The first quarter of 2015 was a busy, exciting and stressful time altogether for the Social Media world. We’ve seen the unofficial death of a social media platform, the birth of a new Twitter app and the return of the F8 Facebook conference, which gave us some really big and exciting news and updates you should be aware of.
Staying on top of the newest Facebook features will help your marketing get better results and will get you the best there is from this social media platform.
Here are the latest Facebook features you should be aware of and a few insights on how you can add them into your marketing mix.
Facebook Analytics for Apps
Last week, Facebook announced a new useful tool for analysing app campaign performance: Facebook Analytics for Apps. This free tool is designed to help marketers and developers track app audience demographics, user behaviour and engagement, as well as analyse app campaign performance.
The tool has four useful features:
1. Segments
Segments offer demographic information about the users who interact with your app and offer you the possibility to take a look at different segments with specific characteristics and compare them to another segment. You can compare app demographics to see how different segments use your app. For example, you might discover that most people who make purchases from your app are within the age range of 40-45, male and Android users. This insight can help you decide if you should increase the budget specifically for this segment.
2. Cohorts
Cohorts provides historical data insights for specific groups of users who performed a set of actions within your app. According to Facebook, the tool allows you to analyse and review specific KPIs for that group, such as: what percentage of them made a purchase, completed a registration process or recommended the app. For example, you can create a cohort or group of users who installed your app in Italy and discover that that specific group made more purchases than those in France. Using this insight will help you decide whether to invest more in mobile app ads in Italy or change the ad strategy in France, to attract more customers there.
3. Funnels
Using the funnels feature allows you to look closer into the user journey flow into the flow. This helps you see app user behaviour, the most visited product pages, check and analyse drop-offs, which can further help you figure out where to improve performance.
4. Advertising
Analytics for Apps offers a clear understanding on app ads, on how they are performing, as well as how you can improve future advertising campaigns. The tool measures the value of your lifetime Facebook ads and the overall performance of your app ads. For instance, you can analyse the value of customers acquired through ad campaigns in Europe and discover which country got you the most customers and at what cost.
Multi-Product Ads
Although the multi-product ads feature was announced last year, Facebook just recently started rolling out the new feature to advertisers using Power Editor. Multi-product ads allow you to showcase and advertise multiple products within a single ad.
Compared to the traditional ads, that only have an image, a headline, a description and a unique landing page, the multi-product ones (known as carousel ads) allow you to rotate different products in one ad. Each product has its own description, image and landing page. These types of ads are available only when using two campaign objectives:
- Clicks to Website
- Website Conversions
There are a few best practices you should keep in mind when crafting a multi-product ad. First of all, make sure you keep the headline and the description text short, so they’ll fit the screen. The best thing to do is to limit the headline to 25 characters and the link description to 30.
The second one is that multi-product ads have a square dimension of 600 x 600 pixels, so don’t use large, wide image. This size is available for both desktop and mobile ads.
Last, but not least, multi-product ads only run on the news feed and are not allowed in the right column of Facebook.
How do you create multi-product ads?
Want to set up your own multi-product ads? Follow these steps.
- Start creating a basic ad and select the “Clicks to website” or “Website conversions” as the campaign objective.
- Choose the option “Multiple images and links in one ad.”
- Complete all the fields for each of the ads: a destination URL, headline, description, and an image.
- If you want Facebook to determine the best order to show your ads, you can choose the “Automatically select and order images and links’’ option. By selecting this option, Facebook will continue to showcase your links in the order you added them. If left unchecked, Facebook will automatically organise them based on the level of engagement received.
- Complete the “See More URL” field. This will be the destination URL for final ad panel.
- Under “See More Display URL,” enter the URL you want to show in the ad.
- The ‘’Tracking’’ section displays any custom tracking tags or parameters you want to follow.
- Finally click “Upload Changes” to save your ad.
Other important Facebook features you should know about:
Featured Videos
Facebook is making a big push for videos, and not for nothing, as this has become one of the biggest forms of online advertising in the last few years and it will expect to span even more in the years to come. One of the latest updates from Facebook encourages business pages to upload a video and share it with their audience when they visit the Video tab. If you want to set up a featured video you have to click Videos in the page tab and then click Add Featured Video.
Messenger for Business
Another important update for the social media platform is the new Messenger Business, which connects businesses and consumers much faster and in an easier way. With Messenger Business, users will be able to send instant messages to companies through their Facebook page.
Some of these features will be available soon for all business pages, while some of them have already been rolled out a few weeks ago.
Which of these new Facebook features have you tried? How are they working for you? We’d love to hear your comments.
Want to find out more about the latest features for Facebook advertising? Read the second part of the blog here: New Facebook Tools & Features You Should Be Aware Of (part 2)
