Today it’s part II of the Ultimate Guide to Social Media Advertising in 2017! We’re going to continue with Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google, plus a bonus one you might not have thought of!
If you missed Part I, it’s here and that article focused on Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Facebook is widely recognized as the biggest player in all the social paid advertising options.
Although Facebook launched in 2004, its advertising was an evolving, ever-moving target for some years, because the social media giant was trying to figure out what they were. Facebook didn’t fully open up to the public until 2006.
In 2007 engagement ads for business pages grew in use and popularity. By 2009 Facebook began to realize its role as a targeted advertising powerhouse, and it opened up advertising to anyone who had a page, giving them advanced targeting options.
So why use Facebook for your paid advertising campaigns? Because it’s targeting options and audience numbers are unbeatable. Let’s look at some stats that explain why.
Facebook User Stats that Affect Your Business
Facebook’s mobile app has over 1.4 billion MAUs. 823 million of those are mobile-app only users. This number is significant, not only because of its size, but because Facebook continues to improve its mobile application and mobile site which attracts more users every year.
- Over 1 billion users log onto Facebook daily, and it’s desktop and mobile MAUs total 2 billion.
- 79 percent of online adult internet users are on Facebook.
- Facebook users in Egypt are busy. They average 380 posts per page per month. Brazilians are also busy with 103 posts per page per month.
- Over 307 million Facebook users are in Europe.
- Almost 30 percent of Facebook users are 25 to 34-years of age.
- On Thursdays and Fridays engagement on Facebook is 18 percent higher than the rest of the week. But, the most traffic to Facebook is approximately mid-week between 1 and 3 pm.
- While younger Facebook users are adapting to and using other networks such as Instagram (owned by Facebook), they’re not ignoring the social network. In the U.S., 50 percent of 18 to 24-year olds hop on Facebook shortly after waking in the morning.
- Facebook users are divided fairly evenly between men and women.
So what do all these stats mean to you and your business?
Your target market probably is using Facebook, and to stand out from the crowd, you’ll want to be sure your ad and your products offer something no one else does.
Yes, Facebook is a crowded marketplace, but it’s too big to ignore, and its advanced targeting options are second to none. Like I teach my students, competition means there IS a marketplace for your product, and that’s not a bad thing!
Facebook ads are popular because if managed properly, they work. Facebook ads can be used to get leads, sell a product, drive traffic, and more.
What can a Facebook do for your business? It can raise brand awareness, local awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, conversions, lead generation, conversions, product sales, and store visits.
It’s tough to think of a business that can’t benefit from one of those types of ad campaigns!
Types of Facebook Ads
Like Instagram, Facebook offers multiple ad formats. These include:
- Photo ads: Consist of one photo plus ad copy. The text cannot take up more than 20 percent of the ad, or Facebook won’t approve it.
- Video ads: Similar to a photo ad but contain one video plus the ad copy. The video can be as long as 120 minutes. Video ads outperform image ads significantly!
- Slideshow ads: This type of ad is actually a video which is created from up to 10 images you select.
- Carousel ads: Unlike a slideshow ad, each image can have its own unique link, which is ideal for a brand that has multiple products to showcase. You can have multiple landing pages or links in a Carousel ad.
- Collection ads: These are specifically formatted for mobile and they allow users to tap on featured products without ever leaving the Facebook mobile app.
- Canvas ads: These ads take up the full screen when someone clicks on them and they can contain up to 20 photos and video and up to 500 characters of copy.
- Lead ads: These are pre-filled lead forms that make it easy for potential leads to enter their contact information, and get on your list.
- Dynamic product ads: These ads are pulled from a product category RSS feed and shown to a user after they’ve visited a sales or checkout page for a particular product. Please note you will need an Ad account that is part of a business manager.
Facebook Ad Targeting
Facebook ad targeting is powerful. You can really hone in on an audience. There are three main audience types:
1. Saved audiences: These can be built during the campaign building stage or in the audience manager. A saved audience can be targeted based on things like age, income, location (even down to the zip code), gender, interests, behaviors, etc.
