What Is Facebook Ads? Popular Types of Facebook Advertising

What is Facebook Ads? This is surely a question many people wonder about, especially those just starting to learn about Facebook advertising. Let’s explore Facebook Ads from A to Z with The7 in the article below.

What is Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads (also known as Facebook Advertising) is a paid advertising service on Facebook provided by the social network itself. Advertisers use Facebook Ads to promote services, products, promotions, and offers through creative images, text, or video.

Facebook Ads gives businesses and individuals the opportunity to boost engagement, raise brand awareness, and even increase sales by reaching a large audience of users, measured through metrics such as CTR, CPM, CPA, and CPC.

Today, more than 3 million businesses actively advertise on the Facebook platform. The reasons businesses use Facebook include:

• Facebook currently has a total of over 2 billion users active monthly.
• Facebook lets businesses target users by location, demographics, age, gender, interests, behavior, and more, so ads reach the right people.
• Facebook ads help increase traffic to a website.

Who is Facebook advertising for?

If you fall into one of the following two cases, you should look into a Facebook Advertising service:

Low-friction conversion goals

Low-Friction Conversions refers to goals such as collecting and providing information, introducing gifts or promotions, without necessarily persuading viewers to buy right away. If this is your goal, you should advertise on Facebook.

Some websites that applied this Facebook Ads approach and achieved great success include Fab, Groupon, and AppSumo.

Pursuing long-term strategic goals

Facebook Ads is also an effective solution for businesses that want to build and grow their brand and pursue a long-term strategy. In this case, Facebook advertising not only raises brand visibility but also helps businesses maintain recognition, thereby strengthening the relationship between the business and its customers.

5 Benefits of Facebook Ads

It’s no accident that Facebook Ads has become one of the most popular marketing and sales channels today. The benefits this form of advertising delivers are always clear and immediate:

High effectiveness, simple setup

Building an advertising campaign on the Facebook platform doesn’t take much time but shows results very quickly. Facebook Ads has a high ROI rate. It suits every business model, from small to large.

Not only that, but FB ads is also a marketing method that’s very simple to set up. Users just need to log into their official Facebook account, create a Facebook Business account, link a payment method, and they can customize and launch a campaign. The entire process takes only a few minutes and anyone can do it.

Supports many features

FB Ads is constantly evolving and comes with many features. Facebook advertising lets you customize video, images, content, events, and more, based on these basic methods:

• Create posts about items/products with eye-catching, engaging visuals.
• Create videos introducing your business’s products.
• Create a Canvas with detailed information about a product’s features/benefits.
• Set an automatic Facebook ads budget according to each business’s purpose and financial capacity.

Frequent updates

In a short time, many Facebook Ads formats have been introduced. They deliver an excellent experience and response for business owners. This comes from Facebook’s algorithm increasingly focusing on user experience. The most noticeable user-focused formats Facebook has rolled out are carousel and dynamic ads.

However, this also poses major challenges, requiring advertisers to constantly update their knowledge. Otherwise, you’ll quickly be left behind as new updates keep rolling out.

Low cost

The cost of driving traffic to a website with Facebook ads today is as low as 1,000 VND per click. This truly helps businesses solve their budget challenges very effectively.

In addition, Facebook also applies CPC-based billing, meaning you only pay when a customer clicks on the ad, helping you save a significant amount of cost.

Targets the right customers

Facebook is a global social network with a very large customer base. Not only that, but smart algorithms using keywords for interests, age, gender, and more allow Facebook Ads to filter and help businesses target their ideal customers with great accuracy.

A Facebook ad designed around a specific insight will reach exactly the audience you’re aiming for, optimizing your sales rate and ROI. This is a wonderful advantage that not every marketing format or advertising channel can offer.

How do ads appear on Facebook?

By now you should have a basic grasp of what Facebook advertising is. So how do you tell the difference between a regular post and an FB Ads post? It’s simple — a Facebook ad has a few basic identifying features:

• The post appears from Fanpages or Facebook pages you’re unfamiliar with and have never liked.
• Below the Fanpage name there’s the word “Sponsored”.
• In the top right corner of the ad post there’s a “Like Page” button and a CTA — Signup button (in cases where the ad aims to increase likes).
• The sales post appears in the News Feed or the right-hand column of the Facebook interface.

