Different Types Of Facebook Ads
After you have decided to run Facebook ads, it is important to do some proper research. One of the research subjects is deciding which type of ad you are going to run.
In this article I will help you make this decision easier and clearer. Many ads work for many types of businesses. So don’t feel limited to using only 1 type.
Ad objective
Ad Objective = Goal of the ads
Ad format = The creative appearance of the ads
First things first, we need to decide what our ad objective is going to be. Without an objective, it is difficult to choose the type of ad format I like to see the ad objectives as a customer funnel; the first stage is awareness, then traffic, and lastly conversion. Facebook deliberately made these objectives to relate to the customer sales funnel.
Awareness ads
The awareness objectives are meant to show your potential audience that you exist. There are over a 1.8 billion people on Facebook. A majority of these people probably don’t know you’re your business exist. Through these awareness objectives, they can interact with your business and explore what you care about.
There are 3 types of brand awareness ads:
Reach
Brand awareness
Local awareness
Reach
This objective will make sure your ad is shown to the majority of your target audience. Its purpose is to maximize the reach. This means that it is not about quality, but the quantity of the viewers.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness will allow you to show your ads to people who are most likely to recall them. It is about showing an ad that will set your business's standards. Make sure it stands out so your audience will remember it.
Local awareness
This objective only appears to physically nearby people. This is useful when you are a restaurant in a specific city and want to attract customers who are just visiting for a day.
Overall, the awareness ads are the start of your customer sales funnel.
Tip: The awareness ads are the cheapest ones, so keeping these running at all times is a good option.
Consideration (traffic) ads
The goal of this objective is to get a certain type of action out of your audience. This means, leaving contact details, visiting your web page, watching a video, etc. It is meant to trigger something.
These are the different type of consideration objectives:
Traffic to your website
Engagement
App instals
Video views
Lead generation
Messenger ads
Traffic to website
This objective will make sure that people click on your website to explore, and potentially buy something. The goal of these visits is to track them after and use that information to find even better people who might be interested in your business. We use the Facebook pixel to track these visits and even specific actions.
The Facebook pixel is a piece of code that you install behind your website. This will allow the Facebook platform to track different actions on specific pages.
Engagement
The engagement objective can be useful for getting likes, shares, and views. This can come in handy later on when you want to scale your ads. Because an ad with 200 likes is more legit than one with only 2.
App installs
This speaks for itself. When you want people to download a specific app you can use this type of objective to advertise to people who install lots of apps.
Video views
Again, speaks for itself. When you use this objective, it will target people within your target audience who watch lots of videos.
Lead Generation
This objective will trigger people who are more likely to leave behind their information. Like, e-mail address, phone number, name, etc. The goal is to gather personal information to for example start a cycle in e-mail marketing.
Messenger ads
To interact directly with your target audience for questions or selling 1 on 1, it is nice to enter an option for messenger ads. Your target audience will be able to send direct messages to you or your business.
Conversion ads
This objective is the lowest in our funnel. Which will mean that our objective will be a certain type of action or better yet, a purchase. Using our retargeting strategy with our Facebook pixel will work great with this objective. It means you can track people similar to the ones who have already purchased or performed a certain type of action.
Conversion
These will help your customers set the focus on converting, aka, making a purchase or performing a specific action like we talked about before.
Store Visit
Quite an obvious one, this type of ad will set your viewers to visit your online shop to potentially purchase something. This type of ad works well when owning a webshop with online check-out. Again, using your pixel will work great with this.
Product Catalogue
This tool is also used to support product sales. However, you can show the multiple products in just 1 ad by adding the product catalog. It is a useful feature when you have a certain collection or criteria of products that you want to show off.
The creative
Now we know all of the objectives, we will look into the type of ad formats. The formats will determine the appearance of your ad.
These are the different type of ad formats:
Video ads
Photo ads
Carousel ads
Dynamic ads
Slide show ads
Canvas ads
Lead form ads
Video ads
Video ads have been getting more and more popular over the years. The performance rate of the video ads has increased by over 50%.
When to use: You can use video ads for any type of product or service. The performance will be best when using objectives like awareness and consideration. It can be used with all ad objectives.
Tip: Use videos of max 15 seconds to receive the best results.
Photo ads
Photo ads are by far the easiest to create. It consists of one photo, a CTA (call to action), and usually a link.
When to use: It is best to use when you have a simple and clear message for your target audience. The format can be used with all ad formats.
Carousel ads
Carousel ads look like a carousel of videos and photos. Mostly used for product catalog. The nice thing about the carousel ads is that every photo and video in the carousel can add its own link to it.
When to use: Like said before, product catalogs can be great for using the carousel ad format. As well as creating some type of awareness when offering multiple services or product categories.
Dynamic ads
These ads are great for people who have already visited your website but have not purchased yet. You create dynamic ads before you start running anything. Once your target audience visits certain products, but does not purchase, the dynamic ads will show up on Facebook (When you have the pixel installed correctly) .
When to use: When you want specific products to be advertised AFTER people viewed them. Can only be used with objective product catalog.
Slide show
You can think of this as a slideshow of pictures on your phone. Only more controlled and marketing focussed. The goal of the slide show is to tell a story. You can take this ad format to the next level with overlay texts, images, branded formats, etc.
When to use: Really fun to use when going for a branding campaign or you want to make a statement by telling a story through pictures. Can be used with all ad objective.
Canvas
These are like the interactive ads of Facebook. It is a full-screen ad experience. They are super high quality to make your product come to life. The best thing about this ad format is that your target audience does not have to leave Facebook to find out extra information because you can scroll left, right, up, and down to add different pictures, information, and benefit of the specific product/service. This is called a micro-site experience.
When to use: Use these types of ads when you can provide the right information and quality into a storytelling scenery. If done right it will be an amazing experience for the viewers. You can use this ad format with brand awareness and traffic as objective.
Lead forms
Lead forms are ads that are interactive as well. You can type your information into the ad and submit it. All fields are customisable. This ad format got introduced in 2020. Previously you had to get off the Facebook website to be able to gather leads. With this ad format, it will make it a lot easier to receive leads, since your audience doesn't have to get off Facebook to type in their information.
When to use: Think of gathering e-mails for e-mail marketing or a newsletter. Or you just want to gather personal information of your customers to do some market research. The format can only be used with the objective, lead forms.
Still not sure?
Still debating whether you are using the right ad objective and ad format? At Floordigital we are always open to have a free consultation call to explore all possibilities and come get to conclusions.
Floor@floordigital.co / +31 619 369 944