In the July/August 2016 issue of the RBMA Bulletin, I wrote about “Targeting With Social Media Advertising,” and specifically, using Facebook. Because the topic is so broad, I am continuing with this issue. I will share some advanced targeting techniques as I walk you through the different types of ads you can create on Facebook to best suit your objective, as well as update you on some of the recent changes the Facebook Ads Manager has experienced.
The 20 Percent Rule
Historically, Facebook only allowed you to place a ratio of 20 percent text on your ad in order to gain approval for your ad to run. Just recently, Facebook said “Let it go, let it goooo,” and decided not to uphold that rule. However, they have implemented an ‘OK, Low, Medium, and High’ scale to determine if your ad contains too much text. Little to no text earns you an OK and too much text earns you a High and the warning that your ad may not run. So, in reality, the 20 percent rule still exists and you will just have to test it to see what works and what doesn’t.
Choosing an Ad Type
When you build your ad in Facebook’s Ads Manager, you have plenty of choices. You can simply choose to boost a post, which I still love and think is highly effective for driving attention to blog posts or promotions, or you can choose from a variety of ad options. Keep in mind, any image you have attached to that post will still fall within the new text rule.
The first ad type is a “static” ad made up of a single image and its supporting post. This is the most straightforward of the ad types to create.
Next, are the all relatively-new choices, which include a carousel ad made up of multiple images, a video ad, or a lead ad.
Carousel or slideshow ads are terrific ways for a restaurant to advertise several mouth-watering menu selections all with the intent of making you want to dine at their establishment. Or for a retailer to showcase several selections from its fall clothing lineup with the goal of you falling in love with one or more choices, and clicking to make a purchase. For radiology, however, I have learned that this is not the most effective ad type for a single service and audience, even though it may seem enticing to add multiple images to your service-based ad.
Lead ads are also new and will be one of the next ad types I try. Why? Because they allow a viewer to click the ad, fill out a form on Facebook signaling their interest in an offer or appointment, and submit their entry to the advertiser. It eliminates the, albeit minor, extra step a user must take to click an ad that leads to your website, and then to fill out and submit a form. The biggest difference, to me, is simply time. A lead ad prefills the information (name, email address) the user shared with Facebook, and all the user has to do is click submit.
Finally, video ads, which will no doubt be part of a future video marketing article here in the RBMA Bulletin, give advertisers the option to share more of their business or service value than a single, static image can convey. Keep in mind, video ads should still be extremely specific, engaging from the very first second, cognizant of length and attention spans, and targeted to your specific demographic and geographic audience location.
Custom Audiences
To advertise to custom audiences, you’ll have to involve your website developer and become familiar with the Pixel. The Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code that your developer will place within the head section of your website along with specific “events” on its subsequent pages, and is best utilized by selecting the “increase conversions to website” ad objective. Most useful for radiology, the Pixel allows you to build an audience of users that have shown intent, but that have not completed a specific action on your website, such as submitting a form. Serving up an ad to a custom audience based on their previous behavior is known as retargeting or remarketing, used interchangeably, and allows you to target your audience at a deeper, more specific level. However, patient privacy issues may be at play here. This will be discussed more in a future RBMA Bulletin marketing article.
To cap off the second installment of this article on highly targeted advertising and social media ad types, I want you to understand that split testing is a key takeaway. Every business, service, and audience location is different. The only way to understand how well your ad is performing is to create more than one to test against it.
In a future article, I’ll continue this conversation by writing more about custom audiences, geotargeting, geofencing, and remarketing.
Want to read on the go? Download the PDF from RBMA by clicking HERE.
