Powerful and scalable advertising, but hard to master!
February 13, 2019
Powerful and scalable advertising, but hard to master!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Facebook for Business
We use it to advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Is used by the Marketing department, mostly. Currently, we use it to catch new customers, to retarget our customers who got lost in the funnel and also to retarget our previous customers.
Based on the huge amount of potential customers and the heavy usage of both platforms, we are able to communicate with customers in a way that would be hard elsewhere. It also helps us capture emails so we can nurture our database and own our channels.
Based on the huge amount of potential customers and the heavy usage of both platforms, we are able to communicate with customers in a way that would be hard elsewhere. It also helps us capture emails so we can nurture our database and own our channels.
- Segmentation is HUGE. You can segment by almost anything you want, be it demographic, sociological, behavioral... you name it. You can also create targets based on your visitors and their actions. Even custom lists.
- They are very good at optimizing your campaigns automatically. This is so important because it will improve your ROI in several multiples otherwise
- Managing ads in general works fine, and the data, even though is not exactly as accurate as Analytics, it's pretty decent.
- Gives you placements and different ad types so you can get the most out of it.
- Pixel and catalog integration are very powerful. You can almost instantly start tracking and catalog fetches your site daily for updates.
- Approval of ads and in general customer service sucks. They won't make you feel like a customer. You'll have to be very careful and beg in case they cancel your account (it happened to us once and they were completely mistaken).
- Scaling the creation and management of ads was huge room for improvement. The platform is slow and it still misses many massive actions and copying campaigns from one type doesn't let you use the same ads for a different objective... many small management problems that aggregated are not so well.
- More visibility on their optimization process, so we can also take advantage of it. Some things are a black box.
- Catalog management works fine but still misses many features to make our lives easier.
- Definitely has a positive ROI with increasing sales, but beware because it's not easy to measure on every stage of the funnel (how much does an ad in the very top of the funnel should be accounted for on a sale?). Attribution is hard sometimes.
- Managing is expensive and time-consuming. So far we haven't been able to find any solution to automate this. We are using automatic rules but you still need to be on top of things (considering how much budget we are spending on this).
- Beware on Facebook suspending your account. As I said before, the suspension was completely unjustified (they ended up activating it again) but don't over-rely on this platform because they just don't care if you spend your money there or elsewhere. They just don't give a damn about the customer (you).
- Google Ads (formerly AdWords)
We have used AdWords, but it's a different platform. In our case, we have more visual products and there's hard to find other scalable channels that let is contact new customers at the very top of the funnel.
Pinterest Ads could be a choice but they are very small in our country.
So, basically, that's why they are where they are: there isn't somebody as big as Facebook, with such a robust platform (for users and advertisers) that will let the scale of your advertising grow very quickly and so powerful.
Twitter Ads can be another option, but in our case, none of our customers use it, so...
Pinterest Ads could be a choice but they are very small in our country.
So, basically, that's why they are where they are: there isn't somebody as big as Facebook, with such a robust platform (for users and advertisers) that will let the scale of your advertising grow very quickly and so powerful.
Twitter Ads can be another option, but in our case, none of our customers use it, so...