<h1> brand awareness vs reach </h1>
Clients ask us all the time what we can do with a small media budget. So we thought we would write a post to help everyone understand the options better on Facebook. So for context, when we choose a campaign objective, Facebook will optimize towards serving the ad to people who will fulfill your objective. e.g Brand Awareness ads, clicks, post engagement, landing page views. All depending on your marketing goals.
What is Reach
So reach & frequency campaigns basically just spend your money looking to hit as many people as possible. Anyone that is solely selling you on reach is only giving you half the story. While reach and organic reach are important to help determine whether our budget is sufficient. It’s good for topline brand awareness campaigns, but if you actually want your users to complete an action after it appears in their news feed, ( click your ad, go to a page, buy a product) they’re not in the right place. If you’re just trying to get the monthly reach figures higher then yeah, you should be running this campaign objective.
Traffic (link clicks)
Facebook will find – within your audience – people who are more likely to click on the ad. That’s why they have a behavior trait for people who are most likely to buy online! This means over the course of the first 24 hours (estimating you’re running the campaign for a week) it’ll be in learning/optimization phase, trying to serve the ad to people in your audience and learn who completes the action.
Once it’s done that, it’ll keep serving the ad set to people in your audience matching the people who’ve done it in the first 24 hours. To that end, Facebook needs to match your targeted audience to other users, not necessarily the traits of what you think your audience is. Let’s face it humans have lots of traits, interests, behaviors, many overlaps and some of the best targeting may have nothing to do with what you thought your users are. HA!
What does this mean?
Well, it’s why your reach is lower. It’s serving it to fewer people in an effort to only serve it to people who will click. How big is the audience you’ve built? My advice would be to create an audience of between 1.5-3m people so Facebook has a big enough pool to really find people who are going to do your action. Sign up, Buy your stuff!
Other options
Tracking – While Facebook tracking is effective, here at Spark factory we built our business on dashboards, custom goals, and tracking. Tracking a client via a cross-channel customer journey is optimal. PiWik, does just that. Using a Facebooks goals method you’ll be able to optimize towards ‘conversions’ on Facebook instead, which are more accurate than link clicks as they only register when the pixel fires on the page when somebody signs up, clicks on a product, etc etc.
Moreover, if you are working with an ad budget under $500 per month you may want to consider doing something better with those dollars than throwing them in the Facebook pond. With over 800 million users on Facebook, your competition is will to spend a more on the low end.
