In this digital age, where everything is going digital, marketing is no exception. As most of the world is on the internet today, companies have started moving from conventional marketing to digital marketing in order to tap into a strong customer base.
What are Meta Ads?
Meta advertising is one of the forms of c that is done on Facebook and Instagram. With an estimated 2.7 billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook is an ideal place to drive engagement for your business advertising. The basic concept remains the same, where the advertiser pays for real estate to show his advertisement for a particular period of time to drive sales. The only difference is that real estate is not physical but digital. Meta ads work by allowing businesses to run ads on Facebook and Instagram from a single platform. We can choose between different meta ad types and formats like image ads, video ads, carousel ads, stories, etc.
Timeline of Meta
The whole ecosystem that Meta has built over the years deserves a case study in itself. It started building its base by building a community where people shared photos, videos, statuses, etc. With time, when they had a strong user base and engagement, they monetized the platform, in 2007, by starting to give space to the businesses to run ads over it for Facebook users. Further, they acquired Instagram in 2012 to expand their customer base. In October 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta and introduced the world to its new venture, Metaverse, which shows the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media and its futuristic approach.
Meta Ads Over Traditional Ads?
Although both share common goals of attracting the consumer, promoting a product, and driving sales, there’s still a significant difference between both marketing strategies. Traditional marketing involves traditional platforms like print media, broadcast media, and outdoor banner advertising, which is a good approach for location-based targeting but turns out to be more expensive, and the engagement is also short-lived. Most importantly, it’s very difficult to measure and analyze the performance of an ad campaign. On the other hand, we have Meta advertising where advertising is done on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Meta advertising is definitely cheaper, as you can start your ad campaign with a budget as low as 100 bucks per day and increase it as per your requirements. The reason meta ads are doing so well is their detailed targeting, where you can set a target audience according to their demographics, location, and interests. Remarketing is yet another strategy that works well most of the time, where you can show ads to people who have interacted with your business profile, posts, and website in the past. Amazing, isn’t it? Not only this, but in Meta ads, you also get to analyze and measure the performance of your ad campaign with several performance metrics like reach, impressions, link clicks, click-through rate, return on ad spend, etc. Analyzing the data helps in understanding the shortfalls and areas for improvement of an ad campaign, unlike in a traditional setup where there’s no reliable data to analyze the performance.
Understanding Metrics
Meta provides several metrics and parameters that can be used to understand the impact and performance of an ad campaign. Following are some of the most important ones to look out for:
Impressions are simply the number of times your advertisement has been seen. A high number of impressions means that your ad is well-optimized for your audience and that your brand awareness is high. One thing you need to take care of is not confusing the reach metric with the impression metric, as Reach is the total number of unique people who have seen the ad.
Frequency is the average number of times your ad has been seen by a user. It can help you understand if the ad is not very repetitive to the users, which can make it irritating for them. So, it’s better to keep track of this.
Ad Click Metric, as the name suggests, tells how many people clicked on your ad. Clicks can simply reflect how well your ad is performing.
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad out of all who saw it. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. It can help you understand how engaging your ad is or how good your targeting is.
Cost per click (CPC) means how much money a click on your ad is costing you. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of clicks. If your campaign is doing well, your CPC should be lower.
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who saw your ad and took the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a lead form. It can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the number of clicks. The higher the conversion rate, the better your ad campaign is as you are getting more conversions.
Cost per action (CPA) is the average cost of the desired action for which your conversion ad was set up, such as a purchase or signing up for a lead form. It is calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions. One should aim to minimize the CPA, as the whole point of running a conversion ad campaign is to get leads at a minimal cost.
Meta Ads is one of the best digital advertising platforms as of now, but is it for you? It’s completely your call. You need to decide if it caters to your nature of business and your goals. Although Meta has all sorts of audiences, all you need to do is target well. That’s why targeting is so important. If you run meta ads just for the sake of it and are not targeting them well, you might not be using them to their full potential. Targeting is not the only thing that you need to take care of. If you want to drive maximum conversions, you should also emphasize the ad creatives, captions, budget, and analysis of previous campaigns. That’s how you can make your meta ad campaign better than your competitors and have an edge over them in driving conversions.