The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains advertising strategies for using Page Insights, tracking tags, and your business’ identity to determine when is the optimal time to run ad campaigns.
Scheduling is one of the only ways to narrow the targeting of Facebook ads without having to pay more. By running campaigns when their target audience are more likely to convert, advertisers can attain a higher return on investment on the Facebook ad spend.
Different demographics are more likely to make purchases at certain times of day, so reaching them with ads at those peak times can boost sales. Companies should determine when these peak times are, either by analyzing conversion data and thinking about the behavior of their customers, and then pause and unpause their campaigns to run ads at those times.
Here we’ll discuss findings of a study on when certain demographics are most likely to convert, then provide strategies for maximizing advertising performance through scheduling.
Due to varying behavior patterns, different demographics of Facebook users are more or less likely to make purchases online at different times of day or on different days of the week. TBG Digital conducted a study on two billion cost per acquisition Facebook ad impressions that it ran for its clients.
The study shows that “male consumers are 42% more likely to execute an online purchase during evening hours versus female users”. The study also indicates that “users aged 50 and above were 119% more likely to purchase online in the morning than the rest of the day.”
The Facebook Ads marketplace does not currently offer a day-parting option — a way to specify that ads should run at certain hours and not at others. The most granularly you can schedule your ads is by day. However, some Ads API tools and services have built unofficial day-parting systems.
If you don’t use one of these tools or services, you can still manually day-part your ad campaigns. To do so, create an ad campaign and submit it to Facebook for approval. Once the ad is approved and begins to run, pause it, then unpause it at the hour you want to start running your campaign and pause it again when that time period ends. You might run ads around lunch time, in the early evening, or only on the weekends.
If you specifically target men, women, or those over 50 and are looking to drive online purchases, you can take advantage of the findings above. Otherwise, you’ll need to determine when are the the optimal hours of the day to advertise for your business.
To determine what hours of the day your Page or Place get the most Likes, you can try checking the notifications of new Likes in the “Use Facebook as Page” option. Check your Page’s Like notifications in the top navigation bar each hour while using Facebook as the Page you’re advertising for and note how many new Likes you’ve gotten. You can then determine at what hours your ads are driving the most Likes to your Page.
With these strategies you can get more highly qualified clicks that generate revenue and avoid paying for clicks that don’t help your business.
For more strategies on using Page Insights, tracking tags, and the behavior trends of your customers to determine the best time to run Facebook ads visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.
All of us know that users of the Web do not read advertisements on the websites we visit, yet the online communities are emerging as the next great media rely solely on this method to produce revenue. In The Social Network Business Plan, social network expert, David Silver presents and explains 18 cutting-edge methods to create revenue for social network websites--none of which are advertising. He also predicts the demise of seemingly successful online communities such as MySpace and Facebook that rely on advertising as non-sustainable modalities. Silver describes and explains that in the future new products and services will be introduced, talked about, rated, reviewed and recommended - or killed - by online communities. One example of the 18 new revenue channels that online communities are adopting is the sale to vendors of anonymized conversations of the community members concerning those vendors' products or services. Another example is online communities who partner with the internet providers to receive payment when a particular online community's information is downloaded usinf that providers service. The other sixteen revenue channels are equally head-turning!
