Facebook Ads After the News Feed Change

The blue button under every post

Since Facebook changed the News Feed in January, posts from business pages reach fewer of the people who follow them.

Under every post sits a blue Boost button. A few taps, a budget and a number of days, and the post goes out to more people.

Many businesses now boost something most weeks. The likes go up, the reach figure recovers, and the phone rings about as often as it did before.

That is not a failure of Facebook advertising. It is what a boost is mainly built to do.

What a boost is built to buy

• Reactions, comments and shares are what a boost mainly aims for.
• The audience is followers, their friends, or a basic choice by place, age and interests.
• Setup happens on the post, with few of the settings a campaign offers.
• Results arrive as reach and engagement, not enquiries.
• The words stay the same, written for followers rather than strangers.

The first is the one that matters. Facebook usually shows a boosted post to the people in its audience most likely to react, and people who react readily are rarely the ones about to book.

What a campaign adds

Ads Manager, Facebook's full advertising tool, starts with a different question: what do you want people to do?

Your answer becomes the objective: a visit to a page on your website, a message to the business, or a sent enquiry form.

Facebook then looks for people likely to take that action, not people likely to press like, so the choice decides who sees the ad.

Ads Manager also controls where and when the ad runs and which audiences to include or leave out, and it can test two versions of an ad against each other.

Choosing the objective

For most local businesses the choice comes down to three.

Traffic sends people to a page on your site. It suits a booking or quote page that does the persuading, as long as it works well on a phone.

Messages opens a conversation in Messenger, which works only if somebody replies within minutes rather than days.

Conversions aims at people likely to complete something on your site. It needs the Facebook pixel, a short piece of code from Facebook, on the page that confirms an enquiry was sent.

An audience that can actually visit

A boost's audience by place is often drawn too wide, so a business serving one part of a city pays to reach people an hour's drive away.

In Ads Manager, location can be a radius around your address or a list of towns, limited to people who live there rather than anyone passing through.

Age matters for anything an adult books and pays for. Teenagers react generously and book nothing.

Resist stacking guessed interests on top of a local audience, which is already small.

An ad written for strangers

A post was written for people who already know you. An ad meets people who do not.

Its first line has to say what you offer, where, roughly what it costs and what happens next, since the rest hides behind a See More link on a phone.

Use a real photograph of your premises, staff or work. And send the button to the page that matches the ad, not to the home page.

A worked example

A trampoline park in an industrial unit on the edge of a suburb sells open jump sessions, but its busiest weekends come from birthday parties booked by parents.

Through the spring it boosted a video most weeks: teenagers flipping, a dodgeball match, somebody dropping into the foam pit. Each collected hundreds of reactions.

The front desk could not connect a single party booking to any of them. Most reactions came from teenagers, many in towns well beyond a reasonable drive.

The boost had done exactly what it was asked. It found people who enjoy trampoline videos, and nobody had asked it for parents.

In July the park built one campaign in Ads Manager instead: adults living within about twenty minutes, an ad about party packages with the price per child, and a button to the party booking page.

The page confirming a party request now carries the pixel, and the form asks how people heard about the park, so the owner can see what a party enquiry from Facebook costs.

Counting enquiries, not likes

Likes, reach and engagement measure attention. A business pays its bills from enquiries, and the two are only loosely connected.

Add campaign tags to the link in every ad: short labels on the end of the address that tell Google Analytics where a visit came from and what it led to.

Count the messages too, and ask callers how they found you, since some people see an ad and phone without clicking anything.

Then divide what you spent by the enquiries that resulted. That figure, compared month to month, is the one worth watching.

Budget, frequency and patience

A local audience is small, so a modest daily budget reaches most of it within a week or two. After that, the same people see the same ad again and again.

Ads Manager reports frequency, the average number of times each person has seen the ad. When it climbs and enquiries tail off, change the photograph or the offer rather than the budget.

Give a new campaign a few weeks before judging it, since early results jump around.

The counter-case

Facebook ads suit some businesses better than others.

Work people look for when they need it, such as an emergency repair, is usually better served by search ads, where the person is already searching.

Facebook is better at prompting a want: a party, a class, a meal out, a gift.

Boosting keeps a narrow use: a post followers are already responding to, especially an event with a date, can earn a small boost. It just should not be the whole plan.

Wherever it fits, the advice holds: choose the action you want, aim at people who can take it, and count the enquiries.

Before the next boost

1. Write down the action you want people to take.
2. Choose the matching objective in Ads Manager.
3. Draw the area customers really travel from.
4. Write the first line for a stranger.
5. Tag the ad's link for Analytics.
6. Put the pixel on the confirmation page.
7. Compare spending with enquiries each month.

Step one changes everything after it. Once the action is named, the objective, the audience and the measure all follow, and a boost never asks the question.

The Google Ads side of reaching people nearby is covered in location extensions and the map in your ad.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.