whatever you’re selling and it is, I know more challenging for business-to-business on Facebook. But there is some stuff that you can learn from Facebook for your business if you are trying to reach an audience. So let’s talk about audiences and reaching them and targeting those people through Facebook. So how do we set that up and how do we manage that?
JUSTIN: Right. So this is definitely one of Facebook’s strengths, regardless of who you’re selling to, either B2C or B2B, it’s the amount of detail you can go into when you’re designing your work target audience. So the very first thing you can do when you are creating an ad is you choose your location. So you can choose a city or an entire country or a postal code or address or you can even drop a pin down and say everyone within 10 miles of where I drop this pin is included in this list. So it’s good to have multiple ranges of cities. What we like to do is just go set a straight one massive like you know put it on the city like 50 miles of this radius, (one massive target, for example put a pin in the middle of the city and target 50 miles from this radius). We also like to target specific neighborhoods or parts of the city for different ads. You have the ability to get really specific and segmented with your approach here; you can even choose whether to target people who are travelling in this location, people who live here, or maybe just everybody.
GEORGE: So they are just in town as a visitor and you can target them?
JUSTIN: You can target that, you can target tourists coming into your city.
GEORGE: Is that because they’ve said they’ve clicked online here or does Facebook just know, how do they know that?
JUSTIN: I don’t know the magic of how Facebook does it, but I am assuming if they probably look at the status update, maybe if they turned on geo-targeting on their phone, they can tell that a post is being made in a new country by someone where they are not usually from. And so for tourism that’s a very powerful tool, just cut out all the people you don’t want to target and just hit the important target audience. All the basic demographics information is there, like you can target by age, you can target by gender, it’s all very straightforward. And whenever you choose an option, it’ll update your estimated target market size, so you want to make sure it’s not too big and it’s not too small. So you’ll always keep an eye on that, while you’re going through your options.
GEORGE: Why? Because there’s a law of diminishing returns? If you maximize your audience and put a whole bunch of money into it, isn’t that a good thing?
JUSTIN: Well, yes and no right… Let’s say you have $1,000 to spend, and you want to hit everybody because you think everybody could use your new product. So you set the target to worldwide and you’re now targeting several billion people. Your cost per click might be low, because you are sending so much money in, but the chances that someone who is clicking it is actually going to become a customer is also very low. You’re getting a lot of clicks but the clicks don’t mean anything because it’s not your target market, it’s just a huge chunk of the audience. So on the reverse side, if you make it very specific to exactly the type of person you want to sell to and you only have an audience of let’s say 1,000 people, the chances of one of them actually clicking your ad and making a sale is also negligible, if it’s that small. So you have to find a middle range. A good amount for me, I’d like to have at least a hundred thousand and then upwards to maybe one million, two million at most, depending on the budget. If your budget is small, you’re not going to reach that many people, you’ve got to make sure you have an audience that matched your budget.
GEORGE: One of the things that I mentioned with business-to-business was in general, we have found not a lot of success with Facebook for business-to-business. But is there things you can do on Facebook when it comes to learning about your audience or testing things that can be helpful to business-to-business or are there business-to-business advertising products or services that do work or that you’ve seen working on Facebook?
JUSTIN: It’s been harder to sell B2B for sure. We’ve had a couple that have had more success, and the ones where we do it’s usually when we have a very specific target market in mind. So one thing we can do is when we go to the interest targeting, you can target by job titles.
GEORGE: So for engineers or something?
JUSTIN: Right. For our clients, they gave us basically a list of all their customers and people they make deals with and their job titles. Then we enter all of that in and try and find people who might be similar, and you know, it’s still wasn’t as good as B2C, but we were getting leads, we getting attention. So if you want to use Facebook, I am not saying it’s a complete dead market but it is harder, you have to make sure you have a very clear idea of who you want to target to. Because think about it, if you are a business, what you need is very specific. Like if a word agency someone is trying to sell us I don’t know wrenches or something, and they didn’t target properly, we’ll be getting all these ads for wrenches. I wouldn’t click on it and you wouldn’t click on it either, so you have to be very careful who you are hitting and who you are not hitting.