2. Custom audiences: Allows you to retarget past website visitors as well as people who have read or liked your content (or even used your app.) Custom audiences can be built using the data you already have inside your email list or CRM.
3. Lookalike audiences: These audiences are great to test different variations of your ad on, because they’re audiences who are similar to your Custom Audience, and therefore, should also convert.
So, how does Facebook ad targeting help you and your client’s business?
If your client is a tourist attraction like a zoo or famous restaurant, you can target people who are at least 100 miles away from their typical location (home) and whom are probably tourists. You can also target people who live in that location, down to their zip code, or even people whose last updated location was in the area of your business.
If you’ve been feeding your audience quality content for some time, you can get leads by offering a freebie (tripwire) in your ad through targeting people who have visited your website. You can even select one page on your website if you want your audience to be really specific.
If you offer office supplies for creative types, you can build out an ad based on age, gender, interests and education level.
Between targeting options, campaign types and ad formatting options, there is a paid Facebook ad option for almost any type of business!
We have TONS of resources for Facebook Ads (since this is one of our specialties, so feel free to check out the resources below:
- The Digital Gangsta – Full Digital Marketing Curriculum
- 14 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Aren’t Performing
- What to Do When Your Facebook Ad Account Gets Shutdown
- Facebook BOOTCAMP Live Free Workshop Event
- Other tutorials on my Show
Everyone knows that LinkedIn is great for stalking and figuring out if you’re more successful than that cheerleader you hated in high school. 😉 😉 😉 But, what many businesses and marketers underestimate is it’s already qualified leads and easy B2B marketing options.
LinkedIn User Stats That Affect Your Business
- LinkedIn has approximately 250 million MAUs, 500 million total users, and 40 percent of users visit LinkedIn every day.
- 70 percent of LinkedIn users live outside the U.S., and LinkedIn reaches 200 countries.
- LinkedIn claims to have data on more than 9 million companies.
- 56 percent of the platform’s users are men and 44 percent are women.
- LinkedIn is “the number one platform for professional content distribution.”
- LinkedIn has created targeted advertising that dovetails off that above trend. Since 74 percent of B2B buyers choose a company that first helps them with useful content, LinkedIn’s ad platform is an effective marketing tool.
What do all these stats mean for your business?
LinkedIn is an ideal B2B paid advertising platform because of the sheer number of highly qualified leads active and willing to share their targeting information on the platform.
How can LinkedIn help grow my business?
Small businesses—especially those that are suppliers and have physical locations—may want to consider cultivating their presence on LinkedIn because brand awareness is key for Top of the Funnel action in the B2B space. However, this article is about paid advertising, so we’ll focus on that aspect of LinkedIn.
What Types of Ad Campaigns Can I Run on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn offers multiple types of ads, which are divided into self-serve ads and LinkedIn advertising partner solutions. We’re focusing on ads that a small business can DIY, so I’ll stick with those ad options for this article.
Sponsored Content
According to LinkedIn sponsored content is “used to attract new followers to your company or showcase page, and drive engagement with company-specific content.” Remember, B2B buyers are far more likely to purchase from an organization or individual that has helped with incredibly useful content. LinkedIn is a great example of content marketing, where those who gain new customers are those who first help prospects.
Sponsored content ads run in user’s news feeds, so they garner a lot of engagement. Advertisers have the option of running an ad using a previous status update, or coming up with a new, never-been-seen LinkedIn status update that links to helpful content with a CTA button. The latter allows you to thoroughly customize your target audience, and is the recommended option.
A sponsored ad can be a good lead generator, can raise brand awareness, and can also strengthen your brand’s positioning as a thought leader in its particular niche.
An advertiser can make multiple variations of the same sponsored content ad, including changing the copy and the images.
LinkedIn sees 2.74 percent view-to-lead conversion compared to .69 percent for Twitter and .77 percent for Facebook. -Hubspot
Display and Text Ads
Display and text ads can include a video or image as well as copy. LinkedIn recommends including at least an image, because text-only ads receive 20 percent less CTR than those with images.
