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4 bold changes Meta made in Facebook Ads Targeting

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While creating an audience for a Facebook ad campaign for one of our clients, I noticed some changes in Facebook ads targeting options. Facebook no longer gives the targeting option related to breast cancer. Digging deep into the issue, I found that Facebook has removed some categories from their audience targeting option.

It was a pleasant surprise to see that Meta takes some initiative by removing some sensitive parameters from Facebook’s audience targeting options.

What changed in Facebook ads targeting

After doing some more research, we found that four categories in the audience targeting options are gone.

  • Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures
  • Religious beliefs and religious groups (like “Catholic Church”)
  • Sexual orientation (like “LGBT community”)
  • Health issues and causes (like “Breast cancer awareness”)

These changes in Facebook’s ad campaign started today, January 19, 2022, and the rollout will happen throughout the week across different regions.

From the past couple of years, the growing concern related to personal data of people being used through different advertising platforms has challenged companies like Meta to scale back their targeting options and stay away from individual characteristics.

How to minimize the potential impact of these changes

These changes will not drastically impact how most businesses create their Facebook ads. However, if it will somehow affect your marketing strategy or target audience, there is still a way to minimize the impact of these changes on your ongoing campaigns.

Meta has released a statement on their developers portal. They have mentioned that the campaign-level edits can still be made (like budget amount or campaign names) on campaigns created before January 19, 2022. But after March 17, 2022, it will no longer be possible to edit previous campaigns without triggering audience changes.

Edits at ad set level or ad level will trigger audience changes immediately from today itself. 

What to expect in future

This update will not go unnoticed by other digital advertising platforms, and soon we can expect similar changes to them as well. 

For the time being, it is interesting to see that finally, Meta is listening and taking some action for the enormous amount of feedback related to data privacy that has been mounting up for the past 2 to 3 years.

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11 eCommerce home page guidelines to boost your sales

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Your eCommerce store’s home page is your storefront and represents the soul of your brand. It shows what your website sells and highlights your call to action.

Your online store home page is usually the highest traffic page on an eCommerce site. Done right, it will entice visitors to stay and explore your products resulting in increased conversions and sales. On the other hand, ignoring eCommerce home page best practices can lead to less engagement and increased bounce rates – thus, you’ll lose customers. This single page is responsible for establishing trust, driving sales, and creating long-lasting customers.

Visual hierarchy is a key principle behind delivering your message clearly to potential buyers. Meanwhile, your call to action offers a clear next step to move visitors beyond the home page and toward your product pages. Together, the most important components when it comes to designing a high converting eCommerce home page. The following 11 guidelines will help you succeed with both.

Keep your design simple

Northernism’s design is very uniquely simple and it stands out by placing images and text on a grid, which isn’t done by a lot of eCommerce stores. Their commerce website has a modern design with plenty of white space and contains simple images, making it feel much luxurious and less crowded.

northernism - uniquely simple design
Northernism – uniquely simple design

Display your Unique Selling Proposition

Ecommerce websites need a clear USP to set them apart from competitors. This means you need to explain to the visitor what you’re offering as soon as they land on your home page.

The tagline from Two Chimps Coffee is displayed soon as you land on their home page and perfectly summarises what they’re selling. “Awesome Coffee. No Nonsense”. They’ve generated a lot of buzz for their clever branding and high-quality coffee, which positions them uniquely in the customer’s mind.

Two Chimp Coffee
Two Chimps Coffee – clear tag line display

Have a visually appealing sale section

It’s important to have a distinct sale section on your homepage. You want the bargain hunters to be able to find it and access it easily. You may want to be bold and big if your promotion is the most important campaign at the time. Or you could be subtle to get a regular stream of discount-loving customers.

Newegg uses a big banner to display their ongoing/upcoming sales promotions.

NewEgg
NewEgg – sales promotions display on home banner

Add a robust search bar for products

Your eCommerce website will be incomplete without a search bar. Adding a search bar will increase your conversions as visitors are most likely going to use the search bar to find products they might need. Many eCommerce stores don’t return relevant search results and you need a search software that can return relevant search results.