GEORGE: One of the benefits of the other app, you know I think we found is testing the designing ad. And then we end up running sometimes in print, in magazines, so we’ll test which one is resonating. It is a great little way, that’s cheaper than going in and getting market surveys and hiring a big company, of how you can actually test the experience or which ad you do too. you don’t want to spent (You only have to spend) 25 bucks and see which one is resonating more, even if it’s only a couple of people, and that gives us a good indication of what might work in print or magazines or with other advertising mediums like Google or third party mediums. Let’s talk about the design side of Facebook advertising, in general and what the rules and restrictions are regarding that.
JUSTIN: Right. One of the most important rules of Facebook advertising is the 20% text rule and in the past this was very strict. Basically, they divide your picture into a grid and if they know there’s text on over 20% of the boxes, your ad won’t run – you won’t get approved. That’s to cut down on the “spammy”, really aggressive ads. As of now, they’ve kind of loosened it so they’ll still allow you to run, but they’ll give you warnings saying that your ad has too much text and won’t hit as many people. So what they’ll do is, if you decide to run the ad anyway, they’ll reduce the number of people who’ll see it, so they’ll penalize you for having too much text on the ad. There’s a lot of good tools available if you just Google “Facebook ad 20% text”, you should see a couple of websites that’ll divide your image for you. And they’ll tell you if your ad can actually run or if your ad is under the requirement, instead of having to go through and test it through Facebook, you can save yourself a little bit of time there. Having text is important though, like most of the times we have found if you have a little bit of text saying “sales here” or “20% off” or whatever it is you are trying to promote.
GEORGE: Some clear call to action
JUSTIN: Exactly. A clear call to action, like in the picture itself, we have seen a stronger response rate from that. For the headline you can access some of the text as well around the ad. For the headline and the descriptive text, once you go through the actual ad created it’s very obvious, but you want to make sure not to use too much text for those either. Because while it might look fine for desktop, and desktop is very lenient on how much text is allowed, people checking on their phones or people browsing Instagram on their phones or using an app when the ad comes up, all your text will be cut off. So it’s very important to check how your ad looks on multiple devices and platforms. You can do all these too inside the creator.
GEORGE: You can, so you don’t have to sit there and go and find $10?
JUSTIN: No, when you are creating the ad, you can check how the ad looks through every single one of their platforms.
GEORGE: What about video ads, can we create video ads with the same sort of thing or those are just boosted post?
JUSTIN: No, this is where it is tricky because you could have boosted posts or link ads that are videos, but that’s not the same thing as having a video ad. A video ad is auto-play, its primary purpose is to get people to see it, so if you want to use a video I recommend you use a video ad instead of putting it into something else.
GEORGE: And in most cases you also put the text in the video [inaudible00:21:29:06] subtitling the video ad. So you can watch it without sound, and you can see the message but you don’t have to hear it.
JUSTIN: Right. Because when videos auto-play, the sound is turned off automatically or else it would be so annoying if every video you scroll past is playing with music. So in the past what we did is we actually added text to the video itself, so like a subtitle, but now Facebook is clamping down on that. What they have offered is a built-in subtitling service, so when you import a video you can go in and manually do all the subtitles for the entire video on your own or you can send it to Facebook and Facebook has said they’ll do it for you. But I haven’t actually tried this so I don’t know how accurate it’s going to be, but you can go in and add the subtitles through Facebook itself. So this is great, you don’t have to waste time doing it to an actual video and we have found great success by having text on our videos as well.
GEORGE: One of the amazing things that you have sort of eluded (alluded to) today is that we all know the amount of data and information Facebook knows about people, but it’s about knowing how you can actually utilize this for creating sort of custom audiences, specifically through some of the things that you have already in your tool kit. What are custom audiences and what are some of the things that you can do with Facebook in creating those custom audiences?
