Five tips to ramp up your Facebook video advertising

You want traffic? Measure it. Many consider clicks as a metric, but this doesn’t tell you anything about the success of the campaign unless your goal is to get clicks. Before starting a Facebook campaign, you have to know your main KPIs. Build your marketing/sales funnel for Facebook and set KPIs for every part of the funnel.

Where the goal is conversion, but the budget is too low or the product/ service advertised is at a higher price point, there may be too few conversion data points to allow the Facebook Algorithm to learn and optimise. In these cases, use the next best KPI to drive the primary goal indirectly. If you are selling Ferrari’s online, you might sell 10 through a campaign, but 10 data points is not enough for the Facebook algorithm to work, so you need to optimise the campaign to drive more traffic to the Ferrari dealer website.

2. Targeting is key

Knowing your audience is a necessary factor to run a successful campaign. Or at least get to know your audience as best as you can. Facebook offers an audience insights tool to help you build your audience in terms of age, gender, interests and much more. Beside classic remarketing audiences try narrow audiences as well as broad interest audience bundles. Develop your own targeting strategy as an overview to ensure you get the full potential out of Facebook’s targeting opportunities. Also make sure to exclude all audiences having a negative effect on your campaign outcome.

3. Scale your budget right

Your budget must fit into your strategy to deliver the best performance possible. Shift budgets to ad sets that work and pause the rest. Then come up with new ad sets or split the existing working ad sets to scale your performance. For example; if you run the best performance on your remarketing ad sets, but can’t use all your planned budget, you should consider creating a traffic generating prospecting campaign to enlarge your remarketing audience.

4. Test, test and test

You think you can set up a campaign once and everything will work itself out? I’m sorry, but that’s not the case. The variety of advertising possibilities is one of the biggest advantages of Facebook. Right now, it allows you to choose between 11 different campaign objectives. On top of that, the platform has a bunch of different placements with unique creative formats. You must test and learn to be successful on Facebook. Test different campaigns, audiences, creatives, call to actions, ad texts and more. But always remember to use enough budget per ad set or ad. In other words, don’t test all at once otherwise your testing won’t give you any results. Fortunately, I work with a team that creates real time tracking dashboards that enable us to optimise campaigns as they are running!

5. Snackable content is king

For Facebook this means short video content. Facebook pushes video content and its users are used to consuming it. If you want to get a slice of the pie use the right format to get your customers attention. The average length of content consumption on Facebook is 1.7 seconds on mobile and 2.5 seconds on desktop. It obviously doesn’t make sense to use a 60 second video or TV spot for Facebook. You need to capture the users’ attention and interest within this two to three second gap to get them to watch for longer and increase ad recall. Try to create snackable (5-15 seconds), thumb-stopping videos that stand out from the content mass. Videos with high acceptance by user base result give a better-quality ranking, therefore cheaper CPMs and better results.

If these tips don’t motivate you to get on board, there’s one more big reason to do so: your competitors are most certainly distributing videos and capturing the attention of your potential customers every minute that you are not. You really have no reason to wonder whether to bring video advertising into your marketing fold.

Dina Hamza, senior account manager, Videobeat Networks London