7 Facebook Ads Strategies That Work
Seven Facebook advertising tactics built around 2012 launches: Custom Audiences, Facebook Exchange, Timeline for Pages and the post-IPO push into mobile.
Why 2012 was a turning point for Facebook ads
Facebook went public in May 2012, and the scrutiny that followed forced the company to prove it could turn its enormous user base into real ad revenue, especially on mobile, where it had almost no meaningful ad product at the time of the IPO. That pressure produced a wave of new ad tools within months, and the businesses that adopted them early got a real edge over competitors still running the same static sidebar ads they’d used for years. These seven approaches were the ones that separated advertisers getting real results from ones just spending money and hoping.
1. Target your own customers with Custom Audiences
Facebook launched Custom Audiences in March 2012, letting advertisers upload a list of customer emails or phone numbers and match them against Facebook accounts to target ads directly at people who already had a relationship with the business. This was a meaningful shift from targeting by broad interest or demographic guesswork, since it let a business reach existing customers, or people who’d abandoned a signup, with a much higher expected response rate than a cold audience.
2. Retarget site visitors with Facebook Exchange
Facebook Exchange, launched in June 2012, opened up real-time bidding for ads shown to people based on what they’d browsed elsewhere on the web, effectively bringing retargeting, already common on the open web through display networks, into the Facebook feed itself. An advertiser could show an ad for the exact product a visitor had looked at and left without buying, which converted far better than a generic product ad shown cold.
3. Rebuild your Page around Timeline
Facebook rolled Timeline out to Pages in March 2012, replacing the old tab-based layout with a large cover photo, a two-column post feed and pinned posts that could stay at the top of a Page. Businesses that treated this as more than a cosmetic change, choosing a cover photo that communicated what the business offered and pinning a useful post rather than a stale announcement, saw better first impressions from new visitors landing on the Page from an ad.
4. Use Promoted Posts as organic reach declined
As Facebook pushed harder to monetize the News Feed after its IPO, organic reach for Page posts started visibly shrinking through 2012. Promoted Posts, a simple option to pay a small amount to guarantee a specific post reached more of a Page’s existing fans, became a practical way to make sure an important announcement or offer wasn’t buried before most fans ever saw it.
5. Shift budget toward mobile placements
Facebook’s stock struggled in the months after its IPO in part because investors doubted the company could monetize mobile usage, which was growing faster than desktop. In response, Facebook invested heavily in mobile ad formats through the second half of 2012, and advertisers who moved budget toward mobile News Feed placements early found less competition and lower costs than on the increasingly crowded desktop side.
6. Use Power Editor to test multiple ad variations at once
Power Editor let advertisers build and manage large numbers of ad sets with different images, copy and targeting simultaneously, rather than relying on Facebook’s basic ad creation tool to test one variation at a time. Advertisers who ran several creative and audience combinations side by side consistently found winners faster than those testing changes one at a time.
7. Send every audience to a matching landing page
The single most common reason a Facebook ad in 2012 failed to convert wasn’t the ad itself, it was a landing page that didn’t match what the ad promised. Advertisers who built a dedicated page for each major audience segment or offer, rather than routing every click back to a general homepage, consistently reported better conversion rates for the same ad spend.
The common thread
None of these seven tactics required a huge budget. What they required was treating Facebook advertising as a system with several connected parts, audience, creative, landing page and reach, rather than a single ad you set and forget. The businesses that combined even two or three of these approaches in 2012 were already ahead of the majority of advertisers still running the same generic campaign they’d started years earlier.
Related guides: more on paid advertising, everything published in 2012 or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
