A Complete Guide to Creating Facebook Banner Advertisements in 2020

With its more than 2.50 billion users, it would be a huge mistake if you wouldn’t use Facebook as a platform to talk about your brand. Although Facebook has remained to be a competitive platform to advertise, you might be surprised to know that the prices for ads decreased by 6% in 2019 despite the 37% increase in ad impressions. If your math is good, this is good news for marketers who can make the most of their advertising budgets.

With a multitude of options to advertise on Facebook, be it video feeds, message feeds, stories, polls, carousels, it has continued to be a great platform to inform, engage, and interact. Facebook advertising has an indubitable advantage of micro-targeting your audience and modifying according to your goals. A survey done by Social Bakers showed that 92% use Facebook as part of their advertising campaign. So if you’re already doing it, you might find some interesting insights and tips as you read on. And if you’re testing waters, you’ll find the right way to do it.

Things to keep in mind before advertising on FB

Budget

This is important to determine the type of ad campaign you want on Facebook, which is a daily ad set up that paces the spend continuously throughout the day and has a margin of minimum 1 USD and should be double your Cost per click. The other campaign setup option is a lifetime for an ad campaign for a particular amount of time.

Other than the campaign for the budget, if you are outsourcing the design or the copy, you need to predict the amount of investment you will be making, the advantages of it, the risk, and how much of it you can afford. Only then you can move on to the next stage. Dividing your ad sets and budgets efficiently will help to boost your ad performance as a whole.

Goal

The campaign structure and theming is one of the key factors responsible for a great account performance. No matter what the brand or industry may be, there are three steps to the funnel, with the conversion being the main goal, engagement, and lead generation are two other vital reasons why Facebook ads are important.

Target Audience

Choosing the right audience and the right time to approach will lay the right foundation to churn great ad performance. For this, you need to know who your audience is, where they live, their interests, time zones, and other such demographics.

Proper nomenclature of all the components followed by targeting the ad sets in a manner that the audience does not overlap is essential. Not doing so might hinder the ad’s ability to reach the audience and can result in cost hike. Knowing the right audience will also help you create a personal and intimate ad design and copy.

Points to remember while Creating an Ad banner and Setting up an ad

Briefing up the creative

Ad creativity plays a vital role in Facebook advertising as it’s a push strategy rather than a pull strategy. One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is taking the campaign live even if the text in a creative is more than 20%. This affects the performance of the ad and restricts its reach. Therefore, while conveying the design concept or marketing strategy, a marketer should ensure a clear brief and should not compromise till the work is justified.

Design recommendations

For a banner ad, the banner contains a visual design, a headline, postscript, description, and the CTA. Facebook asks users to adhere to given design specifications that are:

·         The text limit should be 125 characters.

·         The image should be of the highest resolution.

Recommended size: 1,200 by 628 pixels

Minimum width: 476 pixels

Minimum height: 249 pixels

Aspect ratio: 9:16 to 16:9

Format: JPEG or PNG

Take a look at these banner ads created by Email Uplers, during COVID-19 crisis.

·         Always proofread the creatives and primary texts, before taking any campaign live.

·        The current trend in Facebook ad designs is to follow ‘Moment marketing’ in which ads are designed in trend with global and local current affairs.

Leveraging display locations

One of the most important things to keep in mind when designing a banner ad is to consider the platform on which your subscribers view Facebook. Only 6% of Facebook’s advertising revenue is from desktop users whereas the other 94% is from mobile users. This is the reason advertisers spend more money targeting mobile users. This information is also a reminder of how optimizing your content to be mobile-friendly will work wonders for your business.

When it comes to desktop, there are two locations where you can deploy your ad, the main feed and the other is the desktop right column.

The desktop right column is mostly used for brands that are not available on Facebook, but not always. The other place where the banner ad comes to play is in the desktop feed and mobile feed locations. So while creating a banner ad it is very important to make sure the ad will be compatible with all mobile devices and the desktop version is also flawless. We have all had that one occasion where we zoom in and zoom out on our phone to decode a desktop compatible content. That brings down your credibility and shows how much you care about the consumers as a brand.

Best Practices

Thumb Zones

This term coined by Steven Hoober, helps you determine which positions are the most approachable when it comes to placing a CTA or important part of the advertisement while optimizing it for mobile devices. Try to stay in the green zone as much as possible and see how well it works for your ad campaign.

While most of this applies for a right-handed audience, try mirroring this theory for a left-handed user and find a common area of safe thumb zone.

Testing

A/B testing different ad types using the correct set of ad creatives for different placements can help in improving the results. Testing for Facebook can be done for a minimum of 3 to 4 days to know how your ad might do. Remember to not do any tweaks to reset your Facebook algorithm.

This A/B test done by AdEspresso, found out that even smaller elements like using a real image (a) versus an abstract (b) made huge and unlikely revelations after testing, increasing the performance by a whopping 143%.

Ad burnouts

You do not want people to see your ad too often; it would make them feel violated, especially if they have already engaged with the ad before. You can save yourself from such Ad burnouts by the results delivered by Facebook delivery insights. This is not the same as the frequency metric as it tells the average of first impressions rather than showing how often the audience sees an ad.

The percentage of people who view your ad for the first time will gradually decrease. Let’s say from 60% to 30%, this is when you know you should start a new ad. A classic case of ad burnout will experience a decrease in click-through rates and an increase in cost per click, like in the ad shown below.

Analyzing Ad Performance         

The success of an ad campaign is no more superficial. Thanks to ad management which allows us to know exactly who has seen, acted upon, and overlooked our ads. To determine how efficiently your advertisement has performed, one should look out for these metrics to analyze.

Click Per Action (CPA)

Click per action mainly includes cost per impression (CPM), cost per click (CPC), and cost per action (CPA).

Likes, installs, CTA clicks can help you figure out how your ad has fared. This approach is the most efficient if you are looking for action beyond a click, like tracking leads and obtaining new customers. It might be a survey, or filling up a form or taking a poll. The biggest advantage of CPA is you have to pay for actions that you want to be achieved for your ad goal.

UTM Parameters

To track what happens after the action on the ad, it might be a visit to your website, landing page or even making a purchase, UTM trackers help you derive which source, campaign and platform helped you achieve the conversion. For this you need to have Google Analytics linked to your social ad campaigns. This will also help you monitor traffic activity and sources of traffic on various devices.

Customer Conversion Ratio

As the name suggests, you can track beyond clicks and find out which audience converts to customers. This feature is offered by Facebook Pixel in which you can monitor conversions implementing through your website without making any code changes.

Cost to acquire a Lead (CAL)

A simple formula to do this is to divide the ad spend by the number of leads generated during the campaign period. A successful campaign will acquire high quality leads at the lowest cost. A simple way to find the derivatives for the calculation is to make sure you provide content that needs a specific action more than a click, like signing up or downloading an Ebook.

Facebook also has tools to track the number of people visiting a store physically by accessing location, after they saw a Facebook campaign ad.

Wrap Up

This blog must have shed a light on the scope that Facebook advertising has and for those of you who already are using Facebook as a marketing platform. We hope we might have leveraged some interesting insights.