JUSTIN: Right, so a custom audience is if you want to go beyond just the default targeting system. So there’s many different ways to make a custom audience, which is basically a way of gathering an audience apart from demographics. So say for example you had a customer list of emails, let’s say you had 10,000 emails, what you can do is import all those emails into Facebook and then if those emails are associated with a Facebook account, they get added to a special audience. So let’s say out of 10,000 people, you get 5,000 who have valid Facebook emails. Now you can create ads that specifically target those 5,000 people and no one else. So you can target loyal customers or people who have interacted with you in the past in the form of sending them ads; that’s one way of doing it. The second way is through a retargeting pixels (a retargeting pixel OR retargeting pixels). We’ve talked about this in the past, but it’s not actually the same type of thing, this is a type of pixel…
GEORGE: A pixel is a code that you put onto your webpage or your landing page or whatever?
JUSTIN: Exactly. In this case you would want to put it onto your cooperate (corporate) website, so on every single page. So let’s say after a couple of months you’ll have maybe 6,000 hits, that’s your audience now. Then you can make ads that specifically target those people and they will just aggressively hammer these people with your ads. So if they go to your site, they’ll see nothing but your ad, basically across all the platforms. So it’s very effective for getting people who are on the fence or maybe who would have forgotten about you otherwise. Now they can’t forget because now you are all they see.
GEORGE: So that can actually work well for business-to-business. If you can grab those people who have been to your site for whatever reason, like you have been to a trade show or then you give your information to go to the website, now you’ve got them and you can keep marketing; that sort of retargeting is huge. You got to cap of audience who are clearly interested because they have been to your website, and now you want to just keep reminding them that you exist.
JUSTIN: That’s the sort of thing like, I have [inaudible00:24:52:04] about having those points-of-contact, like secondary point-of-contacts, before a sale. That’s what we have always said, so doing this increases those points-of-contact. I do have to warn you that when you do a retargeting ad campaign, the cost per click is actually more expensive because the audience is going to be smaller, but each of them is worth way more. Getting someone to click back to your site if they’ve been there already is worth a lot more than the first time, and then there’s something new called ad engagement.
GEORGE: There’s always something new with Facebook.
JUSTIN: There always something new, yeah, every couple of weeks something brand new comes out. So this is very interesting in that it’s kind of a retargeting pixel where you don’t have to worry about the pixel itself. Facebook remembers every single person who has interacted with your ads in the past, so let’s say you run a video ad and 10,000 people watched it, you can then turn those 10,000 people into an audience and you can then send other ads to that same group of people. So only the people who have already proven to be an engaged audience will receive your ad. When it comes to videos, Facebook can do even more. They can send your ad to only people who have watched 100% of your video, so it’s a very small number but they must be interested if they watched 100%. Or maybe even 50% or 75% or whatever the amount you feel comfortable with, you can use that as an audience for your upcoming ads.
GEORGE: And there’s something called lookalike audiences, is that sort of the same, what is that? I have heard that but can you tell me a little bit about what lookalike audiences are?
JUSTIN: A lookalike audience is if you have a large number of likes for your business, let’s say you have 100,000 likes for your business, it’s booming, that would be amazing…
GEORGE: That would be amazing.
JUSTIN: …And you want to target more people who you know would like your product but they don’t currently know who you are. So lookalike audience goes through basically your country, so for us it will be Canada, and you can choose to say, out of Canada, the top 1% of people who are most similar to someone who already likes your page. So people who would be in the same demographics as your current audience but they are not yet captured. Let me just explain that again, this is kind of complicated. It’s basically where Facebook finds people who are similar to the people who like your page already.
GEORGE: So they go to other pages. If you go to your competitor, can you replicate their audience or can I steal people’s likes or is there a way to do that for my lookalike audience?
JUSTIN: No, unfortunately not, you cannot do that, at least not through this way, there’s other ways of doing that. This way is just more like I want to get more of the same type of people.
GEORGE: For whatever their likes or interest or whatever might be.
JUSTIN: Exactly, Facebook looks at a lot of that. So if you want to quickly just get an ad out and you are not really sure about the demographics, you are not really sure who your target audience is, just look at the people who have already liked your page and Facebook will make a duplicate of that and find you people – and we have seen some success in doing this. In regards to your other question, targeting your clients or your competitors’, there’s not a real solid way of doing this. Honestly the easiest way is to target people who like your competitors or have an interest in your competitors.
