The Anatomy Of A Facebook Ad

Facebook has several different campaign types with different ad formats depending on your business goal. It is important to choose the right ad format for each campaign. Firstly, you must decide the goal or purpose of the campaign – is it for awareness, consideration or conversion? This will help determine what ad format you should use as each ad format is designed for a different goal.

 Let’s break it down.. 

  • Image or video – choose an image that represents your brand and attracts your target audience. It needs to stand out in a very busy newsfeed! The best ratio for standard newsfeed image or video ad is square 1080 x1080 pixels or above. To learn more about the required ad image sizes for Facebook & Instagram read our Knowledge Base article
  • Headline – this can have the most impact on ad performance. The headline needs to be simple and to the point to catch people’s attention!
  • Primary text - this is the portion of text that sits above the image or video. It can be as short or as long as you want, but keep in mind a couple of points:  on some of the non-newsfeed placements, the text will get truncated to a maximum of 125 characters & on mobile newsfeed – which is our most important placement – only the first 3 lines are shown before the “see more” option needs to be clicked to see the full ad text, that means we need to front-load the text, i.e. put anything important in the first sentence.
  • Call to Action - CTA – button encourages users to click on the ad and visit your website. ‘Learn More’ or ‘Book Now’ perform the best for our clients. 
  • Description - this section of the text sits underneath the headline and won’t be displayed for all placements. Usually, this means it will be displayed on desktop newsfeed only or sometimes on the mobile newsfeed but only when the headline is really short and leaves space for the description. It is a good place to highlight any USPs. 

Performance Metrics - what to use:

These are the metrics that indicate the ad health and performance: 

  • Results: landing page views (link) or leads (forms submitted) depending on the type of campaign
  • Impressions: the number of times an ad was displayed
  • Purchases: bookings made by someone who clicked on an ad (any booking made on the site so not necessarily from the offer advertised)
  • Conversion Value: total value of all bookings made by the ad