Advanced Facebook Ad Techniques: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use Facebook ads?

Want to bring your Facebook advertising to the next level?

To learn how to use Facebook advertising to your advantage, I interview Jon Loomer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Jon Loomer, a Facebook marketing expert who specializes in Facebook advertising. His blog, JonLoomer.com, was the top pick in our 2014 top 10 social media blogs.

Jon explores the benefits of Facebook advertising.

You'll discover new tools for publishers on Facebook, information about conversion tracking, custom reporting options and more.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Advanced Facebook Ad Techniques
New Facebook tools for content publishers

Before going into detail about the four new features aimed at content publishers, Jon explains the difference between an organic post and a Facebook ad.

An organic post is something you share with your fans that's free and will also show up in the news feed. If you want to promote a post or create a separate promotion, that's an ad.

The first new feature is the ability to target organic posts by interest to your fans. Targeting interests was previously something you could only do with ads.

Jon shares why a marketer might want to try targeting fans. Facebook's algorithm only shows content to people who are likely to engage. After these fans engage, Facebook will show it to more people. So, if you target a post to people you know are highly likely to engage, you'll get the benefit of more Facebook visibility.

Note: You can target by demographics, as well as to fans of other pages and fans in specific categories.

The next change, which has been rolled out to a small number of big media companies, is smart publishing. This is auto-publishing, based on user engagement. Facebook looks at the most popular links people share on Facebook, and will share them with your fans. It won't post on your fan page, it'll just appear in your fans' news feed.

Third is post end date. If you share something that's going to expire, you can put a post end date. It will disappear from your page and the news feed when that promotion is over.

You'll hear about the final update, which is improvements to domain insights.

Listen to the show to hear Jon's take on dark data, as well as how to generate and use UTM codes to better track link engagement and conversions.

How Facebook tracks conversions

By default, Jon explains, Facebook records a conversion when somebody has clicked your ad and converted within 28 days or viewed your ad without clicking and converted within 1 day. However, if you use your custom reports, you can adjust that window. You can get rid of view-through, or you can set view-through and click-through conversions for 1 day, 7 days or 28 days.

When you have that conversion pixel on your site, Facebook knows three things: whether someone viewed your ad, clicked your ad or if they ever fired that conversion pixel. Facebook uses these metrics to determine whether your ad resulted in a conversion.

To get to custom reports, go into your Ads Manager and click on Reports. Then click on the Customized Columns button, and then in the bottom right-hand corner of the window, the Attribution Window pops up. This is what you change to include any or all six reporting options.

Listen to the show to discover what happens to your view-through and click-through conversions when you target the right way.

Why bloggers should consider using Facebook ads

Jon says that there's nothing more important than traffi...