The Basics
Campaign
This is a pretty general term for most advertisers, but it has a very specific meaning within Facebook’s ads platform.
A campaign has two key features — it contains one or more “ad sets” (more on that below), and it has an assigned objective that tells Facebooks adverting AI what to do with the ad sets it contains.
Objective
These are types of actions that a Facebook user may take when they see the ads within a campaign. As mentioned above, objectives tell Facebook’s AI what to do with your ads. Are you looking to raise awareness for your brand, or do you need an ad to generate leads?
Depending on your objective, Facebook will adjust when and where your ads are shown in a campaign.
Ad Sets
Think of Ad Sets like controllers for your campaign. This dimension of Facebook’s ad platform defines your targeting, budget, schedule, bidding and placement of each ad and impression. While it’s up to Facebook’s AI to pilot many of these factors, this level shapes the tactical delivery of your content.
Facebook Ad
Finally, we’re at the actual “ad” part! This is the creative piece of Facebook’s platform. An ad is the visual element that gets delivered to your prospective customers — the meat of it all!
Metrics
Impressions
A Facebook impression is the smallest unit of “attention” they can measure — one instance of one ad seen by one person. You could think of each impression like a leaflet that gets picked up by your target audience.
Reach
This is the number of unique people that see your ad. Each unit of reach usually includes several impressions.
Facebook Pixel
A pixel is a snippet of JavaScript software used outside of Facebook that measures how people use your website — pageviews, clicks, add to cart, etc.
This code sends these measurements back to Facebook to synchronize your advertising efforts between your website and ads campaigns. You can even build a target audience from the visitors to your site!
New and Advanced Features
Retargeting
Retargeting is the practice of using a Facebook Pixel to place Facebook ads in front of someone who visited your website. This is a big part of modern digital ad strategies that are designed to close digital sales through mere exposure.
Lookalike Audiences
This tool takes a “seed” audience and “grows” a brand new one from Facebook’s massive database of users.
Here’s how that works…
Let’s say you have a list of 100 current customers from your sales department’s CRM. A lookalike audience will take that list and try to find people that are similar based on stored demographic data.
Ad Auction
All Facebook ad buys are essentially a bidding war — you’re competing with other brands for the attention of the same people.
For each ad Facebook will display on its platform, there’s an algorithm that is selecting the best choice every time, and that choice is rarely the highest bidder.
How Facebook chooses an ad is calculated in real time, but factors like anticipated performance (will the buyer actually get the clicks they want?), the target’s personal preferences and even your account history are taken into account.
To “win” at auction, you simply need to have the best quality ad in the second that Facebook is generating the bit of content in the timeline, newsfeed or story.
Facebook Story
You’re probably familiar with the Facebook timeline and newsfeeds — they’re the core function of a Facebook account that include posts and pictures from your friends and liked pages. In fact, you probably interact with them every day on your own personal profile.
One of Facebook’s newest core features is called “Stories.” These are temporary, 24-hour pictures that brands can place content within.
Facebook is constantly adding new media for its users and introducing brand new advertising mediums along with it. As the platform continues to evolve, so will the ads and terminology we use to market. It’s an exciting time to be in social media marketing, especially Facebook Advertising!
