What are the new trends in Facebook off-site promotion in 2020?

Understanding Facebook advertising trends is crucial for sellers to formulate off-site traffic strategies in 2020. In order to keep up with Facebook advertising changes and the types of advertising that need to be focused on in the future, this article will discuss three major trends in detail and how to make the most of them to create successful Facebook advertising campaigns.

1. Facebook advertising costs are rising

Facebook advertising costs have been rising in recent years, mainly due to the following key factors:

1) Supply and demand

Facebook now has more than 6 million advertisers, which is a huge increase from the 4 million advertisers in 2016. The increase in advertisers has also increased demand for advertising and occupied limited supply, pushing up advertising costs.

2) Seasonal traffic

By observing Facebook's advertising in the fourth quarter of 2019, it can be found that advertisers spent a lot of money on advertising during this period to promote products and holiday specials, especially for seasonal businesses. This forces advertisers who run ads throughout the year to see their spending costs rise year by year.

3) Policy

2020 is an absolute election year, and candidates will organize online events or run Facebook ads to communicate directly with tens of millions of voters. To this end, candidates in each city, state and country will raise a lot of money to run political ads on Facebook, so advertising costs may be higher than normal. Advertisers who run ads on Facebook year-round are expected to see a modest drop in ad costs in January, but will see costs gradually rise as the campaign enters its climax.

4) Ad quality

As we all know, another reason for poor ad performance is that the ad quality itself is not good enough. Facebook's algorithm has always favored advertisers who can provide a good user experience, because advertisers are not Facebook's key customers, but users are, and a decrease in the number of users will also lead to a decrease in the number of advertisements. Therefore, Facebook's algorithm focuses on advertisers showing relevant ads to the right audience. To this end, the better you are at leveraging Facebook targeting in your ad placement and ad creative design, the better your ads will perform, and the algorithm will focus more on you, which will reduce advertising costs to a certain extent.

2. Consider Facebook Mobile Ads

Although mobile advertising is not a trend, it is increasingly valued by major advertisers. It is understood that the total proportion of Facebook's advertising revenue coming from mobile devices exceeds 90%, and the number of users visiting Facebook and Instagram on mobile devices is increasing year by year. Therefore, from an advertising perspective, mobile advertising should be given priority consideration.

1) Advertising pictures

The use of images in advertising is very important and widespread, especially on mobile devices. Facebook has announced that it will standardize image sizes across all ad placements so that advertisers don’t have to create different image variations. The current standard image size ratio is 5:4 (the vertical is slightly larger than the width), and square-ratio images and videos are generally more suitable for mobile devices.

2) Length of ad copy

When Facebook increased the size of ad images, it reduced the number of lines of ad copy above the images on mobile devices, from about seven to three. This means you have to grab the user’s attention within the first one or two lines of your ad copy or at least get them to click the “…see more” button to view more of your ad copy.

In Ads Manager, you can preview each ad that will be served. For example, if you choose to run your ads on all placements, you can easily view your ads’ performance on Instagram feed, Facebook Newafeed, Instagram Stories, and other locations in the manager, and make modifications or optimizations accordingly. You can also customize the appearance of your ads for each placement, and even develop the same version for mobile and desktop.

3) Copywriting location

There is a title and a subtitle below the image on the desktop ad placement, but not on mobile devices. This section is called "Newsfeed Description" and is only available on PC. You can place a few lines of text below the title, which will only appear in the News Feed on desktop.

But if you have a CTA button (like Learn More), it may cut off part of your headline in mobile ads. So be sure to preview what your ad will look like before you run it so you can accurately estimate what parts of your headline might be cut off. In most cases, ads perform better when they include a CTA button. Of course, you can also test how well your ads perform without a CTA button, so that the ads can blend better with the feed.

4) Consider Instagram

When you choose to run ads on Facebook, you can run them across all of its family and display ad placements, including Instagram, Facebook Newsfeed, Instant Articles, and more. As Instagram becomes more and more popular, the platform is taking up an increasing share of advertising. If you use all ad placements, you can view a breakdown of your ad placements in Ads Manager and check where your ads are running.

5) Video

Instagram Stories are still relatively new to many advertisers, so the cost of running them is relatively low. Standard Instagram Stories ads are up to 15 seconds long, but you can create a carousel ad with up to three panels and a duration of 45 seconds, which Instagram will automatically break up into consecutive 15-second segments.

3. Use Video in Facebook Ads

The importance of using video on platforms like Facebook or Instagram is nothing new, but it’s only going to grow in importance. For example, they have put Facebook Stories front and center on mobile devices. Others say that Facebook ads will become more video-oriented in the not-too-distant future. Advertisers should consider creating video ads to take advantage of the way content is consumed on the platform, and should create video ads for the content they are marketing, and consider mobile ads first when doing so.

1) Video length

Videos can be as short as 15 seconds or as long as several minutes, but there are advantages to any length of video, it all depends on what you are providing and what you want to achieve with the video. You can run the same ads on Facebook Stories as you do on Instagram Stories. Instagram’s video ads were previously limited to 60 seconds, but recently increased their ad length to 120 seconds.

2) Video subtitles

When users swipe to the video, Facebook video ads will start playing immediately, but the video is usually in muted mode (unless you click the unmute button in the lower right corner). In order to grab people’s attention without sound, you need to add subtitles to the video so that users can immediately understand what the video is about.

3) Video text

The rule of no more than 20% text in image ads also applies to animated text in videos. You can choose a static image and then add animated text to make it stand out in the feed, but if the text size takes up more than 20% of the image, its delivery may be reduced.

4. Facebook Ad Campaign Budget Optimization

Two years after CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) was launched in 2017, Facebook made it mandatory in 2019 for all eligible accounts to move to CBO when using multiple ad sets.

Traditionally, budgets are determined at the ad set level. Let’s say you’re running a conversions campaign with five different ad sets targeting different audiences and you’re planning on spending $100 per day. In this case, you’d typically allocate a budget to each ad set, so each ad set would spend $20 per day.

Once your campaign is running for 3-5 days, you’ll start to consider pausing any underperforming ad sets and shifting budget to higher performing ad sets, but all of this work needs to be done manually.

With CBO, you set your budget at the campaign level instead of the ad set level. You can set a budget for each day your campaign runs (daily budget) or for the entire duration of your campaign (total budget). All campaign budgets use campaign budget optimization. Facebook will evaluate each opportunity individually and automatically optimize your campaign budget in real time. Get the best results at a cost that matches your bidding strategy.

In short, CBO treats the ad groups in the campaign as a whole and allocates more budget to the best-performing ad groups based on system bids, thereby maximizing cost savings and increasing coverage and impressions. At the same time, it saves a lot of time. There is no need to manually set a budget for each ad group, nor to adjust the budget based on ad performance. But even if you use CBO, Facebook still allows you to set budgets at the ad set level.

Going back to the example above, if you want to spend $100 per day and you have 5 campaigns, you can set your bidding budget to $100, but you can also decide on your advertising budget, you can set a minimum spend of $15. So you can force the algorithm, rather than having the algorithm fully optimize for you. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of patience, and a lot of testing to find what works for you.

Author: Traffic FB

Source: Traffic FB