Facebook advertising is always updating and changing, and this year is no different.
Especially with all of the iOS updates and targeting restrictions we saw happen last year.
So in this post, we’re giving you our top 5 Facebook ad tips for 2024 to keep your ads profitable and your business growing.
Let’s get started!
Top 5 Facebook Ad Tips For Businesses In 2024
Tip #1: Rethink your Facebook advertising funnel.
The first on our list of Facebook ad tips is going to lay the foundation for the rest of the tips we share in this post.
Most of us to date have used Facebook ads to drive traffic to our website and complete conversions there.
But with the new iOS update, a lot of people are now opting out of being tracked that way.
This means Facebook can no longer see what goes on beyond its platform now most of the time.
It can’t work its magic in optimizing your ads the way it used to or finding more people who look like your customers the way it used to.
So the workaround to this is to readjust your advertising funnel to keep people interacting with you on the Facebook platform.
Facebook can still track anything that happens within its own platform.
So if your advertising campaign is Facebook-centered instead of centered around your website…
…you can still track things with the same level of accuracy that you’re used to from Facebook.
So for example, if your ultimate goal is leads, use Facebook’s native lead generation campaign instead of sending people to a landing page.
If your ultimate goal is sales, consider setting up a Facebook shop where people can check out on Facebook.
And honestly, whether you’re B2B or B2C, either way, we would still suggest using the lead generation campaign…
…to get email addresses because email marketing is still killing in 2022 with an average ROI of 4200% (or $42 for every $1 spent).
But that’s another post for another day.
Now if you want to learn how to create Facebook lead ads, then be sure to read this post next.
Our point for this tip is that Facebook ads can still work, you just need to rethink how you’re leveraging them in your overall marketing funnel.
Tip #2: Try running more engagement ads.
The next one on our list of Facebook ad tips revolves around engagement.
What are engagement ads?
Well first, there’s the actual engagement campaign on Facebook which breaks down into post engagement, page likes, and event responses.
Post engagement will drive more likes, comments, and shares on your existing posts.
Page likes will help you get more Facebook page likes for your business page.
And event responses are only really relevant if your business hosts events that you could benefit from getting RSVPs to.
The other campaign that we would consider running for engagement that’s not necessarily in the “engagement” umbrella is the video views campaign.
So the purpose behind running post engagement ads, page like ads, and video views ads would be twofold:
- to fuel your marketing funnel, and
- to establish some social proof while you’re doing it.
Now before we get into this, we want to say if you’re totally lost when we talk about the marketing funnel or Facebook ad funnel…
…we would suggest you go read either of these posts next to get a firm understanding of how it should work and why it’s important.
It will change the way you think about your customers.
But assuming you do have at least some idea of what your marketing funnel looks like…
…you want to use engagement ads to start ushering people into the funnel.
A cold audience, which is an audience that has never heard of your brand or business before, is not going to buy from you upon seeing you for the first time.
They need to interact with your brand several times before feeling:
- like they trust you enough to give you their payment info, and
- that they are convinced they need your product or service.
So your engagement ads should be purely value-based, meaning they are not selling anything to the audience.
But rather, they are solely providing valuable content to the audience.
You want top-of-funnel marketing content to be value-driven.
That’s because it will establish a positive first impression of your brand if the audience sees their first ad from you and finds it helpful or valuable.
And as a result, you’ll garner a lot of:
- likes,
- reactions,
- comments, and
- shares
…which fulfills the second purpose of these campaigns that we mentioned: social proof.
If one person sees a lot of other people who have liked your ad, it helps that person trust your brand faster.
And the reason is that they see that other people are already liking your content.
This is known as the bandwagon effect, which:
“refers to the tendency people have to adopt a certain behavior, style, or attitude simply because everyone else is doing it.”
And once you’ve built up a sizable audience of people who are engaging with you, you can retarget them!
You can retarget them with new ads that move them down your marketing funnel closer to a lead form completion or a sale.
And you can be more salesy in those ads because these people already know who you are!
They’re already familiar with your brand.
Now we’re going to stop there in terms of walking you down what a marketing funnel can look like because, again, we already have other posts on that.
And we need to move on to the rest of our Facebook ad tips.
But just know Facebook ads can still work effectively even with all the tracking restrictions and changes.
You’ll just need to rethink your ad campaigns to keep your funnel on the platform.
Tip #3: Use video in everything.
Video is not an option anymore, it’s a necessity.
In just about every test we’ve seen recently, videos are outperforming static images every single time.
And let us encourage you- videos do not have to be hard or complicated to make!
But if you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh I don’t know how to do the TikTok dances” or “I don’t have a camera or editing software” – it’s okay!
You don’t need to follow all the new Gen Z trends to be successful.
And if you have a smartphone, that’s all you need to make an effective Facebook video ad.
In fact, the more casual the video, the better it’s being received these days.
Video has become the standard, minimum expectation from Facebook and Instagram users.
So if you’re not already using video, you need to do that, like yesterday.
Here’s our tutorial on how to create short Facebook video ads for you to read next because it will help you get started if you don’t know where to begin.