When considering running a text ad, keep in mind that these don’t show up on mobile yet, and approximately 60 percent of all LinkedIn traffic is mobile. Sponsored content does show up on mobile because the ads appear in users’ news feed.
These ads appear in users’ inbox, or on the side or bottom of the LinkedIn home page. They can direct visitors to your company’s LinkedIn page, or to your landing page or website.
LinkedIn allows up to 15 variations of the same text ad for split-testing purposes.
LinkedIn Ad Targeting & Budgeting
Targeting options on LinkedIn are robust because of the information account holders have to give away simply to become productive members of the platform.
Targeting options include:
- Location (can include or exclude locations)
- Professional traits including company name, industry, and size; job title and function; seniority level; school; fields of study; degrees; skills; LinkedIn group membership; gender; and age.
- Audience expansion allows you to reach audiences beyond the LinkedIn newsfeed and also allows you to include audiences similar to those you’ve targeted (LinkedIn’s version of lookalike audiences).
LinkedIn ads can be paid via cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM). How you pay is determined by the ad campaign goal—brand exposure or results. LinkedIn ad campaigns can start at just $10 a day.
YouTube
The most important thing to keep in mind about advertising with YouTube: Yes, video super popular right now, but to give it even more strength, since Google now owns YouTube, advertisers can harness the power of Google Adwords when advertising. And this means, YouTube advertisers can target people not just based on their YouTube activity…but on their Google search history as well.
Yup. Mind. Blown. OK, while you’re processing that information, I’m going to send you to your Google Ad Words account because that’s how you access YouTube advertising.
Once logged in, you’ll go to the “campaigns” tab and click “create new campaign” button or the “Plus Campaign” button. Directly under the area where you name the campaign you will see a “Campaign Type” with a dropdown. In the dropdown, you’ll select “Video” and Adwords will then reset the remainder of the set-up for YouTube.
While you’re messing around with your Adwords/YouTube account, check out these stats on why you want to make a YouTube ad in the first place:
YouTube User Stats that Affect Your Business
- At 1.5 billion users, YouTube has the attention of almost one-third of the world’s Internet users. Each day, those users watch a billion hour of videos. Yes, that’s BILLION.
- Six out of ten people surveyed preferred a live video platform like YouTube to cable networks.
- YouTube’s mobile app reaches more 18 to 49 year olds in the U.S. than any cable network.
- YouTube is available and localized in 88 countries and accessed in 76 different languages (which covers 95 percent of Internet users.)
- Only nine percent of U.S. small businesses use YouTube.
- When viewers don’t skip a YouTube ad, they pay attention to it. On YouTube, viewers pay 84 percent more attention to an ad than they do to a television commercial.
What does this mean for my business?
YouTube has tremendous reach for businesses who need to market internationally and to millennials. There is little competition for marketing on this channel, due to the challenge of creating quality video marketing content.
How Can YouTube Help Grow My Business?
YouTube ads cost anywhere from $0.10 to $0.30 a view while quality advertising video production can cost at minimum $1000, and clear upwards of $20-50K for a basic video.
Recognizing that video ads may not be attainable to small businesses because of the cost of production, YouTube has set up two experimental options to help small business owners generate a YouTube ad.
They created Director Onsite service, currently available in seven U.S. Cities. The business owner agrees to a $150 ad spend with YouTube, and YouTube sends assigns a scriptwriter to the business, and later a videographer who spends two hours at the business filming. Lastly, a YouTube ads specialist will help you get your ad set up and optimized on YouTube. Here’s an example of an ad created using this service.
Seven cities isn’t much, so YouTube also came out with the YouTube Director for Business app, only available on IPhone (that’s right—it’s not even available on Google model phones!) This app helps business owners design their own ads with their iPhones. Here’s an example of a quality video made with this app.
So, once you manage putting together a video, how does your business benefit from YouTube advertising?
With the power of Google AdWords targeting options. But first, let’s look at the two types of video ads you can run on YouTube.
