Justifying RoI for Facebook's paid advertising formats

It indeed surprises me when I still receive requests in my inbox for liking Facebook pages. Are Facebookers still referring to traditional functionality of Likes or hoping that quantifying it will rule out the ‘paid’ bit of Facebook advertising?

When Facebook gained roots in advertising with Pages, social media briefs were simple – demand for infinite likes. This meant budgets invested in creating prolific content to enhance organic reach.

Albeit, with increasing active users came Edgerank Algorithm and inflating information explosion resulted in various paid ad formats. Most addictive of them all being sponsored post – which comes as a suggestive story on your timeline.

While brands managed to adapt to this by ruffling budgets between audience acquisition and boosting content, RoI remained unjustified.

Designating ad formats

From video ads to boost posts and partner categories – paid advertising on Facebook shifted gears to a qualitative approach. Targeted content dissemination for relevant audience through specifics such as behaviour, job titles and area became prominent.

Since investing on Facebook is inevitable, brands might as well focus on finding the sweet spot to break even (be it monetarily or in terms of reach) the investment.

Hyper targeted objective

Every campaign needs to have an objective – said and done. It now has to graduate to a precisely hyper targeted objective. It could be as simple as getting more downloads for your app or registrations for your event.

Unless the fine point isn’t decided, the follow through steps won’t yield results to their optimum level.

Hit the right spot 

If it is an event that you need registrations for – what is the kind of event? Who would like to attend it? What your tentative target audience are searching for on social media right now? Where do you need them to be based?

A lot of these factual and behavioural questions will help you achieve your objective through tapping the most relevant audience.

Monitor through and through 

Once you have zeroed down on the target audience, follow their social habits closely. Evaluate the response you receive after running the first advertorial. Improvise accordingly.

For instance, if registrations are needed for a start-up fare, filters such as start-up owners, audiences interested in technology and location would make sense. Once the results are back try running an improvised campaign with only location or only audiences interested in technology.

Run almost four to five ads with different filters, this leads to quality lead generation and conversation. Eventually cost per registration becomes accessible, which helps place RoI in perspective.

Similarly, an e-commerce brand can run adverts with product and site link. This helps track cost per click, conversion per click and quality of the click. These results forms the fundamentals for the  next campaign.

Fate of the subsequent

When information becomes cheap, attention becomes expensive and that is what brands pay for now.

For instance, travel site Tripoto often runs sponsored posts for their content, while KitKat boosted their views for their video campaign #MyBreak. It is about paying for gaining your consumers’ attention towards the right element.

Targeting can be further narrowed down basis nature of the business. Established brands have a loyal audience base , thus what is required is content dissemination for engagement. Start-ups however, can expect higher RoI from app installing campaigns that enhance their footprint.

Facebook advertising goes beyond traditional axioms of social media marketing. To get this right, drop in at our Facebook Advertising Workshop. Register here.