What types of advertisements does Facebook offer?

Photo Ads Video Story Ads Messenger Ads Carousel Ads Slideshow Ads Collection Ads Playable Ads Dynamic Ads Lead Ads

Pros and Cons of Facebook Advertising

With 1.79 billion people using Facebook every day, it provides an immense platform for any business. In addition, Facebook ads do not only run on Facebook. If you choose to use Facebook advertising, your ads can also appear on Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. You can choose where you want your run to ad, but these options will increase the visibility of your advertisement. This proves to be one of the many benefits of Facebook advertising compared to other platforms.

Just like many other marketing decisions, there are pros and cons of Facebook advertising to consider. This article will go over some of the most important ones to help you determine if Facebook advertising is right for your business.

Table of Contents

The Biggest Pros of Facebook Ads

There are many benefits of Facebook advertising. It provides countless tools to help you create the best advertisements.

It also lets you determine an ad objective, define a target audience, and set a budget all in one place. Plus, there are numerous different ad types to choose from, allowing you to find the right one for your business. Lastly, you can track your ads using Facebook measurement. Here are more details about some of the biggest pros of Facebook advertising.

Define Your Ad Objective

When you are creating a new Facebook ad, you can set your ad objective. This is the first thing you need to do when creating a Facebook ad as this answers the question of what you want to achieve with the ad. It helps ensure you have a clear, established goal for the advertisement.

Facebook divides these marketing objectives into three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. These three categories are then broken down into more categories. Awareness objectives focus on getting people’s attention and are further divided into brand awareness and reach. Consideration objectives are based on getting people to engage. This includes app installs, traffic, lead generation, messages, engagement, and video views. The goal of conversion objectives is to get people to act, including things like conversions, store visits, and catalog sales.

When discussing the pros and cons of Facebook ads, the ad objective feature is one of the biggest pros. It ensures you are successfully setting your goal with the advertisement.

Set Your Target Audience

One of the other pros of Facebook ads is that it allows you to target a certain audience with your advertisements. Facebook offers three audience selection tools to do this. They are core audiences, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.

Core audiences allow you to define your target audience using certain criteria. These criteria are location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. You can define your audience as specifically or generally as you’d like.

Custom audiences focus on re-establishing connections with people who have previously engaged with your business. This includes those who are on your contact lists, past site visitors, and app users.

Lookalike audiences help you reach people who are similar to your current customers. You establish a lookalike audience by creating a source audience of people you know. Usually, this is based on similar interests and traits.

Along with these three audience selection tools, Facebook will automatically place your ads to users who are the most likely to find them relevant.

Set Your Ideal Budget

One of the many benefits of Facebook advertising is that it allows you to use a set budget. You are always in control of how much money you are spending on your advertisements. Your budget is based on a daily or lifetime budget. Additionally, this is where you set the time period of when you want your ads to run. Facebook ads are shown to those who are most likely to be interested. This is where the ad auction occurs, which we will talk about later.

When it comes to the pros and cons of Facebook for businesses, a pro is that Facebook shows you your reach and frequency of an ad. You can set your desired reach and frequency and Facebook will tell you the exact budget you will need to achieve this.

When you set a budget, it is important to know what factors impact the cost of your Facebook ads. These factors include audience, gender, location, age, time of your advertising, and the quality.

The Variety of Types of Facebook Ads

When you create a Facebook ad, you are given certain ad formats to choose from. This allows you to find the ad format that works best for your business and the type of advertisement you are aiming for. Here are the types of ad formats available:

Photo Ads
Video
Story Ads
Messenger Ads
Carousel Ads
Slideshow Ads
Collection Ads
Playable Ads
Dynamic Ads
Lead Ads

All of these ads are created to work on every type of device and connection speed. With the variety in the different types of Facebook ads available to use, you can find which one best fits your business.

Track your Performance with Facebook Measurement

Facebook measurement is a feature that lets you better understand how your ads are working and how to optimize them. Facebook measurement offers many tools to do this. One of these tools is Ads Manager. It allows you to track the ads you currently have running on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. You can track your campaign performance, view reach, and demographic breakdowns. A major benefit of using Ads Manager is that it is available in a mobile app, so you can access it anywhere.

Other Facebook measurement tools allow you to review relevant analytics and help you find what is working. You can review your entire ad account and look at certain ads in more depth. Use these performance metrics to determine what is working and what is not. You can see where your ads perform best and which audiences are the most engaged. Then, you can use this information to optimize your ads.

Cons of Facebook Advertising

Along with the many benefits of using Facebook advertising, there are disadvantages to using it. Age demographics can become an issue if your target audience is a younger generation. Facebook advertising uses ad auctions to determine which ad to show to certain users, which can be difficult to win at times. If you are considering the pros and cons of Facebook for business, here are the cons you should know about.

Age Demographics of Facebook Users

When determining if Facebook advertising is the right decision for your business, you need to take into consideration the demographics of Facebook users. The demographics regarding age are divided pretty evenly. 24% of Facebook’s advertising audience is between the ages 18-24. The 25-34 age range is the largest on the audience, accounting for 32% of Facebook’s advertising audience. The senior age range, those 65 and older, is the smallest age demographics but the fastest growing. It is important to know that Facebook is the most popular social network for seniors. Understanding these Facebook demographics is important when determining if Facebook advertising is right for you.

Although these statistics show people of all ages are using Facebook, it might not be the best place to advertise your products. Facebook is becoming less favorable among younger users. Their “go-to” social media platform has shifted from Facebook to apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Therefore if your target audience is a younger age, Facebook advertising may not be successful for your business.

The Amount of Competition for Ads

After you create your advertisement, it is sent to an ad auction. Facebook uses ad auctions to determine which ad is best to show to a user at that given point in time. Facebook uses three factors to determine who wins an ad auction. They are bid, estimated action rates, and ad quality. The bid is how much an advertiser is willing to pay to achieve their objective. Estimated action rates are the probability that a user will complete the advertisers desired outcome after seeing an ad. Ad quality is the most self-explanatory. It simply uses certain factors to measure the quality of an ad.

When weighing the pros and cons of Facebook advertising, competition is an important con to consider. It can be difficult to win ad auctions. The amount of money you are willing to pay for an ad directly affects your chance of winning. If you are a small company, your bid might be too low. This is where larger-sized companies have an advantage because it is more likely they have a greater marketing budget.

Still Unsure about Facebook Advertising?

There are both pros and cons of using Facebook advertising for your business. Facebook advertising provides a great platform to advertise for your company. It is a large platform and has the necessary tools to have successful advertisements. On the other hand, there can be issues with age demographics and the competitiveness of winning a bid.

Hopefully, this list of pros and cons of Facebook Advertising, helped you make a decision. If you are still unsure about Facebook Advertising, SEO Design Chicago is more than happy to help! We have experience using Facebook Advertising and are ready to use that to help your business!