TrueView Ads
These are the most common video ads seen on YouTube. Advertisers pay only for at least 30-second long views of for video interactions such as clicking on a CTA. Skippable TrueView ads need to be 12-60 seconds in length, and nonskippable ads should be 15-30 seconds long.
There are two types of TrueView Ads:
- Video discovery YouTube ads appear to viewers as related videos on YouTube video watch pages, on the YouTube homepage and in the search results. They run on both the desktop and mobile versions of YouTube. The ad originally consists of an image thumbnail (preferably from your video) and up to three lines of text. The ad will run differently depending on where it is seen: mobile, desktop, search results page, the homepage, etc. These ads can also be used in the Google Display Network (GDN.)
- In-stream ads are those ads that play before someone watches a video on YouTube. Advertisers have the option of making these ads skippable or non- skippable, and they can also be played anywhere in the GDN. These ads also play after a video has ended or, midway through a video that over 10 minutes long.
YouTube allows different ad variations so you can test which in-stream ad is working best. Typically these ads have a text overlay on the side of the video, instructing users to “click here to go to www.ourwebsite.com.”
TrueView ads are great for driving TOFU movement such as getting someone to sign up for a free 30-day trial of your email marketing software, or having them download your free ebook and gaining them as a lead.
Bumper Ads
Bumper ads are short, six-second ads that a viewer may not even realize is coming on their screen after they watched a video.
These ads are good for brand awareness and brand recall (when a consumer remembers your brand at the time they are beginning to think of purchasing.)
Six seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but Google conducted some research and found that bumper ads are effective.
“And while Bumpers are short on time, they’re long on impact. We tested over 300 Bumper campaigns this year and found that 9 out of 10 drove a significant lift in ad recall.” -Google
Targeting and Budgeting YouTube Ads
YouTube has you set a budget per day. It also allows you to decide how your ad will be delivered to your audience.
Standard delivery means your ad will be showed evenly throughout the day while accelerated delivery quickly gets as many eyes on the ad as possible. Accelerated delivery is best if there is an ongoing trend that relates to your ad and you want to capitalize that.
You could always go to Twitter to gain insight on what trends your ad might dovetail with 😉 😉
YouTube targeting is thorough thanks to Google AdWords. After deciding whether your ad will appear in YouTube search or YouTube videos, you determine targeting based on:
- Locations—include and/or exclude locations
- Language—over 76 options
- Device—also lets you specify the operating system and carrier (or Wi-Fi), and lets you increase or decrease the ad if you select mobile device
- Dates—set beginning and ending dates for your campaign and create a schedule for showing your ad/
Impressions and Views—if desired, you can limit the daily impressions and views of your ad - Gender
- Age
- Parental status
- Interests
- Keywords—get found when people run specific “how-to” searches in YouTube
- Topics
- Retargeting–those who have already been in contact with your brand
- Excluding/Including—you may not want your ad seen with specific products or brands. Alternatively you may want it seen with other trends. YouTube lets you determine this.
Interested in running a YouTube ad? Start by writing a brief script and thinking about the setting you would like to include in your ad. Then test out the YouTube Director for Business App!
Since YouTube is owned by Google and YouTube utilizes the Google AdWords system, you have a pretty good idea of targeting in AdWords. But, the delivery of ads and the Google search experience is certainly different than YouTube.
And the reality is, since Google is the largest search engine in the world, and it arguably was the most significant shaper of the Internet as we know it today, it now possesses an overwhelming amount of advertising options and small business products. In fact, marketers often call this the “Google Universe.”
While this article is mostly about paid advertising in social media, Google’s social platform Google+ doesn’t have a lot of MAUs. Widely known as barely-used social platform, even Google began calling Google+ . But, of course advertising within the platform utilizes AdWords, and those advertisements are seen across Google.
Google User Stats that Affect Your Business
- There are over 1 billion active Gmail users and over 2.5 billion Gmail accounts. Google AdWords has Gmail ad targeting options.
- Everyone who has a Gmail account automatically has a Google + account but the majority of those accounts have never been logged into. Google now sees Google + as “a social layer across all of Google’s services” instead of a social media platform. Google +’s MAUs is probably only 4 to 6 million people.
