Do you leverage Facebook as a medium to generate more awareness for your business? If so, I’ve got some good news, Facebook recently released a new ad objective called brand awareness and in this article I’m going to show you how it works.
How brand awareness ads work
Brand awareness objective is the first of its kind. Unlike most other Facebook objectives, brand awareness ads works with real-time data to optimize for your goal.
Using its complex algorithm Facebook calculates how many people will recall your brand if they were asked within 2 days.
This is measured by a metric called estimated ad recall lift – which is a numeric figure Facebook estimates will remember your ad in two days time.
How does estimated ad recall work?
Estimated ad recall takes several things into account including the total amount of people who viewed your ad, the amount of time they spent viewing your advert and data from over 300 studies from the Nielsen Brand.
Using this data it estimates how many people will recall your brand. The number is only an approximation as it does not take into account your ad copy or the message you’re using.
Estimated ad recall lift provides you with real-time data on how your content is performing, allowing you to scale campaigns that have a higher brand recall, and stop or edit campaigns that aren’t doing so well before you’ve allocated the lion’s share of your budget.
With page post engagements you would often wait days or weeks to measure likes, comments and shares to get an idea on how your ads were performing. However, measuring brand recall by likes, comments and shares has never been a great way to decide if your branding efforts were actually a success, and you’d often have to spend a good portion of your budget before you had any data to work with.
Brand awareness objective cuts right through this problem by offering real-time data as your campaign is live.
How you should be using brand awareness ads
You shouldn’t be using the brand awareness objective to generate leads or sales, there are other Facebook ad objectives that do a better job. You should be using it to increase awareness for your business, an event that’s coming up or a new product you’re releasing.
For example, if you’re a small restaurant or bar you could run an indefinite ad campaign that is combined with a small daily budget of $1-$10. Your ad will be served to the right audience every single day and will compound your business’s brand in their minds over time.
Once a prospect is served your ad, you can edit the frequency of how often they see your campaign from 1-90 days.
Bidding models for brand awareness
There are two bidding models you can for the brand awareness objective, they are:
Brand awareness – serve ads to people who are most likely to remember your brand in two days if asked.
Reach – serves ads to the maximum amount of people within your selected timeframe.
If you choose to optimize for reach, you can choose between 1-90 days before showing the same person your advert again. To achieve your campaign’s goal of increasing brand recall, you would be best optimizing for brand awareness. I suggest only optimizing for reach when you’re running time-sensitive campaigns or are targeting a very small audience.
Summary
Facebook officially launched their brand awareness objective late last year and is not yet available for everyone. At this moment in time it can only be used by Facebook account managers and works with Instagram. If you would like to learn more about this objective and use it for your business, feel free to get in touch with me today.
Nick Bridges
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2 Comments
Gabriel Cobián
August 2, 2016Do you mind given us an example of when to use the Reach Bidding Model? I don’t completely understand why to even use it when you have the option of Reach&Frequency Ad.
Thanks.
nick
August 2, 2016There’s really no situation where Optimizing for Reach is optimal. You’d use it when you want FB to show you ads to as many people within a target audience as possible. The problem is that FB is not optimizing to show your ad to people likely to perform a desired actions (opt in, click to site, download an app, engage with a post, sign up for event, etc…).
The good is that you’re paying for impressions not actions.
In reality, there’s always a better optimization than bidding for reach. But if you have money to burn and not much of a need for targeting and want everyone in the FB population to see the ad (where a click is not required) this could be a good ancillary option.
You could use this when you’re promoting something where you want awareness but no call to action. Ex: promoting an upcoming TV show, Happy Hour at a bar, or a sale at a retail store. But, again, there are better ways to optimize than that.