GEORGE: Or actually click like, so that may not be a lot of people but it might be enough people?
JUSTIN: Yeah and if it’s not big enough, Facebook won’t even let you do that. But if you are lucky, if your competitor is big enough, it could be an interest category and then you can target those types of people, but it’s not an exact science.
GEORGE: So if I am Burger King and I want to go after McDonalds, you target people who like McDonalds, easy.
JUSTIN: You target people who like McDonalds.
GEORGE: One of the aspects is really, in any advertising is, is it working? And you know back in the day it was really hard to track success but that’s one of the benefits of digital technology and digital advertising, as you can track a lot of stuff and then Facebook also provides you with a lot of tools. Can we talk a bit about the metrics of success and what some of those metrics could be if what you are doing is actually working?
JUSTIN: Absolutely. There are lots of different metrics because there are lots of different ad types and also lots of different objectives. For example, the metric you are going to be looking at is not going to change every time if you are running different types of ads. But in general, the first one is cost per click; how much does Facebook have to pay to get a person to click on your ad.
GEORGE: Which then therefore, how much do you pay Facebook?
JUSTIN: Exactly right. So if you have a low cost per click, let’s say 10cents per click, then that means your ad has done very well; Facebook didn’t have to work very hard at all to get people to click your ad. It gets more value for your dollar and the determinant of cost per click and all of these really is how well your ad is designed, was it captivating enough and are you targeting the right people? The goal of most campaigns is to get as low cost per click as possible.
GEORGE: So that doesn’t mean that nobody cares. Because some people might think if you are paying small amounts that means nobody cares, it could be the opposite that you are so clear in your messaging that it actually gets cheaper.
JUSTIN: Yeah. No matter what, having a low cost per click is better; it doesn’t mean that no one cares. If no one cares that means it would have a very high cost per click because out of 100 people maybe only one person cared enough to actually click it.
GEORGE: And the hold of that one person will be very valuable to you, so therefore you should pay more.
JUSTIN: Right. But you don’t know what’s actually happening, you know in general the lower the cost per click the better your ad is done, if you’re focusing on link clicks.
GEORGE: Is there an average that we should expect? Or is there any way to know? I mean if you say 10cents, how low can it go, how high can it go?
JUSTIN: I think our absolute best was 6cents per click and that was incredible for every dollar we were getting like 15 clicks, that’s really good.
GEORGE: And then conversion. I mean which is sort of not necessarily related to the Facebook ad, but once they click on that ad, they go somewhere. Is there a conversion rate like when you go to the landing page for example, you get to whatever it is that you are selling on the landing page, and what’s a good conversion rate? So if I got that 6cents and I got that 15 people and now they’ve come to my landing page, is it kind of like direct mail where like you know 0.5% is considered pretty good but it’s a volume game, is that higher or is it really hard to tell?
JUSTIN: A lot of that will depend on what page you send it to, like the whole thing is more about how the landing page is designed. From what we’ve seen, we’ve seen 0.5’s, but we’ve also seen like 30’s, it really depends on what you are advertising and to who. So it really varies across industries, but I’d say if you are between like 2% to 5% that’s a pretty good place.
GEORGE: If people are filling out forms or engaging on the landing page…
JUSTIN: Exactly, you have a pretty good campaign if you can get that much.
GEORGE: While through the separate conversation about landing pages, I think there’s a whole lot of conversation. What are the other things for the metrics you know, reach?
JUSTIN: Yes, reach. So reach is a Facebook specific term. The term that you have heard most often is impressions right, because impressions that’s situational ad pressing as well.
GEORGE: Will that be like viewership in television? Is that not the same thing, I mean what is reach is how many the maximum amount or not chosen or what is reach?
JUSTIN: So impression is the number of times your ad was shown. So let’s say I see your ad 5 times; I count 5 impressions because the ad was seen 5 times, but that counts as one person reached because it’s only me. So Facebook has a present algorithm for calculating this, but reach is basically unique people who have seen your ad.
GEORGE: It doesn’t matter how many, just once or more than once.
JUSTIN: Once or more than once.
