3 Surefire Tips to Create Facebook Ads That Convert

Are you already advertising on Facebook – but not yet seeing the results you hoped for? If you want your ad spending to yield more fans, leads or sales, you might just need to tweak your strategy a little bit to start seeing a better return on investment.

Here are 3 of my favorite Facebook ad tips for tweaking your approach, so your next Facebook ad results in higher conversion rates – and more business for you.

1. Reach More Fans Through the News Feed

The number of users accessing Facebook on mobile devices has skyrocketed in the past year – today, 60 percent of all users are visiting Facebook on their phones and tablets.

This has pretty serious implications for advertisers because when users access Facebook via mobile, there is no right-hand column – which means you can’t afford not to focus at least some of your advertising on News Feed placements.

To get your Facebook ads into the News Feed (specifically Page Post ads, Page Like ads and Sponsored Stories), you have to use the Power Editor. It’s different (and a little more complicated) than the ads dashboard you’re used to, but there are plenty of resources to help you learn how.

2. Play by the 20-Percent

Rule Facebook recently revised their guidelines for Facebook ads that appear in the News Feed, like Promoted Posts, Offers and ads that you target to mobile Facebook users.

Any image-based ad that goes out to the News Feed of users – like a still from a video advertising your next webinar, for example, or a product image offering a discount – can have a text overlay, but that text can’t take up more than 20 percent of the total ad image.

Make sure your image-based ads don’t get penalized before they get results!

3. Super-Charge Your Sales With “Custom Audiences”

Sometimes, the conversion goal for an advertising campaign is simple: sell more. In that case, it makes the most sense to target people who are already leads – like your email list.

In the past, though, there was no convenient way to sync up your email list with your Facebook marketing.

That has since changed with the addition of the “custom audiences” feature – now you can upload your email list directly to Facebook, so that when you set up an ad, you can select them as a “custom audience” in the targeting section of the ads dashboard.

Advertisers are already reporting a higher conversion rate on their ad spends (in one example cited by Facebook, an auto company saw a 24x return on their ads by using custom audiences in combination with Offers).

When it comes to Facebook Ads, smarter is better… :)