But truly, if you just want to selfie-record yourself chatting for 15 seconds, speaking to the goals or pain points your target market has…
…that’s really all it takes to create a good Facebook video.
Tip #4: Use Reels and Story ads.
The next one on our list of Facebook ad tips is also about videos.
Reels are the Facebook and Instagram versions of TikToks.
They are short-form videos that are one the fastest-growing mediums on the platform right now.
And Stories can be images or videos that are only present for 24 hours, unless you save them to your Highlights on Instagram.
And we’re mentioning Instagram here because Facebook owns Instagram, and a lot of the content we’re discussing can be shared to both platforms.
You can run Facebook ads on Instagram, you can share Instagram Reels to Facebook, and so on.
So when we talk about Facebook ad tips…
….you should definitely be testing out running Reels ads, and Story ads to capitalize on video-centric ad formats.
And this is different from just posting Reels and Stories organically.
This puts advertising dollars behind your Stories and Reels to take an already explosive organic strategy, and put, even more, reach behind it.
But our last piece of advice when making ads for these formats before we move on is to share the offer and value upfront…
…don’t save it for the end because once the ad ends, it goes to the next Reel or Story, and most people won’t scroll backwards.
So you want to get their attention at the start of the 15 seconds.
That way, they have the whole rest of the ad’s length to click or engage.
Now before we get into our last Facebook advertising tip, a quick question for you guys, have you seen our new social media ads training course?
If not, now’s the perfect time to check it out!
Tip #5: Test out some new targeting options.
Finally on our list of the top Facebook ad tips…
…we know saying “test out new targeting options” is vague, but don’t worry, we’re going to give you some specific instructions in a second.
But we say that as a general, ongoing tip for you this year because like we said earlier, Facebook deleted a ton of targeting options last year.
You might have had a killer ad combination that was generating great results, that’s now no longer available.
Or maybe, like many of us, you were seeing great success with lookalike audiences.
And while that targeting feature is still available, all the iOS updates and privacy restrictions have now made them less effective.
What worked last year is probably not going to work forever – and in today’s case with Facebook ads, we know it’s not.
So you should always be looking to test out new targeting options.
Now here are some specific things you can try with your targeting.
a. Broaden your targeting
Now we know that sounds counterintuitive, especially since we’ve said so many times to narrow down who your target audience is.
And that, if you’re marketing to everybody, you’re marketing to nobody.
We’re not saying to broaden your audience so much that it doesn’t even look like your customer avatar anymore.
But we are saying is to remove some of the restricting qualifiers that you might have had in your ad set targeting from previous years.
That is if they’re even still there after all the targeting option removals.
You want to give Facebook some breathing room because one update they made in recent months was they made targeting expansion mandatory.
If you don’t know what we’re talking about, there used to be an option you could toggle on or off in the ad set level called Targeting Expansion.
This allowed Facebook to show your ads to people a little outside the targeting parameters you set…
…if Facebook thought these other people would be likely to click or convert.
It was all based on Facebook’s AI. Well now, that is just built-in and is no longer an option.
Facebook says, “Your inputs are used to guide ad delivery.
To help improve performance, we may deliver ads beyond your detailed targeting inclusions…
…but we won’t deliver ads to people outside your age, gender, location, and language selections.”
This could be a good alternative to lookalike audiences.
Because it uses AI to find additional people outside your selected target audience who Facebook thinks would be interested in your product or service.
So for instance, let’s say, you sell yoga athleisure-wear for women and have a target audience selected with different yoga interests…
…Facebook may know something about this audience that you don’t.
Maybe FB has seen that women interested in yoga are often also interested in essential oils or an organic food delivery service.
Facebook’s AI will show your ad about yoga to people that might fall a little outside your selected targeting descriptions…
…because it’s confident that they will also be interested in what you offer.
So to help with this, you don’t want to bog your ad set down with too many restrictions.
We would aim to make your audience size anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million depending on if you’re local or not.
Now some of you may be like, “Woah that’s a huge audience!”
But if your current, smaller audience isn’t delivering the results you want, you gotta try something different.
b. Change your retargeting
Instead of solely retargeting website traffic, retarget a lot of Facebook actions as we mentioned before like:
- engagement,
- lead form completions,
- video views, and
- page likes.
This will help broaden your retargeting audience instead of just limiting it to website activity which is what Facebook is struggling to track right now.
So those are our top 5 Facebook ad tips for 2024.
If you want to get some help from the experts, check out our Facebook advertising services today!
Other Facebook Advertising Resources
Other Facebook Advertising Resources
- How To Make Good Facebook Ads That Convert: 5 Best Practices
- The Top Online Advertising Platforms in 2024
- What Facebook Says To Do For BIG Ad Results
- How To Create Ads That Actually SELL
- How To Use Facebook’s New Page Experience For Your Business
- 3 Common Ad Mistakes & What You Need to Do About It
- 30 Facebook Ad Examples: Get Inspiration For Your Next Campaign
- 50 Facebook Ad Statistics You Need To Know
- Facebook Touch Explained: Everything You Need To Know
- 25 Tips for Small Business Marketing On Facebook