Amazon’s search bar is one of the most popular ones.

Amazon - robust search bar
Amazon – robust search bar

Be clear about your shipping and return policy

Shipping and return policies should be displayed clearly on the homepage, either on the right or left side. This is especially if you offer free shipping or if your return policy is better than what your competitors offer.

Kigurumi - clear shipping policy
Kigurumi – clear shipping policy

Display genuine testimonials and reviews from customers

Testimonials turn the spotlight away from the seller to the customer. Potential buyers were once in your customer’s shoes, debating which product to buy, comparing prices etc.

When the visitor hears what your product can do – from someone they can actually relate to – then their trust deepens and their chances of purchasing rises.

Lucky Paws shows its testimonials in a creative and quirky manner.

Lucky Paws - testimonials
Lucky Paws – testimonials

Select higher quality photographs

Peep Laja says that brands must think deeply about how they show what they’re selling. So it’s not only about the photo quality but also about which photos you’ll be selecting.

Personalise your home page

Personalization not only leads to more sales but also increases customer lifetime value. The customer is likely to return to your website if they feel that you understand their needs very well.

You can Autocommerce to recommend relevant products based on the visitor’s location, pages viewed, purchase history. Nordstrom has a great recommendation section.

Nordstrom - personalized shopping
Nordstrom – personalized shopping

Add product images to categories

Visitors want to see what kind of products you offer and your categories section presents an overview. To encourage them to explore further, adding images is very helpful. You can also use thumbnail images for each of your main categories.

Case-Mate does a great job of indicating what kind of product you will find when you click a link.

Case Mate
Case-Mate – categories with product images

Feature your best products

When you feature your best products throughout your homepage, you essentially give customers an idea of what to buy and help them make a purchase decision. You can strategically test which collection of products works best on your homepage in terms of sales. It could also be your best sellers, new products or seasonal products.

Physiq Apparel displays its “Featured Products”

Physiq Apparel
Physiq Apparel – featured products display

Have an intuitive navigation structure

If customers can’t get to pages easily, they might believe that you don’t stock the product they want, and abandon your website. So your homepage navigation, categories and sub-categories should be intuitive and easy to follow.

BooHoo’s navigation makes it very easy for visitors to understand how to discover products and where each link leads.

BooHoo
BooHoo – detailed and well-designed navigation

Wrapping Up

An eCommerce home page performs many tasks, from helping visitors to find and buy products, to highlighting other key information such as shipping and return policy.

Your home page should bring visitors closer to a purchase. You don’t want them hanging around your home page. You want them to browse your product pages and buy.

Hopefully, you’ve found inspiration and will implement some of these guidelines on your own home page. Here is another great article that explains 5 essential elements of good website design.

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What are Responsive Search Ads and how to make the most out of them in 2022

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Since 18 February 2021, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are now the default ad type when looking to create ads for a Search campaign.

Advertisers can still create new Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) and edit existing ones but they’re being pushed aside nevertheless.

Introduced in 2016, ETA is an ad format that allows you to preview the complete ad. You not only have more control over the text and how it’s displayed – but you can also pick and choose which text assets to place in the headlines and descriptions. Moreover, the text assets don’t need to be combinable, which is the case with RSAs.

So what are RSAs and what does this mean for advertisers moving forward?

Traditionally, the advertiser would write a combination of headlines and body copy and multiple stand-alone versions of ads would be created.

Google’s algorithm would figure out which ad performs amongst them.

With RSAs, each piece of headline and description is considered an “asset” and Google dynamically combines these “assets” based on search intent.

In a single RSA, you can provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions.

The more you enter, the more Google’s machine learning algorithm will match your ads and serve the most relevant dynamic ads to your potential customers.

The hard part?

As each headline and description asset can be mixed and matched automatically by Google, they need to make sense on their own.

This requires a little more thinking when writing the copy.