• Some websites are linked with Facebook.

These display positions apply to both the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook. However, on the Facebook Mobile version, ads are adjusted to fit the screen size.

Popular types of Facebook ads

Facebook offers users quite a variety of ad types, meeting most business needs and objectives.

Facebook ads by objective

The objective is a key factor determining where Facebook Ads are displayed. There are 3 main objectives that FB advertisers usually aim for.

Awareness

Facebook ads that raise brand awareness among customers, attracting more people interested in the business’s products/services.

• Brand awareness: Show ads to people most likely to remember them.
• Reach: Show ads to the largest number of Facebook users possible (depending on budget).

Consideration

FB Ads that help customers remember and look up more information about a business, then consider whether to buy the business’s products. These ads target the following goals:

• Traffic: Direct users to click through to a business’s landing page or website.
• Engagement: Increase the number of engagements (clicks, likes, comments, shares) users have with a business’s Fanpage posts.
• App installs: Show ads to users most likely to install the app.
• Video views: Increase views for a promoted video.
• Lead generation: Users can fill in their personal information on Facebook, helping businesses identify potential customers.
• Messages: Advertise products/services in the user’s Messenger.

Conversion

Drives users to take specific actions on Facebook, such as contacting for consultation, purchasing, or paying. This form of Facebook Ads targets:

• Conversions: Encourage users to take action or make a decision in Messenger or on a business’s website.
• Catalog sales: Show ads to users who’ve shown interest in the product.
• Store visits: Target people who live near the store’s location and are most likely to visit and make a purchase.

The Facebook objective varies depending on each level of awareness

Facebook ads by category

Corresponding to the objective, advertisers will choose different Facebook Ads categories, specifically:

Image ads

This is a Facebook Ads format that uses images of the brand or product/service when displaying the ad. Facebook supports most of today’s most popular image formats:

• JPEG, WBMP, WEBP, XBM, GIF, HEIC, BMP, DIB.
• JPG, PNG, PSD, TIF, TIFF, HEIF, IFF, JFIF, JP2, JPE.

Note:

• Choose images with a ratio between 1.91:1 and 4:5.
• Keep text on the image under 20%.
• Use standard image dimensions.
• Save the image file in JPG or PNG format.

Post ads

This is a type of Facebook ad that consists of a post with an accompanying image. Post ads usually appear in the Facebook Newsfeed.

The cost of this type of Facebook Ads is calculated based on reach or engagement (depending on your setup). Here, reach means each time a user sees the ad. Engagement, meanwhile, is clicks, likes, comments, and shares.

Slideshow ads

This ad type combines multiple elements including text, images, video, and sound. Slideshow ads let you insert up to 1 slideshow video and 10 images.

Carousel ads

Carousel ads let you display up to 10 videos or images within a single ad. In each image, the advertiser can insert a separate link directing to their Facebook Fanpage or website.

Instant Experience ads

This is an automated form of FB Ads that delivers an instant experience to customers. Once a user clicks the ad, they’re directed to a specially designed, eye-catching landing page, helping the business’s product/service stand out even more.

Video ads

Video ads consist of a short video accompanied by introductory content. Running FB video ads requires investing time and effort to produce a polished video.

The video needs to convey a clear message tied closely to your brand. With this type of Facebook ad, cost is calculated per video view and after every 3 seconds of the video.

How does Facebook Ads work?

So how does Facebook advertising actually work? Depending on geographic location, age, gender, interests, and other demographic details provided by users, Facebook helps businesses select the most suitable target audiences using its advertising algorithm.

When setting up FB Ads, you can choose your target audience, the budget you’re willing to spend, your bid per click (CPC), or the cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM).

To make a Facebook post ad as effective as possible, it’s essential for a business to accurately identify exactly who its target audience is.

Facebook offers a number of criteria for selecting target customers, including:

• Location: Location, region
• Age: Age
• Gender: Gender
• Precise Interests: Specific interests
• Broad Categories: Broader categories (filtering customers by characteristic behaviors).

