Meta offers several advertising formats across Facebook and other placements. The right choice depends on the objective, audience, creative, destination and quality of measurement. Some formats described here reflect the 2020 product range, so confirm current names and availability in Ads Manager before launching a campaign.
How do I advertise on Facebook?
Anyone can advertise a Facebook page, but it’s a good idea to create a Facebook Business Manager account. You can do so with a regular Facebook account, but a Business Manager account will allow you much more flexibility in adding additional staff members, running multiple business pages, and generally helps separate work accounts from personal accounts.
Types of Facebook ads
There are multiple types of Facebook ads and they each have their own use cases and best fits for marketing and advertising. Often, ad campaigns will not stick with just one type of ad, but will instead mix multiple types of ad while tailoring the specific ad content to best fit each type of audience or need.
Page boosts
Page boosts specifically generate traffic for a Facebook page. They are intended to drive traffic to your Facebook page and get more likes. This may be useful for you if your Facebook page is a core element of your business, but if you’re trying to generate leads for your own website then this will not be useful to you. If you own an e-commerce site you can display product listings on your Facebook page, so it may be worth running some analytics to see if conversion rates justify this ad type for your business.
Post boosts
Similar to page boosts, you can also choose to ‘boost’ individual posts on your pages. You can choose to target these generally or specifically only to people who have liked your page, which can be useful for increased engagement. These can be useful for generating buzz surrounding announcements like new product launches, but again, your audience is likely to remain on Facebook.
Image ads
Image ads are fairly self-explanatory: they are ads that use an image. Facebook typically does not allow much text on the image itself, but the ad will include room for a small piece of text above the image and a call to action button. These are quick and easy to set up, but can easily get lost as a user scrolls down their feed.
Video ads
Video ads are one of the best types of ads for generating awareness. People are more likely to pay attention to video ads than image or text-based ads, and a creative video can work wonders for your brand’s audience growth.
Canvas ads
Canvas ads are mobile-optimised ads that cover the entire mobile screen. These can be interactive and mix video, text and CTA content together. They’re absolutely fantastic for capturing viewer attention and represent a very good opportunity to generate clickthroughs if you use the right ad.
Dynamic product ads
These are most useful for those running e-commerce sites. Facebook allows you to upload your store’s products (this can be done automatically with most leading e-commerce software) and then display those products directly to customers. Since these are synced up to your site, Facebook will pull this data directly and will automatically update the data to include any new prices/imagery without you having to manually alter the details. These are very good for marketing your products directly, so make sure your product imagery is top-notch.
Ultimately, understanding what each type of Facebook ad type is best suited for your audience or end-goal is the key. Getting the most out of your marketing budget and running a successful campaign, whatever your aim for that campaign may be, involves assessing which type of Facebook ad will give you the result you want.
Choose by objective and measurement
Start with the desired action, acceptable acquisition cost and available data. Check current formats in Meta Ads Manager because several names and placements have changed since 2020. Test one creative variable at a time and assess incremental sales or leads rather than relying only on attributed clicks.