- GDN or Google Display Network, is comprised of the display ads you see on websites everywhere across the internet. It’s believed 90 percent of global internet users are exposed to the GDN. Since Google + ads are automatically uploaded to the GDN, paid advertising on Google + isn’t a lost cause 😉
- In spite of lackluster social media stats, Google has LOTS of information on users because, if a user uses Google while logged into Gmail, Gmail, Google + and Google search engine all track their movements and assign them internal user profiles. This makes for potentially highly targeted ads.
- Google currently has 7 products with one billion users. These include Android, Chrome, Maps, Search, YouTube and the Google Play store.
- There are 4.4 billion searches daily on Google, and Google still has the lion’s share of the search engine marketplace at over 77 percent.
- Approximately 60 percent of Google’s searches are done through mobile, and the majority of those searches are for a local business. However, ads that are more targeted for desktop search continue to convert more than mobile ads.
What does this mean for my business?
While Google continues to be a controversial business it’s not going anywhere, and the immense amount of data it has compiled and uses on internet searchers makes it a heavy hitter for paid advertising that catches people both in the purchase stage and awareness stage of a buying cycle.
How Can AdWords Help Grow My Business?
Google AdWords is well-known to most business owners as “that thing that gets me to the top of Google.”
AdWords actually gets your ad seen and hopefully, puts eyes on your business. Businesses selling physical goods as well as services are well-suited for AdWords. It can work for B2B businesses, and other types of businesses–so long as the targeting excludes unqualified traffic.
The way Google provides ads is to make them very relevant to whatever it is you are searching for. It’s not disruptive advertising. A lot of people click on the search ads because the copy is highly relevant to whatever they are searching for.
AdWords has two options for advertising: Search and display.
Search results reach people when they looking for something specific such as a good or service. Search ads also target people on Google Search Partner sites such as AOL.
Display ads are more visual and can appear when someone is looking on a website. Display ads become a part of the Google Display Network or GDN. They’re targeted, in part, by the search actions that internet user made at some earlier point.
Display ads are ideal for remarketing because they keep the potential customer engaged. You also have the option of managing which sites your display ad is shown on in GDN. If you want to stand out from the crowd in the GDN, remember that 67.5 percent of display ads are plain text ads. Try making a visual ad instead, especially since the CTR of a display ad is 0.31 percent compared to the 0.23 percent rate of a text ad.
Google also offers mobile ads but those require more of a partnership with Google, so we’ll stick with the DIY search and display ads for this article.
Types of AdWords Campaigns
Google offers three type of ad formats. The Search Network consists only of text ads due to how search results display. These are shown on PC, mobile and tablet.
The GDN offers text, image, rich media (animation or interactive elements) and video ads, and these can be shown in Gmail, as banners, and within mobile applications as mentioned above.
AdWords Budgeting & Targeting
We discussed AdWords targeting while covering YouTube advertising. But, a YouTube ad works a little differently than an AdWords ad.
Google AdWords also runs on auctions, like many other platforms, but, the most significant factor that determines campaign costs is the quality and relevance of your ad. This is largely determined by the keywords used to make and place your ad. Google wants to be sure people are getting their desired results when they search for something. So, an ad about natural pet food that is key-worded for hotel rooms isn’t going to be very helpful to most people, and it will rightfully be given a low relevance score by Google.
An advertiser will tell Google what the highest dollar amount they’re willing to pay every time someone searches for one of their keywords is. If your dollar amount is the highest, this increases your ad’s possibility of showing up first in search or in display. If it’s the second-highest amount, your ad may show up second, and so on.
Since Google also considers a quality score when it comes to your ad, the equation for ad rankings on search and in display looks like this: Maximum Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank and the ad rank = the position of the ad in search results.
And with Google, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The average price per click (PPC) on Google is $1-$2. Google can set your PPC budget based on what you tell them is your overall budget, OR, you can manually set your PPC budget.
