The mission of social media is to create a vibrant community. Advertising on Facebook can really jumpstart this process. When seen from the surface, advertising on Facebook looks simple. You create an image, write the headline and ad copy, choose your target audience and budget, and you’re set. Right? Well, not quite, at least not with Power Editor. Facebook’s Power Editor is a Google Chrome add-on you can install to your Facebook account that can greatly improve the quality of your advertisements. You can view the installation guide on Facebook’s Help Center.
So how can the Power Editor help you? Here is a list of four mind-blowing ways:
1. Increased Targeting Capabilities with “Partner Categories”
For those of you who are somewhat aware of how Facebook advertising works, you will know that it allows you to target your audience by broad categories.
These “broad categories” capture the interests that Facebook users have placed in their profile. So if you were targeting people who like games, “broad interests” will include only those users who have listed “gaming” as one of their hobbies. But if an avid gamer does not list “gaming” as one of their hobbies, what do you do?
In Power Editor, an added feature you can access is “partner categories.” Earlier this year, Facebook partnered with three third party data providers: Axciom, Datalogix, and Epsilon. These data providers essentially collect the off-Facebook purchasing and lifestyle activities of users, and shares them with Facebook. This way, if a person did not list “gaming” as one of their interests, you will still be able to target them if they had bought any gaming-related items from anywhere on the Internet.
Advice for Brands: With partner categories, you will be able to more comprehensively target your audience by their interests and lifestyles. This is especially useful for businesses who are in a more niche industry in which broad categories will often not yield an optimized enough audience.
2. Streamlining Your Targeting with Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences allows you to create a database of target audiences on Facebook from your current e-mails, phone numbers, and Facebook user IDs. For example, say that you have just collected 100 e-mails from launching a white paper about lead generation. With these e-mails, you can go to your Power Editor and store them in a database for future use.
Advice for Brands: Using custom audiences can really streamline your targeting efforts. In this example, we can assume that the users who gave you their e-mails are interested in marketing, particularly in lead generation. Store these e-mails in the database and use them to target any future ads promoting a lead generation piece.
3. Expanding Your Audience with Custom Audiences
Let’s continue from the previous example in which you are left with 100 e-mails of individuals with a marketing interest, particularly in lead generation. With custom audiences, not only can you store these e-mails for future targeting, you can also expand your audience by asking Facebook to find similar audiences.
The way that Facebook finds these lookalike audiences is by analyzing the off-Facebook activities associated with these e-mails. So if the 100 e-mails you have gathered previously have been used to sign-up or register for other lead generation articles, Facebook will find more users for you who had also subscribed or signed up to these similar topics.
Advice for Brands: A lot of research is needed in order to effectively target your audience. This can cost you a lot of time and money that you may not want to spend. With the lookalike audience feature in custom audiences, you can easily find these audiences without spending too much of either.
4. Conduct A/B Testing by Creating “Dark Posts”
What are “dark posts,” you ask? They are simply posts you created that can only be seen by the target audience through an ad. In other words, without promoting your dark posts, it will not be seen by anyone except yourself.
As some of you may know, A/B testing your promoted posts can be challenging. It may require you to create two different posts on your timeline simultaneously, which can make it look very spammy. How can we get around this?
Advice for Brands: You can begin by creating a dark post that runs parallel with your control (original) post. This will allow you to conduct A/B testing on your posts without having to duplicate them on your timeline, improving the performance of your advertisement without having to make it look spammy.
Power Editor, if used correctly, can really improve the effectiveness of your advertisements. It will allow you to target your audience better and faster. This streamlined capabilities can ultimately decrease the amount of resources you need to put in Facebook advertising, thus increasing your ROI.
