How effective are Facebook ads in generating actual sales?

Facebook ads are very effective in generating sales, but it takes a lot of testing, optimizing, and persistence to prove it. I recently published a guide on how to create Facebook ads. While doing research for this guide, I analyzed dozens of business ads on Facebook’s platform. Here’s what stuck out with the most successful ones…

• Visuals matter. If you don’t have a relevant visual that gets your audience’s attention, your ad won’t go very far. When coming up with what visuals to use, strive to use a high quality image, video or animated cinemagraph that showcases your product or people using it. If you’d like to advertise a sale, it’d be helpful to incorporate text that’s large, legible and catches your audience as they’re browsing through their newsfeed. If you don’t have the resources required to shoot your own photography, check out Burst, which features royalty-free high resolution images available for download.
• Appeal to a targeted, narrow audience. With an audience of over 1.3 billion people across the mobile app and desktop site, Facebook’s user base presents a ripe opportunity for marketing. However, you don’t want to serve your ad to the entire social network population. Instead, using Facebook’s audience targeting to reach specific users, allows your ad to be served to people who are more likely to convert and be within your target audience. This nifty little tool lets you target based on factors such as age, gender, relationship status, education, and more.

• Test out different ad types. Facebook’s advertising platform provides a range of ad types such as image ads, video ads, Canvas ads, and dynamic product ads (amongst others). Each type has its own benefits and use cases; so experiment with them to offer variety to your audience and also to get creative with your selling scenarios. For example, using Facebook’s carousel ad type is a great way to communicate the different features of your product; and Facebook’s offer ad type has known to be successful in converting potential leads into customers by promoting significant discounts or free trials.
• Experiment with your CTA’s. As with the different ad types, experimenting with CTA’s can have a drastic impact on the effectiveness of your Facebook ads. Having a variety of call to actions lets you know what resonates most with your audience and you can also offer something else to your customers. Instead of always telling your customers to “buy now”, try getting them to “browse [your] new collection” or “contact [you] for a personal consultation”. By easing up on the sales-heavy CTA’s, you can support your customers throughout their purchasing journey and create additional touch-points for your brand.

I go more in-depth into Facebook ads in this guide (How to Get Started with Facebook Ads: A Complete Guide for Beginners), so feel free to check it out. As with anything, advertising on Facebook isn’t something you can just figure out — you’ll have to dedicate time to testing and optimizing your ads. Once you’re able to do that consistently, you’ll find what works best for your brand, and in turn, what works best with your audience.