Pro’s and Con’s of Facebook Advertising 

Pro’s and Con’s of Facebook Advertising

Chances are you’ve heard about paid-advertising online because you’re trying to grow your business, right? The demand is high and it’s growing every year. Arguably, with businesses growing, advertising does too. Almost all social media platforms offer it but do we actually know the pro’s AND con’s of online advertising? We’re going all detective and zooming in on Facebook advertising to see why so many marketers and business owners use it and why you should too! 

Pros 

• Broad audience
  Facebook has more than 1.4 billion daily active users. The biggest audience than any
  other social platform and it still continues to grow. Facebook gives you the ability to target
  a broad audience to expose your business to because they have the users on their
  platform. It’s an audience at their fingertips. Guaranteed.

• Visual content usage
  You can use images and videos to capture the interest of your target market, helping you
  to sell your products and services. Seeing as capturing people’s attention is very hard
  these days, this is an awesome feature to take advantage of. Visual content helps attract
  more attention to your ad and business.

• Advanced targeting approaches
  I just told you how Facebook has over 1.4 billion daily active users right? Well Facebook
  constantly collects data on every user, seeing what content they’re consuming, how they
  behave on the platform and what their interests are (in a non creepy way). This allows
  your brand to target a specific audience by targeting detailed demographics and
  locational areas as well as interests, income brackets, job titles and even the user’s
  purchasing history. You have the ability to really target an audience down to specific
  details.

• Complete Control over budget
  You can set it, change it, increase it, decrease it, whatever you like! Facebook ads give
  you full control over your budget, Just remember, the higher the bid, the higher the
  chance your ad will be shown to more people. This is great if in the case your ad is
  fatiguing and not performing how you’d like, you can pause any ads and save the rest of
  the money left in the budget you set at the beginning. 

• Instant return on investment
  This does depend on how well you create your ads and how they perform, but the point
  of this pro is that you can easily define a cost per conversion and understand what your
  profit is within days of running your ad.

• Easy to set up
  Compared to other ad platforms like Google Ad Words, Facebook Ads are super easy to
  set up. They almost give you a checklist whilst doing it. However, this shouldn’t
  overshadow the fact that it takes a lot of experience and skills to create great performing
  ads that convert for businesses.

Cons

• Costly
  Truth be told, it could definitely get costly if you set up or manage your ads incorrectly.
  You’d see little to no return. It’s important that you get your targeting options as refined as possible.

• Potential low conversion rate
  Reaching people too early in the buying cycle could potentially reduce your goal
  conversion rate and in comparison to Google ads, the conversion rate could be much
  lower because you’re not necessarily targeting people who are actively searching for your
  product and/or service.

• Absence of organic views
  Facebook have dropped organic views (non-ad posts) to a small percentage so they
  encourage you to spend money in order for your organic posts to be seen by people who
  are already following you. This is the ‘boosting’ feature on Facebook. When running ads,
  there is no such thing as organic views. If your ad reaches someone who is already
  following you, it doesn’t count as ‘free’ advertising when the click through to your website.

• No option to advertise at certain times and days of week
  Unless you’re on a lifetime budget, you can’t pick specific times of days when people are
  more active to run your ad. You can only select a start date and end date. 

There’s many advantages to running Facebook ads for your business, as you can see the pros definitely outweigh the cons. What’s great is that Facebook ads own Instagram so you have the ability to advertise on two platforms and applications all from one place.