The key elements of Expanded Text Ads when compared to Responsive Search Ads :

Key ElementsText AdsResponsive Search Ads
Number of headlines (in setup)Up to 3 (30 characters each)Up to 15 (30 characters each)
Number of descriptions (in setup)Up to 2 (90 characters each)Up to 4 (90 characters each)
Number of headlines shown3Up to 3
Number of descriptions shown2Up to 2
Maximum length of ad shown150 characters300 characters
Arrangement of assetsStatic (as written down)Automatic
Control over text asset combinationFullLittle

Google’s rationale behind Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)

As Google favors a shift towards machine learning and automation, many advertisers feel this will give them less control over their marketing campaigns. Google claims that machine learning can improve campaign performance in terms of relevancy, clicks and conversions.

Consumer needs and priorities are continuously changing, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. Google reasons that its push towards RSAs will allow advertisers a better way to adapt to changing customer demands and shifting market trends without creating individual static ads and testing them out manually.

Moreover, Google wants more advertisers to use RSAs (especially novice advertisers) so that it gives their machine learning algorithms more data to work with. This way Google can make more recommendations related to account performance.

How RSAs can help your business

You can tailor your headlines and description copy to your customers’ locations or locations of interest.

Multiple headlines and descriptions options allow your ads the opportunity to compete in more auctions and match more queries, thus reaching more potential customers.

You can increase ad group performance as you attract more clicks and conversions that your existing text ads aren’t capturing – this is because responsive search ads help you compete in more auctions.

Moda Furnishings, a British furniture designer and importer, wanted to increase sales from its e-commerce site. The brand reused content from its expanded text ads to create responsive search ads and added them across its ad groups.

The result?

Moda Furnishings has seen clickthrough rates increase 96% while sales have grown over 3,000%.

Jonathan Brierley, CEO of Moda Furnishings said, “We’ve seen significant improvement across all key metrics since adding responsive search ads. From site traffic to sales, responsive search ads have outperformed expanded text ads.”

How to make the most of this new development

Leverage RSAs to test out a diverse mix of messages regularly. This will not only help advertisers improve their ads, but it will also allow Google to better match a message to a particular search or user.

Continue creating and testing ETAs as they could outperform the machine learning-based RSAs. Ideally, like advertisers, you should supplement your ad groups with RSAs but continue to test two to three ETAs in each ad group. This will allow you to optimize your ad copy while also benefiting from Google’s machine learning-driven ad copy testing at the same time.

Use Google’s tools such as their Ad strength tool which takes relevance, quantity, and diversity of ad copy and provides a score (ranging from Poor to Excellent) for your RSAs. As per Google, “Advertisers who improve Ad strength for their Responsive Search Ads from ‘Poor’ to ‘Excellent’ see 9% more clicks and conversions on average”. Also, use location insertion to increase the relevancy of your ads. 

If you are interested in writing effective ad copy, check our article – The Main Purpose of Your Ad Copy – To Get it Clicked

Conclusion

Responsive search ads can bring in more leads and improve your conversion rates. Although it comes at the price of lesser control, its machine-learning mechanism can make it easy to quickly test your message and offers at a large scale.

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15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

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Facebook connects more people online today than any other company. Its popularity has prompted businesses to rethink their marketing efforts and how to best engage with potential customers online. 

Here are 15 statistics that will help you understand the social network better and craft your Facebook marketing strategy accordingly.

1. For your Facebook marketing your daily active users has risen to 1.91 billion

About 1.91 billion users are active on Facebook each day, up 7% or 123 million compared to last year. Daily active users represented approximately 66% of the 2.90 billion monthly active users in June. Meanwhile, monthly active users grew by 194 million (or 7% compared to last year).

(Facebook, 2021)

2. Users between 25–34 years constitute the biggest demographic group

As of July 2021, amongst global Facebook users, 18.8% were male between 25 and 34 years old and 12.5% were female in the same age range. While Facebook users are a diverse age group, 71.9% are within the 18–44 years old range.

