Facebook Advertising

Remember that all social media output from Ballard UK must align with our social media policy. 

As of 2019, our social media advertising focuses on Facebook, for a few reasons. Firstly, it is more cost effective than other platforms, and provides better analytics. Secondly, it also includes advertising on Instagram and Messenger.

How to set up a Facebook Advertising Campaign

There are three stages to Facebook advertising – the campaign, the ad set and the adverts.

Campaign: 

The campaign is fundamentally what our objective is; whether that’s to sell tickets, reach a wider audience, gain video views etc.

-          It is normally most effective to select conversion as our objective; as it is harder for FB to achieve, reporting is usually more successful and we get better value for money

-          Budget Optimization: Always select this. This setting allows Facebook to spend the budget strategically across ad sets, reflecting purchasing patterns, and achieves the best results.

-          Bid Strategy: On Facebook, companies bid for placement in newsfeeds (costs depend on how easily targeted/hard to reach a user is). Audiences should be created who will get results cheaply and for whom there isn’t a huge amount of competition.

-          Cost:

o   Lowest cost is possible is usually better. If you select a target cost, you might end up losing out on a lot of people just to save a tiny amount of money

Ad set:

The ad set is the “audience” – these are the groups of Facebook users that we’re promoting our advertising to. There are three types of audiences on Facebook: custom, saved, and lookalike.

Saved Audiences

The saved audience can be understood as the classic Facebook advertising audience – a saved audiences tells Facebook to display adverts to users who have certain demographics/likes etc.

Setting up a saved audience:

1.       Choose the location – you can select anyone, or people who are permanently in an area

2.       Choose the age of your audience (we usually go 18-65+)

3.       Choose the gender

4.       Choose the language: this can be useful for shows in other languages, or based on international source material

5.       Demographics:

a.       Positive demographics: this is when you select people based on their demographics to be included in the audience

b.       Exclude: You can exclude people who have certain demographics (people who already like Arcola’s page, for example).

c.       Narrow: this is when you have “one demographic” and “one demographic”

d.       Expand: Facebook makes an informed guess to widen the audience based on the data from the running campaign.

6.       Conversion Window: This how soon you want users to start buying after seeing adverts

Custom Audiences

This is an audience based on their previous engagement with Ballard UK; we primary use retargeting audiences and Customer File audiences.

Retargeting Audiences:

A retargeted advert uses Ballard UK's pixel to create an ad set based on people who have previously visited our website. When setting it up, you can specify both dates people have visited the website and specific webpages.

-          Make sure to include both the webpage as an HTTPS and a HTTP link

-          Make to include the booking page, and any additional content on the site about the show (blogs, press releases etc)

-          Name the ad set “SHOW TITLE Retargeting”

Customer File Audiences

This allows us to make adverts based on the audience data we have from previous shows.

1.       Create your CSV through Spektrix (In Insights and Mailings → Customer Lists → Output for Spektrix)

2.       Drop your CSV into Facebook; rename it, and click that you got your data directly from customers

3.       This data isn’t stored by Facebook. Facebook anonymises it, and then makes informed guesses based on the data.

4.       Once you have this list, it can be used to exclude users from certain adverts.

Lookalike Audiences

When you create a lookalike audience, Facebook creates a larger audience based on an informed guess on the kind of people that your previous audiences are.

Advert:

Remember that when you make an advert, it must be effective. We mainly use the solo/main image format.

1.       Select your image from the Drive.

a.       Once uploaded, you can crop the image to book square, which is more visually effective – Facebook allows you to preview it in different formats.

2.       Pick your headline and call to action (“Book now” is usually most effective)

3.       Pick the URL

4.       The copy: what copy are we using for this advert?

a.       It’s important to aim the copy at the people in the ad set – focus on certain aspects of the performance/production

b.       Don’t fear using emojis and gifs

5.       Newsfeed link description

a.       This is the blurb underneath the URL; make sure to write something effective, otherwise it pulls it from the website.

Duplicating Adverts:

You can can duplicate adverts within an ad set, to speed up the process.

New Ads in Ad Sets:

You can also create an advert using an existing post; this has the benefit of making the post look more engaged on our page as well.

Dynamic Creative:

Create an advert, select your audience and turn on dynamic creative.

This gives then mixs and matches images, headlines and calls for actions within an ad set, optimising the most successful combinations.