GEORGE: So it’s very clear, you know how many people that has posted.
JUSTIN: Yeah. That means you have reached 30,000 people, you can say that like unique people.
GEORGE: And then how do you know how many times they’ve seen that ad then?
JUSTIN: There’s another metric called frequency, which is the average number of times people have seen an ad. So if you’re going back to the whole 7 times, for most ads, depending on the audience size, you’ll probably see maybe one to two maybe sometimes three. For the retargeting ads we talked about earlier, the number shoots up to like 15 to 20. So that shows the benefit of that, looking at frequencies you get a way of seeing how many times the same person is seeing your ad over and over again.
GEORGE: What about people clicking? How important is that? I mean you can see these ads; maybe sometimes it’s not important to click on it because you know from a brand point of view, reach and people just seeing an ad is important. If you’re selling a pair of shoes, sometimes it’s just being in peoples faces, but one of the benefit of digital is people are actually engaged and they click on these ads. Tell me a bit about clicking and what that means in Facebook.
JUSTIN: Well clicking and cost per clicking are very tied together. Click is the ultimate goal of most ads. If someone clicks on your ad they want to hear more or they want to see more of what you’re offering, but the amount of clicks you get really only matters with how much money you spent. So 100 clicks is good if you spent $1 or $10, but if you spent a thousand dollars, that’s not good at all. So that’s why cost per click is a better metric of seeing how well your ads are versus your clicks. But it is important to look at the clicks regardless to see how many people actually click my ad.
GEORGE: Is that really through engagement or how does that work? How does that fit into it when you’ve got engagement? If your ad is not engaging, they are not going to click on it or even look at it.
JUSTIN: Well engagement in a sense, is separate from clicks. Engagement is like if a customer wants to give their opinion or share with their friends or like the ad; they feel so strongly about it that they want to have a reaction to it, that’s an engagement.
GEORGE: That goes for potentially an ad or a boosted post, doesn’t matter if it’s engagement, it’s engagement.
JUSTIN: Engagement is engagement, but certain ads are better at getting engagement than others. Like boosted posts are amazing at getting engagements because that’s the whole point. Link click ads, if you get a couple of likes or a couple of comments, it’s a benefit on the side, like you are not gunning for it but if you have some it is nice. So engagement really matters if you are looking at boosted posts, maybe videos, that sort of thing or having contests, that’s when you want to look at engagements. So number of reactions, number of likes, number of comments, number of shares.
GEORGE: And how long you spend on videos. To me, I watch a lot of video on Facebook and is that important and you said earlier about knowing how much time I have watched or…
JUSTIN: Yeah, it’s kind of creepy if you think about it, that Facebook knows exactly how many time each person has watched your video. So you can see the average time watched, you can see how many people watched 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 25%, 50%, 90%, 100%, and those are all set out. That tells you, if you have a couple thousand people who watched all the way to the end, that’s pretty great.
GEORGE: Amazing and Facebook there’s some other stuff coming in. I saw they are going to audio now apparently and this is a podcast we are doing today. There seems to be a big movement from audio online, which is interesting, and a lot of people listening in their cars, but I have heard that that is also something coming in coming days. It was literally announced last week and I think it’s, I am not even sure if its available around the world, but I always find it interesting. And I mentioned this earlier, what Facebook does is keep us challenged on the evolution of what they are doing. They definitely are, from a marketing point-of-view, keeping us on our toes but also providing us with tools, if you are a marketing manager especially, tools that really help you succeed for your clients and then your business that you are working for.
JUSTIN: Like that’s something about Facebook, it’s very effective. It’s really good for business, it’s really good for I say all business, but you just have to know what to do with it. Know what you want and Facebook can help you do the rest.
GEORGE: Alright Justin, thanks very much for joining me today. You have been listening to the Marketing Manager’s podcast and today we’ve been talking about how Facebook can really work for your business and marketing your product or service. Thanks for listening and if you want more or if you want to talk to us, you can go to our site curvecommunications.com and contact me or Justin and learn more about Facebook or ask us any other questions about marketing, thanks very much. Thanks Justin.
JUSTIN: Thank you.