(Statista, 2021)

3. India has the highest number of Facebook users in the world

India far outnumbers other countries with its 340 million users. It is followed by the United States with 200 million users and Indonesia with 140 million users. Since global usage distribution is widespread, businesses and brands who are considering an international expansion can not ignore Facebook when it comes to marketing.

(Statista, 2021)

top 15 countries based on number of facebook users

4. 1.1 billion Facebook users talk in English

Every marketer knows that Facebook is fundamental to most marketing strategies on an international scale – with the capacity to reach billions of users. Despite living across diverse locations it is heartening to know that 1.1 billion Facebook users speak in English. 

(WeAreSocial, 2021)

5. Almost all users exclusively use mobile to access Facebook

98.5% of users accessed Facebook via any kind of mobile device and 81.8% of users accessed it via only a mobile phone. Businesses with Facebook Pages should keep this in mind. When creating ads and posts, you should focus not on desktop only but ensure that they look good on mobile devices as well.

(Statista, 2021)

6. More than 1.8 billion people are using Facebook Groups every month

As people seek new ways to stay connected due to COVID-19 social distancing, Facebook group activity has seen a significant uptick, with more than 1.8 billion people actively using Facebook Groups every month.

(Facebook, 2021)

7. Facebook’s total ad revenue was $28.5 billion in Q2 2021

In the second quarter of 2021, Facebook’s total revenue was $29.1 billion, which is a 56% year-over-year increase. Of which, their advertising revenue amounted to roughly $28.5 billion. In 2020, Facebook’s advertising revenue worldwide amounted to $84.2 billion. Needless to say, Facebook is still one of the most important platforms for advertising and growth.

(Statista, 2021)

8. Facebook has the most ads & highest CTR

Facebook Ads Manager offers four different ad placements: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. Of these four, Facebook is the dominant platform with the most ads (45.2%), the highest average CPM ($5.82) and the highest CTR (3.90%), while the CTRs on Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger fall under 1%.

Facebook – $5.82 CPM & $0.33 CPC

Instagram – $5.33 CPM & $0.98 CPC

Audience Network- $4.47 CPM & $0.52 CPC

Messenger – $4.15 CPM & $0.52 CPC
(Social Insider, 2020)

Average facebook ad click through rate by placement

9. Conversions are the main campaign objective for 26.94% of Facebook ads

There are various options to choose from – from metric goals like engagement, reach, or clicks, to broader objectives such as brand awareness or store visits. The main of most Facebook ads is to achieve conversions (26.94% of ads). Meanwhile, 24.19% of ads are aiming for post engagement, and 22.64% are seeking link clicks. Brand awareness, event responses, and store visits are even less popular objectives and ads with either of these three aims make up only 2.03% of the total.

(Social Insider, 2020)

Most common campaign objective in facebook ads

10. Status ads have the highest click-through rate

Among the creative types available in Facebook ads, status ads have the highest click-through rate (6.65%). This is a little surprising, given that status ads are averaging only $58.27 in ad spend while video ($157.15) and share ($146.16) have the two highest average spends.

(Social Insider, 2020)

11. 15% of all Facebook content is video

Between Facebook Live and native videos, video content totaled 15% of all content. In 2020, 71% of video content was published by Pages with over 100k fans.

(Social Insider, 2021)

12. Vertical videos generate the highest engagement rate

Vertical videos with a description length of up to 10 words increased engagement rates from 0.29% to 0.44%

(Social Insider, 2021)

Average engagement rate by video format over time

13. There are more than 200 million small businesses around the world using Facebook marketing tools

One of Facebook’s most popular tools is the Facebook Page where businesses can publish and share their information like address, contact details, and a description of their products or services. Using this tool brands can greatly increase their online presence and connect with people who might be interested in what they have to offer. There are over 200 million small businesses on Facebook from around the world.

(Facebook, 2021)

14. Users spend an average of 19.5 hours per month on Facebook

Facebook plays a big role in consumers’ lives. It’s the most popular social media app. People spend a similar amount of time on WhatsApp (19.4 hours per month). This is followed by Instagram at 10.3 hours per month.

