Facebook Ads continue to be a moving target. How do you get the best reach and achieve your goals with your Facebook Ads? In this 1-hour webinar with Buzzsumo, I covered smart ways to amplify your content with Facebook ads.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- When to Boost a Post and when NOT to
- How to split test your ads to make sure you are getting the cheapest cost per click
- How to read your Facebook Ad reports so you know what’s working and what isn’t
- How to test what types of content work best on Facebook
And there was a great Q&A session at the end so make sure you tune in to that!
For those of you who like to just get to the good stuff right away, I have a couple of quick tips from the webinar:
When to Boost Your Facebook Posts
Many people only use the Boost Post option without any real strategy on what they are trying to achieve. So here are a couple of quick rules around when you should boost your posts.
Rule #1 Only Boost your Best Content
When you post something on Facebook, I usually wait a day (or at the very least a few hours) to see how that post does organically. There can be other factors at work as to why a post may not get a lot of engagement, but you will get better results from your Facebook Ad if your post is already interesting.
To find your best posts, first go to your Post Insights on your Facebook Page.
Then switch to your Engagement Rate from the drop-down menu in the upper right area of the lists of posts. Engagement Rate is the percentage of people who interact with your post of those who have seen it. Looking at the engagement rate will normalize your posts to take the fact that some had a different reach out of the equation.
You will have to judge for yourself what a “good” engagement rate is for your Page but in general, I wouldn’t boost anything that has less than 5% Engagement Rate. There are, of course, exceptions when you have something more promotional that needs to get out but make sure you are focusing on your most engaging posts.
And don’t forget that Buzzsumo has an EXCELLENT tool to help you analyze your content called the Facebook Analyzer. This allows you to sort your posts and filter by type and easily analyze a longer period of posting.
Rule #2 Know your Goals and Key Performance Metrics
Don’t just boost a post because it’s doing well. Make sure it serves your key business goals for your Facebook Page.
My key metric is link clicks and optins to my email list. I don’t really care that much about how many Likes I have. I would rather create content that drove people to my website so that they can get good information and hopefully optin to my email list to get more information from me.
So when I have a post on Facebook, I watch to see if it’s driving traffic to my website. I’ve been doing some more Facebook Live videos lately and not all of them are driving traffic, but I watch the ones that do.
This video post also had a lot of Link clicks organically so this would be a great candidate for boosting.
Analyze your Facebook Ad Reports to Determine Your Success
Facebook Ad Reports are going to be the key to your success. Make sure you are comparing the right stats to see which ad performs best for you. Your Results column will have different metrics depending on the type of ad you created.
If your key metric is cost per link click, then make sure you are watching the cost per link click column to compare your ads.
Also make sure you are looking at the right Level and the right Date Range.
For more Facebook advertising tips, watch the whole webinar recording – it’s packed with information on how to make your ads better. And make sure you go and grab my FREE report and video series “How to Get Highly Targeted Leads the Easy Way with Facebook Ads”
Hi Andrea, While I agree with you that boosting only the best performing post is the best strategy for small business, I am also a big fan of A/B testing. I think that even as a small business owner, we can invest $5 on each post.
As you said, we can track the performance of Best performing post on $5 budget to amplify the results. This way, we ensure to give equal chance to every post while getting the best ROI from our marketing budget.