When setting up keywords for a search or display ad, Google will suggest keywords for you based upon your website, and can also give you more options based upon a keyword suggestion you enter.
Since keyword competition can be fierce on Google, it is recommended you come up with long-tail keyword which is typically more than two words and hones in a very specific audience niche.
For example, instead of choosing “local bakery” or “Cheshire Bakery” I might specify “chocolate chip cookies Cheshire bakery” or “cookies bakery in Cheshire” especially if that’s something my business is known for.
Another option to target niche audiences, and to make sure your ad isn’t wasted on Google searches irrelevant to your business is to use negative keywords. A negative keyword excludes searches that include the negative keyword you wish to block.
This may not make strategic sense initially, but think about it: The brick-and-mortar store (and online store) White House Black Market may wish to make a negative keyword of “Donald Trump” so that searchers don’t grow distracted from their initial search.
Ultimately, Google’s AdWords can work for any type of business, but the ad must be well-designed, well-written, and well-targeted.
StumbleUpon
Stumbleupon is considered a social network, although it could also be considered a web browser plug-in or an online social network. It’s purpose is to provide its users with content highly relevant to their unique interests.
It works by having users enter their information preferences after signing up for an account. It then presents web pages based on the topics you selected, and you can rate the content you view so that Stumbleupon knows what type of content you like, and if the pages they’re showing are appropriate for others who like the same type of topics.
Is Stumbleupon worth a paid social advertiser’s time? Potentially, because Stumbleupon is the single-largest traffic generator of all social networking sites, even though it’s user base is small compared to other social channels on this list.
Stumbleupon User Stats that Affect Your Business
Stumbleupon generates more web traffic than Reddit.
- Over 75,000 brands and businesses have advertised with Stumbleupon.
- According to Search Engine Journal 15% of B2B marketers have used Stumbleupon to distribute content.
- The social channel has over 30 million MAUs, and those users average 7 hours a month on Stumbleupon.
- Mint.com is a Stumbleupon success story that received 180,000 monthly unique visits from the site. Mint claimed that they had more success with Stumbleupon than they did with Facebook paid advertising.
- Some of the most popular content on Stumbleupon continues to be visuals and lists.
Paid Discovery Campaigns with Stumbleupon
Stumbleupon paid advertising is relatively easy to implement. You pick which piece of content and web page you want to promote. Since engagement on Stumbleupon isn’t very high, and since its users are very picky about liking and rating the content they stumble on, you’ll want to be sure your content is very high quality and relevant to the topic you assign it.
After determining your content, you’ll select your topic and audience targeting. Stumbleupon targeting isn’t extensive.
Targeting options include:
- Device
- Demographics
- Interest
- Location
You’ll want to do some research on Stumbleupon to see what type of content you should be using for your specific interest and topic. Look at content formats, voice, style, length, and topic development, and be sure your content will fit in well with other content of the same category. You’ll also want to include lots of visuals like this article from Mashable that did very well on the platform.
Your “cost per stumble” (every visit to your webpage) will be anywhere from 10 to 50 cents based upon how detailed your targeting is. You will receive organic and paid stumbles and Stumbleupon won’t charge for the organic stumbles.
Stumbleupon does allow you to have multiple campaigns for one site. Even while a campaign is live, you can change targeting, your price per stumble, and even the run dates.
Stumbleupon is best for brand awareness because, it’s not technically PPC advertising. It’s more like pay-per-impression. In traditional PPC, the user might see the ad on a webpage then decide to click on it. With Stumbleupon, they see the “ad” (content) first thing–there is no other steps taken. You’ll want to be sure that your web page is well-designed, potentially with an opt-in in the sidebar, promoting your tripwire. Bonus points if your tripwire is around the same type of topic that sent the visitor to your site!
There you have it–your complete guide to paid social advertising platforms in 2017!
What’s clear, is that in 2017, almost any type of business can benefit from paid social advertising. It’s no longer a matter of throwing money out and seeing what sticks. If applied strategically, paid advertising can definitely fill your funnel and improve your business’s’ bottom line.
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