(DataReportal, 2021)

15. 48.5% of B2B decision-makers use Facebook for research

Facebook is amongst the topmost social networks for B2B research. Only YouTube comes in higher at 50.9%.

(Hootsuite, 2021)

If you are interested in scaling your Facebook ads, read about the 6 advance techniques for scaling facebook ads in 2021

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5 most effective tips to manage your PPC Campaigns during COVID-19

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COVID-19 has affected customers and businesses in various ways. Customers are buying more of their essentials online while some businesses are scrambling to break even. Altered buyer behavior and current market situations have caused some businesses to end their online PPC campaigns while others are contemplating it. It might turn out to be the wrong move that will cause more harm than good.

Scale Down, But Don’t Kill Your PPC Campaigns

Buying habits and priorities have changed for now. If your conversion rates have dipped, take a look at other businesses in your industry. If they are in a similar predicament, reduce your ad spend but do not kill your campaigns completely especially if they were working well. The data will get messed up and you will have to start from scratch to rebuild your targeted audience. 

When you come across logistics issues such as stuck deliveries or trouble restocking the goods, don’t remove your ads entirely. You can pause them for a while and mark them as “currently out of stock”.

Pounce If You Have To

Most people are staying home in isolation and their use of the internet has increased significantly. There is a lot of traffic and huge amounts of wasted potential because businesses are scared to market their offerings.

PPC rates have been fluctuating but right now the cost of ads is low. While the conversion rates are different based on industries, it is still an amazing opportunity for proactive businesses to build their brand. The usual oversaturated market is facing less competition as many marketers and companies have retreated.

After figuring out how the market is evolving, businesses that dare to act now have a potential to grow that should not be squandered. 

Due to uncertain business conditions, there is a window of opportunity now where your competitors are not spending on particular keywords. You can increase rankings for the more competitive and high traffic keywords by spending less and increasing your conversion rate.

Connect With Your Audience

Use emails and go live on your social media accounts and build relations. Being open and wishing good for your consumers health and livelihoods would improve brand image and conversions. 

Pivot slightly and increase your offerings by factoring in certain activities that have been on the rise like homeschooling, working virtually at home offices, social distancing, reconnecting with old friends and family. Mention them when in your ad campaigns too.

Get inspirations from some of the top businesses in the world and how they are conducting themselves during this pandemic.

Change Your Messaging

We are still living in uncertainty. Be considerate of people’s feelings and critically examine the context and tone of your messaging. Mention your services accurately in your ads such as “free home delivery” or “same day delivery”. Avoid showing large gatherings of people. 

You should experiment and run campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Find out how people are searching for terms and topics related to the Coronavirus and adapt your marketing to help them in any way you can.

Take Advantage Of Cash Grants

Last but not least, eligible small businesses should take advantage of grants offered by the likes of Facebook and Google in their efforts to support and empower Small Business owners. Besides 

Facebook is offering $100 million in cash credits to support SMBs in 30 countries. To be eligible, you must:

  • Have between 2 and 50 employees
  • Have been in business for over a year
  • Have experienced challenges from COVID-19
  • Be in or near a location where Facebook operates

Similarly, Google will provide ad credits to “Small and medium-sized businesses globally, who have spent with a Google Ads account in ten out of twelve months of 2019, and in January and/or February of this year. Eligible customers are those who advertised directly with us or through a partner, and adhere to our advertising policies.”

PPC Campaigns

Wrap Up

While there is a positive impact amongst local grocery retailers and education industries, some of the most negatively impacted verticals include travel, tourism, leisure, car rentals and alternative medicine. We would advise you to observe the landscape well, gain up to date knowledge before making any big decisions. It is easier to experiment with new pricing and messaging and scale upwards when your PPC campaigns go right – than to completely start from scratch hoping for a miracle.

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The Best Way To Effectively Scale Your Facebook Ads (6 Advanced Techniques)

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When it comes to scaling Facebook ads, most people suggest the same tactic – A/B testing. “A/B test your copy. Then A/B test your landing page. A/B test all your creative. In fact, A/B test your entire campaign!”

