Facebook Local Advertising Secrets Revealed

Are you taking advantage of Facebook local advertising for your local business? If not, it's something you should definitely consider.

Did you know that most people around you are on Facebook? The platform has 2 billion monthly active users...

Did you also know that your competition is likely using Facebook advertising right this very minute? 93% of marketers use it regularly...

Aren't these stats CRAZY?

I'm not going to cover the benefits of Facebook Advertising in this article. Rest assured, there are a ton and you can check them out in this article on Facebook advertising benefits if you'd like.

What I am going to cover in this article is how you can maximize the results for your local Facebook advertising. Let's get into it...

How to Optimize Facebook Local Advertising for Better Results

Facebook ads optimization means better results and we're going to cover a number of ways to help you.

You will learn how to increase your click-through rates (CTR), lower your cost-per-click (CPC), and reach a highly profitable audience.

Sounds impossible?

Read on and let's find out!

1. Optimize Likes and Shares

Likes and shares act as huge social proof for your ads. When people see an ad with a ton of comments, likes, and shares it lends credibility to what you have to offer.

So how can you maximize the likes and shares of your ads? It's quite simple, but often overlooked.

When creating an ad instead of choosing the "Create Ad" option select the "Use Existing Post" option. 

When you can use an existing post across multiple campaigns and/or ad sets the likes and shares of the existing post transfer with it.

This is an excellent way of taking advantage of the past history of an existing post and optimizing your ads for likes and shares.

2. Accelerate Facebook Ad Optimization

Getting enough data to properly optimize a local Facebook ad campaign can take some time if you are running on a smaller budget. However, there's a simple trick you can use to get around this.

You typically want at least 10,000 impressions on an ad to gather enough data to properly identify any changes you need to make to improve your results. 

What you can do to speed up this process is to adjust your daily budget in the ad set temporarily. Increase it until you get the desired impressions you need to properly analyze the data, then you can decrease your daily budget to keep your overall budget on track.

3. Know When to Launch Facebook Ads

The success of a post or an ad also depends on the time and day. This is true, not only on Facebook but for all social media platforms.

Have you ever looked at the performance of your ads by day? In the Facebook Ads Manager, you can select "day" in the Breakdown option (see below).

Can you spot any trends in performance based on the day? If so, you might want to consider scheduling your ads to run on specific days of the week instead of all the time.

Check Out These Other Related Facebook Ad Resources

There are multiple facets to Facebook Ads. You might find these other resources very helpful too:

• Facebook Marketing for Small Business: How to Get Started
• Easy Facebook Advertising Tips for Unbelievable Results

4. Fight Facebook Ad Fatigue

How often should someone see the same ad? Well, it depends on your industry and your profit margin.

For a frame of reference, I would say you should start analyzing ad fatigue when your frequency is near 5. 

The easiest way to combat ad fatigue is to create multiple variations of the same ad, create separate ad groups, and schedule certain ad groups for specific days. This way you'll be able to run similar ads, but the look will be different and reduce ad fatigue.

If you'd like to learn more about ad fatigue check out these additional resources:

• 11 Ways to Combat Facebook Ad Fatigue
  

These articles are also helpful when running campaigns with small audiences, e.g. remarketing campaigns.

5. Monitor Performance by Ad Placement

Your ad placement plays a huge role in advertising costs when launching a Facebook local advertising campaign.

CPC can vary over 550%, depending on different ad placements.

To boost your placement:

First,

Discover your top-performing ad placements by logging in to Facebook Ads Manager and using the Breakdown Menu to break down your campaigns by Placement.

Based on the information you gather, you can decide whether you need to remove certain ad placements and/or increase your spending on specific ad placements.

6. You Must A/B Test

A Facebook ad campaign is incomplete without testing.

When A/B Testing I would recommend only changing one element at a time, otherwise you will have no way of knowing which element made the difference.

You also need to make sure you have enough data for the information to have statistical relevance. This is a great tool for determining the sample size you need for your A/B testing.

Here are some testing elements you should consider:

• Ad design
• Ad copy
• Your unique value offer
• Ad placements
• Call-to-action buttons
• Bidding methods
• Campaign objectives

Even small improvements over time can significantly increase your results and decrease your ad spend. Testing is well worth the time it takes.

7. Select The Correct Objective

When setting up a campaign, you must select an objective. 

Your chosen objective tells Facebook the best audience to show your ad to. Although Facebook's algorithm changes from time to time, choosing the right objective places your campaign in front of the best audience.

Having said that, there are times when a campaign might fall into multiple objectives. When this happens I would recommend testing (see #6 above) to see which objective gives you the best results.

8. Exclude People Who Have Converted on an Ad

Another way to optimize your ads is to exclude the ads from people who have already converted. Why would you want to show the same ad to a person who already took action on it, right?

How you exclude people will depend on your particular campaign. In the example below, I'm assuming you want someone to register or sign up for something.

In order to exclude people who have already converted you need to do a few things:

1. Create a landing page where your ad clicks will be sent to.
2. Create a thank you page where opt-ins from the landing page will be sent.
3. Create a Custom Audience of people who visited the thank you page. People who visited the thank you page obviously filled out the form on the landing page = they converted. (Note: You must have the Facebook pixel installed on your website to do this.)  
4. Activate the exclude feature to include your custom audience. 

9. Set Up Rules

To make your life a hundred times easier, set up rules in the Facebook Ads Manager.

Rules can be used to automatically check your campaigns, ad sets, and ads, and then update or notify you of any changes.

How can you use rules to optimize your ads? Here are a few examples:

• Pause low performing ads when they hit a specific metric.
• Increase your budget if a certain ad hits a specific metric.

10. Target the Right Audience

Although this one is last, please don't discount the importance of finding the right audience for your ads.

Target the right audience with the right message and you'll get great results.

But, if you target the wrong audience it doesn't matter how good your ad is...the results will be very disappointing.

Audience targeting on Facebook is really powerful. Take the time to ensure your ads are reaching the right target market. This will ensure you get the best results for your advertising budget.

Header image courtesy of Pexels.com.