Our Most Effective Tricks for Marketing on Facebook

Is this your ideal advertising target? They could be - Facebook remains one of the most valuable advertising platforms around, but many businesses don't know who they're marketing to. Consider these tricks for using Facebook advertising, which we've found to be some of the most effective ways of improving the success rate of campaigns.

This feature - accessible from the Ads Manager unless they've changed things since this was written - is one of the best ways of finding out more about your customers. However, keep in mind that this information is generally anonymous - you can't find data on specific people, only trends for the entire group. On the other hand, you will be able to note things like:» What percent of your audience graduated from college» The most common relationship statuses» How old your audience is» How often they click on ads

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Individually, each of these is of limited value - but when you examine trends like these, you can start to build a picture of who's actually responding to you and adjust your campaigns based on that. Targeted advertising is measurably more effective than non-targeted, so there's no reason to avoid looking at this information. Note that at the time of publishing, your custom audience requires a minimum of 1000 people to display this information, so you may not be able to see this data on a brand-new campaign.

Believe it or not, this is also part of the Audience Insights section - there are some reports that only show up for people who are in a specific geographic area (typically the US, though Facebook is working on expanding these features, and it wouldn't be surprising if more areas are covered). Believe it or not, Facebook can also tell you data like:» What type of vehicle your audience drives» The size of their household» Their income bracket» How much they tend to spend online

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The key here is to avoid bombarding yourself with too much information. Yes, you can learn these things... but will knowing them actually impact your advertising decisions? Look through the whole list and ask yourself which of those items are worth reviewing on a regular basis. Trying to account for too many variables is a common mistake among businesses who've just received access to all this information - trust us, you'll do much better if you limit your use of this to what you actually need to know.

The reports generated when people view ads will tell you more about your customers than pretty much any other system on the site. The goal here is to sort through your campaign and look at the information from a new dimension. For example, a basic report could tell you that a majority of your clicks were from females instead of males, or that a majority of your clicks came on mobile devices. However, scrutinizing the numbers by running them together could also tell you that a majority of conversions came from men on desktops - just the opposite of what you might have expected by looking at the basic numbers.

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This is where the true value of most metrics lie - data that's useless by itself could suddenly become a key indicator of success if it's viewed in the right dimension. The Data Breakdown function in the Reports tab of your ad manager is one of your best sources of high-quality information.

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