I mean, aren’t you a little tired of listening to the same old yapping about A/B Testing over and over again?

Yes, A/B test has its place in Facebook ads but it is not a ninja technique to magically improve your conversions! A/B testing requires costly software and heavy traffic to run experiments that can return statistically meaningful results.

Here are six powerful techniques that will help you in scaling Facebook ads while staying profitable.

1. Managing your daily budgets

This is something a lot of Facebook Advertisers struggle with, how do you decide your daily budgets?

There’s no doubt Facebook provides high-quality traffic to campaigns with higher daily spends. But if you haven’t tested your audience, creative and copy – the better option is to always start with something like $20 per day. 

Once you have done tests and seen results, you can start scaling your campaigns by setting up higher daily budgets like $100 or $200 per day.

It’s all about providing Facebook with more data, if you can spend more, that does not necessarily mean your ads will start performing better.

Optimize first, then scale.

2. Continuously fed lookalike audience

To scale your campaigns and boost sales, it’s really important to keep your Audiences fresh.

One way to achieve that is by following a strategy we call ‘Continuously Fed Lookalike Audiences’.

Can you imagine the return on your Ad spend if you could only target people who are more likely to convert?

Assuming you’ve already implemented Facebook Pixel on your Landing Page or Website, you can create custom conversions and track everyone who is converting from your ads. You can then create a Lookalike audience of people who are converting and create new Ads from it.

The data will keep getting stronger, as your custom conversions feed your lookalike. This technique is guaranteed to scale your conversions and amplify your ROI.

3. Facebook automated rules for scaling Facebook ads

Facebook has an automation feature in Ads Manager called ‘Rules‘. Which has different parameters for automating actions like ‘turning on’ or ‘turning off’ a Campaign, an Ad Set or an individual Ad. 

For example, if Cost per Result goes above an amount which is not profitable for your business, Facebook will automatically shut off your ads. 

Automation rules help in minimizing the risks like over-spending on Ads that don’t deliver results without having to monitor your ads all day long. 

You can also set an automation rule to increase your campaign budget and scale if your ads are profitable.

4. Lookalike audience from video engagement

It is a powerful technique where you can really leverage your video marketing.

Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based on video views. For example, people who watched more than 50% of your video.

If people watch your video (or at least 50% of it), there’s a decent chance that they are interested in your offer, or at the very least motivated by your marketing. 

When you build your campaigns based on lookalikes of an already engaged audience, it will have a higher probability of targeting more individuals who are interested in your offerings.

5. Avoid audience overlap between your ad sets

Audiences you create on Facebook can be checked for overlap.

The ‘Audience Overlap’ tool will show what percentage of people are common among the different audiences you have created. If you are not keeping this factor in check, you can count on Facebook doing it for you, as it’s a part of their algorithm. 

Ad Sets with more than 25% of Audience Overlap will have delivery issues. Ads can simply stop showing, or worse, they will end up competing against each other in Facebook auction. 

As if you don’t have enough competition already.

6. LTV (Lifetime Value) lookalike audience

Over the years Facebook has been gathering information from their pixels all across the web.

Pixels have gathered up the data for conversion values and revenue tracking for whoever has been using them. 

Facebook can tell how much an individual spends over their ‘lifetime’ with businesses, those who spend more are segmented as ‘high quality’ traffic.

When creating a custom audience from an email list, Facebook also provides an option to add value to each individual, how much they have profited your business. 

That’s why this technique of creating ‘LTV Lookalikes’ is really great for businesses who have a well segmented CRM database. 

By following this technique you will be able to closely align your Lookalike audiences with high value individuals across Facebook.

Wrap up

These are some of the most powerful techniques that when scaling Facebook ads. Start using these techniques in your campaigns, and you will be able to tackle scaling and profitability issues with ease.

If you are interested in Facebook marketing, have a look at 15 Awesome Facebook Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2021

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