This ad setup information, combined with Facebook’s existing user data, helps the social network filter and show ads to the right audience.

Proper Facebook Ads targeting for high ad performance

When running a Facebook post ad, choosing the right target customer group plays an extremely important role, helping you achieve a higher success rate. There are 3 Facebook Ads targeting techniques based on 3 specific audience groups:

Core Audience

Core Audience is the core group of target customers. They share common characteristics in demographics, location, behavior, interests, and have the highest probability of purchasing the product/service. Facebook Fanpage ads targeting Core Audience are usually based on the following factors:

• Location: By province/city or business location radius. Example: Selling in the Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Hai Phong areas…
• Demographics: Analyzing age, education, occupation, marital status… Example: Age 15–30, Female, Single…
• Interests: Researching insights and customer interests. Example: If selling sneakers, target people interested in sports, fashion…
• Behavior: Understood as user habits. Example: If selling Android phone accessories, target people who access Facebook via Android phones.

Custom Audience

Custom Audience is a group of target customers that has been customized. After Facebook Ads has run for a certain period, you’ll gather important data to build various potential-customer segments. These include:

• Users who have visited your website.
• Users who have engaged with posts on your Fanpage.
• Users who have watched your videos.
• Users who have sent messages to your Fanpage.

Once you have these segments, you can build Facebook Ads campaigns targeting each customer segment. This form of FB Ads is also called Facebook Remarketing.

Lookalike Audience

Lookalike Audience means creating similar target customer segments based on the Custom Audience segments you’ve already collected above.

Similar means alike in aspects such as age group, behavior, language, interests, and so on. However, a lookalike audience segment will include people who don’t overlap with those already in the custom audience segment.

Additionally, if you create multiple lookalike segments, make sure they don’t overlap with each other in customer data. Today, experienced advertisers use all 3 techniques — core audience, custom audience, and lookalike audience — simultaneously.

Notes for Facebook advertising

Many people wonder about the secret to Facebook advertising that helps close sales and boost revenue quickly. If you’re new and don’t have much experience, the notes below will help you avoid ineffective FB Ads, low sales, or having your account locked or flagged.

• Optimize and design a standout landing page to attract customers and increase the website’s conversion rate.
• Use the Instant Experience ad format, adjusting placement and CTA appropriately to optimize conversions.
• Use other Digital Marketing channels simultaneously, such as running ads on Google…
• Build a conversion funnel for each stage of the buying journey.
• Create multiple ad groups at once and regularly monitor their performance, then make adjustments accordingly.
• The more compelling your content, the more engagement it attracts, helping increase conversion rates and lower bids.
• Use correctly sized images with illustrations that comply with Facebook’s guidelines.
• Avoid using prohibited words related to status comparisons, brand copyright violations, emotional distress, lending, drug names, etc.
• Text displayed on the ad image must stay under 20%.
• Thoroughly research and analyze the market segment your business is targeting.
• If targeting is off, the ad won’t bring any benefit and will waste your advertising budget.
• Use the Audience Insights tool to analyze and research the profile of your potential customer group.

Risks when running Facebook Ads

No advertising platform is 100% perfect, and Facebook is no exception. Some risks when running Facebook Ads include:

• Facebook can “swallow” your ad spend if you’re not careful and end up promoting policy-violating products.
• The Facebook ad review process can take a very long time even if you comply with Facebook’s advertising policies.
• Investing a large amount into media without generating profit due to targeting the wrong customer segment.
• Risk from Facebook Ads algorithm updates.
• Even when targeting the right customer segment, the conversion rate may still fall short.
• Facebook Ads is extremely strict with the Vietnamese market due to issues like fraudulent ad spending, circumventing Facebook’s rules, and advertising products/services that Facebook prohibits.

We hope this article has helped answer your question about what Facebook ads is. The benefits Facebook Ads brings will surely help your business sustainably increase brand recognition as well as achieve a high conversion rate.

If you run into any difficulties while running your ads, or if your results fall short of expectations, contact The7 Digital at Hotline: 0827386886. With over 10 years of experience providing full-service marketing and a team of highly capable experts, The7 is always ready to accompany your business.