We're also seeing that Facebook is investing a lot of their time in expanding their mobile and messenger apps. They really want to make these experiences places for consumers to actually learn about products, talk to products, and engage with products and actually go further down the purchase funnel. That is actually buy the things right on the mobile device as they're having a conversation with brands. So if you're interested in this, you can see the reading for this week that talks a little bit more about the new features that are coming to Facebook mobile. Facebook has also adopted its story functionality from its sister platform Instagram. What I see is a key advantage to this new ad format is that it's not specific to big business. So you can see here that we have a small apparel company and the apparel company is selling some of its new arrivals in the hat area or the hat product type. It might be hard to get an individual to scroll through or click through all of the different types of hat looks that are shown inside of this short video. Instead, by putting this add as a story format, we actually have the ability to get the consumer interested in a passive way and get them to look at many different types of hats without making them do anything specific. This type of passive browsing is a key advantage to this new ad format. We'll go into the Facebook ad Manager in the later set of videos for this module. But I really do want you to think broadly before you get started. It's okay to start small with Facebook ads, even a few dollars can really be a way to test whether one add objective and one set of targeting parameters is effective or another is more effective. A/B testing doesn't really take much money. So I would really encourage you to try as many different combinations of objectives as possible and also try various formats and iterations of targeting parameters. Not to mention, you should A/B test all of your content as well. So the images, the actual body copy that you use. The more testing, the more you can learn what your audience responds to. Once you feel confident that you have a objective and targeting parameters and content that all are optimal, then slowly scale up your spend. As you do so, be sure to watch for saturation. At some point when doing Facebook ads, you'll spend more and get a diminished return. This happens with all app platforms. All I'm asking you to do is track these metrics across time and learn when it's time to turn a campaign off. So Facebook ads or auction-based. Every ad that's available on the platform goes up from an auction and the highest bidder typically wins. I encourage you to bid the maximum where your margins are comfortable but don't get hung up on missing out on a particular opportunity. Be aware of your margins. Remember, that if you make $20 on the sale of $100 hotel, that the max bid should be a fraction of what you're actually making a profit. In general, try different bidding strategies. The first or the most intuitive strategy may not actually be the one that you want to use. If you'd like to pay to drive clicks to your website, using the clicks model is not always the most effective way to do it. So from what I've read, other models such as the optimized cost per thousand model can actually be more effective. You will want to try all the different ways in which you can pay for a Facebook ad and find out which one actually is cheapest to you. Again, it's not always the one that's intuitive. The optimized cost per thousand model is interesting, in that, it actually gives you the ability to choose a specific action that you'd like. So it tries to send traffic to you that is more likely to convert, but it's not a guarantee. Your won't only pay when an action happens. Instead, you'll pay on unrolling CPM basis. It just tends to send traffic that correlates to the objective that you'd like more. So in what I'm reading this optimized CPM model actually can be cheaper in some cases than a CPA model. So the actual amount that you'll pay on average when you scale it out would actually be cheaper. Of course, Facebook likes this because it's again passing the risk back to you. Finally, there are other factors that influence price. If people don't like your ad on the Facebook platform, they're going to charge you more to serve it or Facebook will charge you more. The better your ad performs or the more that people actually click on your ad and engage with it, the more that Facebook will want to serve your ad because it's got some level of assurance that your ad isn't super annoying and boring to people. Remember that one of the secondary goals of the Facebook ad Manager, is to create content that people see it's not really boring or uninteresting or spammy. It they create an environment where the ads are spammy or boring or predatory, then consumers will become even more annoyed with the platform. So they're really trying to make sure that the ads that are served are good ones. So this quality assurance way of doing it gets it that. If people don't like an ad they'll report it and if they report it enough times, Facebook is either going to charge you an arm and a leg to serve that add or they're going to basically say you can't serve it. Of course, Facebook also loves ads that perform well. So if you're add performs better, Facebook will charge you less to serve it. That just means they don't have to try as hard and serve it to as many people. Think about it this way. If Facebook has to serve an ad to 100,000 people to get them to buy one hotel as a result of an ad. That's a lot of advertising money that was potentially wasted on that one conversion. However, if one in 20 people convert in buying that hotel, Facebook doesn't have to try very hard and therefore, they can charge you much less. Of course, as we showed by industry earlier, specific types of advertisements are going to be sold at a higher rate than others and that usually correlates to the amount of money that industry is pulling in.
