Advertising on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is a powerful lever for increasing your visibility, generating leads and boosting sales. However, to maximize your return on investment, it's essential to structure your campaign properly, optimize targeting and monitor performance.
In this article, find out how to effectively launch your Meta ad, and optimize your campaign according to your objective, target audience and budget.
Creating and configuring an advertising account
Before running ads, the first step is to create an advertising account via Meta Business Suite, which allows you to centralize campaign management. Next, you'll need to create or add an advertising account and associate a valid payment method (credit cards or e-wallets) with it.
Choice of campaign objective
Meta offers six main categories of advertising objectives:
- Awareness: Increase the visibility of your brand or product by showing your ad to the people most likely to remember your brand.
- Traffic: Redirect people to a destination page (website, application).
- Interactions: Get more messages, video views, interactions with your publications and "Likes" on your Page.
- Prospects: Generate leads for your company or brand via instant forms, messenger or whatsApp.
- Application promotion: Find new people who will install and use your application.
- Sales: target people likely to buy a product or service. This objective is ideal for optimizing sales on a website or application, or for reaching the users most likely to contact you via Messenger.
Meta target audience definition
The success of an advertisement depends largely on the relevance of its audience. The target audience on Meta Ads refers to the group of people you want to reach with your ads.
Meta Ads offers an advanced targeting system based on several criteria:
- Demographic data (age, gender, marital status)
- Geographical data (country, city, district)
- Interests and behaviors (favorite pages, interactions, purchasing habits).
Creating an impactful ad
The format and content of your ad determine its effectiveness. Meta Ads offers different formats:
- Single image: simple and quick to create, it's suitable for clear, direct messages and is ideal for grabbing attention immediately.
- Carousel: displays multiple products or features in a single ad, and allows swiping to see more elements.
- Video: attracts more attention than a static image, and can be used to explain a product or service in greater detail.
However, a good visual is not enough: text plays an equally important role. To grab attention, write a punchy tagline, highlight a clear added value and end with an effective call to action such as: "Order now", "Try for free".
Budget and cost of advertising on Meta
The cost of a Meta Ads campaign depends on a number of factors. The greater the competition for your target audience, the higher the costs. Similarly, the objective of your campaign and the optimization of your ad (quality of visuals, relevance of targeting, user engagement) also play a key role in the overall cost of your campaign.
For example, a brand awareness campaign can work with a smaller budget, while a lead acquisition campaign often requires a larger budget to generate concrete results.
Meta Ads works on a bidding system, so if your budget is too low, your ads may only be shown to a limited extent. However, a higher budget doesn't always guarantee better performance. For example, in a lead acquisition campaign, it's possible to achieve the same results with a budget of €10 per day as with €15 per day, provided that targeting parameters and optimization are well defined.
To test and analyze performance, you can start your campaign with a minimum budget of €5 to €10 per day for a few days. This will enable you to obtain relevant data before gradually optimizing and increasing your daily budget.
Optimizing advertising campaigns for better performance
Once you've launched your ad, it's crucial to analyze its performance to optimize your budget and maximize your results. Here are a few key indicators to analyze:
- Coverage (number of unique people who have seen your ad), impressions (number of times your ad has been seen). These indicators allow you to evaluate the visibility of your ad.
- The click-through rate (CTR) 🔗: The percentage of people who clicked on your ad compared to the number of impressions.
- Cost per acquisition: A key indicator for a lead generation campaign. The cost per acquisition is calculated by dividing the total amount spent by the total number of leads obtained.
- Cost per click (CPC) : Represents the average cost you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. The cost per click is calculated by dividing the total amount spent by the total number of clicks.
- Cost per view (CPV) : Cost per view is used for video campaigns and represents the average cost you pay each time a user views your video. It is calculated by dividing the total amount spent by the total number of views.
Optimizing advertising campaigns means adjusting targeting, visuals and text according to performance. If an audience doesn't convert, test a new one. If an ad underperforms, change the visual or the tagline. The key is to continuously test, analyze and adjust to maximize results.
