Social media platforms are constantly evolving – whether it be the addition of new features, changes to current features, or process overhauls, there is always plenty going on. If you want your business to be at the forefront, and to cut through the noise in the market and reach your valuable customers, then it’s important to stay up to date with these evolutions. Facebook is no exception to this – with 2.93 billion monthly users reported in June 2022, and there being over 10 million active advertisers on the platform, you have to be able to adapt your approach to stay ahead of the competition.
In this blog post, we will cover three changes that happened on Facebook last month, that will impact how you advertise on the platform: their new B2B advertising options, their new automation tools, and their updates to the Meta Advantage Ad Suite. By the time you reach the end of this short Facebook ads guide, you should understand these new changes and whether they will impact you using Facebook ads and the campaigns you run.
In the past, Facebook has been a core advertising platform when carrying out B2C advertising. However, it’s notoriously been a challenge to run any sort of B2B advertising campaign and to not be throwing at least some of your budget into a void. This is partly because 71.3% of Facebook’s active users log onto the platform to message family and friends, and 64.5% log on to share personal content. Another reason is that B2B targeting options have previously been rather limited, making it challenging to reach those users who would be interested in B2B content.
However, this is finally no longer the case, as Facebook has launched new B2B targeting audience segments that are available on a global scale. With these new targeting options, Facebook claims that ‘B2B marketers can [now] reach key decision-makers across small, medium and enterprise businesses’.
The new B2B oriented targeting options are:
With these new options, you’ll more easily be able to reach those who are decision makers in IT, or those who work in marketing. But how will Facebook find and fit users into these options, you ask? It’s simple - by looking at the job titles a user has on their profile and determining which group they fit into best.
It’s worth noting that the above list is ordered by how specific each targeting option is. i.e. targeting option number 1 is the most specific, and 3 is the most broad. You’ll be able to delve into the specifics of each targeting option when setting up your Facebook ad campaign in Ads Manager.
Another relevant B2B targeting option Facebook has introduced, is targeting those who have recently created a business. This is called ‘New Active Business’, which finds admins of engaged businesses that were created in the last 6, 12 or 24 months. (Note: This reflects 3 segments, with one for each timeframe.)
Over the last few months, Facebook has been developing and building their Meta Advantage suite and rolling it out to all advertisers on their platform. What is the Meta Advantage suite you ask? Simply put, it’s a group of settings that Facebook believes can and should be automated. These include settings you may find at the campaign creation stage, targeting stage, or ad stage. Each setting aims to reduce the time you spend on manually creating your adverts by using their machine learning to figure out what can bring you the best results, so that you have more time to actually run your business or complete other tasks.
As well as saving you several hours per week, the Meta Advantage suite aims to provide other benefits, such as:
In August, Facebook introduced new Meta Advantage tools, whilst also updating several already existing tools – read on to find out more.
The key new feature that they introduced is Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns – which will be useful for any sort of e-commerce business. They are designed to automatically determine which products you should show in your Facebook adverts to generate the most conversions at the lowest price. Eliminating the manual steps of Facebook ad campaign creation, it automatically chooses up to 150 different creative options by using AI and machine learning and tests them simultaneously, allowing you to learn which ads are most effective in a short space of time.
In practice, Facebook claims that using an Advantage+ Shopping campaign rather than a business-as-usual campaign decreased the cost per purchase by 12%, allowing you to reinvest in marketing strategies or other areas to improve your business.
For those based in the US, Meta will be adding another feature to Advantage Shopping+ Campaigns slated for later this year – if you have a checkout-enabled Shop set up on the platform, then you’ll be able to set this virtual shop as the destination of an advert. Facebook can then use AI and technology to direct users to the most effective destination – your website or your Facebook shop – depending on which results in the most transactions.
This is a tool that has been around for a while, but in August Facebook updated its benefits. In case you’ve not heard of this feature before, it simply automatically adjusts your adverts creative for each person who gets serviced the ad, which helps to show the version that is most likely to get the desired response from the user, increasing the effectiveness of your ad.
Now you have more options when utilising this feature in Ads Manager, where Facebook has increased the number of different ways you can optimise and experiment with your ad creatives, such as allowing Ads Manager to automatically add music from their sound catalogue to image based ads. Theoretically, this creates a more immersive experience for the user and allows the ad to run in more placements – such as video placements, e.g. Reels. This therefore minimises the disadvantage of running image ads when it comes to limited placement options.
Facebook have added numerous new features to Advantage+ App Campaigns to help you improve the impact and performance of your app install campaigns with minimum effort. These new features include: increased creative flexibility when pairing assets, improved stability of 7-day click attribution capabilities to improve performance for campaigns with longer conversion windows, split testing capabilities to determine those more successful setups, and more detailed reporting insights with added regional and ad-level stats. If you’d like to strengthen your knowledge on App campaigns in general, then check out this article.
Although it’s been around for a while, it’s important to also be aware of Advantage+ Audience – this tool creates a personalised audience based on the details of your Facebook page. When used in a Facebook ad campaign, Meta will analyse the audience and automatically adjust it overtime to make it more effective, and therefore help you reach more relevant people with your adverts. Check out this article for more info on this tool.
Now that you know all about Facebook’s new B2B targeting options, and the updates they made to their Meta Advantage Suite, you are ready to find the most significant users within your audience, and show them the most attractive version of your ads – all helping you to conquer the Facebook Adverts network and stand out from your competition, which in today’s climate, can make or break your success.
If you’d like to broaden your knowledge on digital advertising and become an expert on another platform, then why not take a look at our simple guide to TikTok advertising in 2022 here.
If you are looking into how to advertise with Facebook, reach out to our social media ads team and we can help.
Paid Advertising Executive
Ben joined the Blue Frontier team in 2022 as a Paid Advertising Executive. He specialises in paid ad campaigns on social media– such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest – and also delves into PPC from time to time. Having previously worked at a digital media company constructing paid social media campaigns, Ben plans, creates and manages similar campaigns for a wide variety of our clients, maintaining close contact in order to best understand their needs and business goals. Keen to expand his existing digital marketing skillset, Ben is always looking to learn something new and is never afraid to combat a new challenge.
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