Facebook Video Advertising
Advertise on Facebook with compelling video ads
Video advertising on Facebook
Facebook is one of the most popular video advertising channels in the UK. With it’s large audience and detailed targeting options, it is great for generating awareness and response for businesses of all sizes. Facebook is a highly effective channel for video advertising, whether to complement an existing TV campaign, or as a standalone channel for promoting video ads that are tailor-made for Facebook.
Here we examine how you get started with Facebook Video Advertising.
At a glance
- Facebook Video Advertising offers businesses of all sizes a large UK audience and is an incredibly powerful way to communicate your message and drive response
- Facebook has a wide range of targeting tools and campaign types to help you target the audience that’s right for your business
- Facebook Video Ads are different from TV ads and need to be created with mobile viewing in mind
- You can spend as much or as little as you want on Facebook Video Ads campaign
- You can buy Facebook Video Ads on a self-service basis, but if your new to Facebook Video Ads we’d recommend you talk to an expert
What are the benefits of Facebook Video Advertising?
You should consider Facebook Video Advertising for a number of reasons:
- Audience Reach and Size: when you buy Facebook Video Ads you can target a huge audience. Facebook claims to have a 90%+ reach into the UK adult market – and remember as Facebook owns Instagram you can choose to target Instagram users as well as Facebook users
- Targeting: Facebook has a wealth of data on its users. This means advertisers can create audiences within the Facebook Ad platform to target their products. For example, you can define audiences by age, gender, location and a range of interests which is based on their browsing behaviour and other factors
- Custom Audiences: you can also create ‘custom audiences’ to target. You can target people who have liked your Facebook page. If you have the correct GDPR permissions you can upload an email list to target. And you can create ‘look-a-like’ audiences, which are audiences which have similarities to your core custom audiences
- Impact and viral effect: Facebook is a busy environment, so you want your video to stand out and engage the viewer. Consider the first frame of the video and get your key messages out in the first few seconds so you get your brand in front of the viewer even if they don’t watch your video in entirety. Do this well and you may get a viral effect, where people like and share your video which effectively creates more viewers of your ad for free
- Objectives focused: Facebook offers a number of campaign types, so whether you want to raise brand awareness, or target enquiries there are campaign types you can select to target your campaign objectives
Which brands should consider Facebook Video Advertising?
Facebook Video Advertising can be very effective for a wide range of brands and businesses. We’ve already looked at the powerful targeting available to help you find your audience, but there are also a range of ‘campaign types’, enabling you to set up campaigns to target different business objectives. For example a large FMCG brand may want to create a campaign with an objective of awareness, where they simply want to reach a high volume of people; whereas a small local business may be more interested in focusing their video at a defined audience in a tightly defined location.
What types of Facebook Video Advertising packages are available?
There is a wide range of Facebook Video Ad campaigns which you can buy. These are typically defined by the objectives of your advertising campaign. The first thing you do when you set up a Facebook campaign is to select the campaign objective. Here’s the range of options you see in the Facebook Ads Manager. Here is a quick run through of campaign type you can choose for you video ad campaign:
Campaign Types to Raise Awareness
If you simply want to raise awareness of your services, there are two campaign options:
- Brand Awareness – to increase people’s awareness of your business, brand or service.
- Reach – to show your ad to as many people as possible in your target audience.
Campaign Types to Raise Awareness
If your objective is to increase consideration of your services, you can encourage users to click a link on your Facebook Video Ad to connect people to your Facebook page, your website, a blog post or an app. There are five campaign types:
- Engagement – to reach people more likely to engage with your Facebook Video Ad. Engagement includes likes, comments and shares but can also include offers claimed from your Page.
- App Installs -to send people to the shop where they can download your business’s app.
- Video Views – particularly relevant to video ads, this campaign type targets your videos to people on Facebook most likely to watch it.
- Lead Generation – to collect leads for your business. Create ads that collect info from people interested in your product, such as sign-ups for newsletters.
- Messages – connect with people on Facebook, communicate with potential or existing customers to encourage interest in your business.
Conversion Campaigns
Conversion Campaigns are geared at creating leads and sales from viewers of your video ad. There are three campaign options:
- Conversions – encourage people to take a specific action on your website, such as having them to add items to a cart, download your app, register for your site, or make a purchase.
- Catalogue Sales – which shows products from your e-commerce store’s catalogue to generate sales.
- Store Traffic – to promote your brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby.
As you can see there are a lot of points to consider when running a Facebook Video Ad campaign.
What types of creative work for Facebook Video Ads
There is an art in creating good Facebook Video Ads. Facebook provides a completely different viewing environment to linear TV, so you will need to adapt your TV ad or better still create video ads with Facebook in mind. Check out this research on video ad viewing habits from Facebook:
Source: Facebook
So here are our five top tips for creating your killer Facebook Video Ad:
- Grab attention quickly – the majority of Facebook Video Ads are viewed on mobile devices; so your video needs to be ‘thumb stopping’ – focus on the the first few seconds to arrest the scrolling viewers’ interests
- Keep it simple – don’t over complicate your ad. Be very clear and single-minded in what you want to communicate. Don’t have too many words on the ad.
- Keep it short – attention spans are limited, so keep your video ad between 5 and 15 seconds – so get your brand out there early in the ad
- Copy – you can add a title and short copy description next to your video ad. Make this as compelling and benefit-driven as possible to encourage the user to view the ad
- Sound – around 85% of Video Ads will autoplay with sound off, with users electing to turn sound on. So make sure visuals, subtitles or text on screen conveys the critical messages.
Facebook Video Ad formats and guidelines
Getting formats right for Facebook Video Ads is also critical to campaign success. Most TV ads are created in 16:9 widescreen format, but remember most Facebook Video Ads are viewed on mobile phones. Here are some points to consider:
- Technical requirements – make sure your video complies with Facebook technical guidelines. This covers issues like technical form. Facebook recommends H.264 compression, square pixels, fixed frame rate, progressive scan and stereo AAC audio compression at 128+ kbps.
- Video aspect ratio – bearing in mind most people view on a phone the most popular ratios are square and vertical. Also remember Facebook Video Ads can appear across the whole Facebook and Instagram environment, encompassing feeds, stories, desktop, mobile. Research suggest that the square format gives the opportunity for maximum reach.
Source: Facebook
How much does Facebook Video Advertising cost?
There is no single answer to that question unfortunately. But your Facebook Video Advertising will have three components: video creation, media cost, and campaign management:
Facebook video ad creation costs
There are so many approaches to this. You can re-edit or adapt existing video content, or you can create a new video ad. You can try to do it yourself, or you can go to a specialist agency. And you can even experiment with video ad creation platforms like Animoto and Promo. For a basic video ad, edited from pre-existing assets we’d estimate a £1k to £5k cost – and higher if you were creating something from scratch.
Facebook video ad media campaign costs
The good news is that there is no minimum entry point to Facebook Video Advertising; you can set a budget you are comfortable with, and take it from there – so if you wanted to spend say £10 a day, no problem. However as we saw above there is a wide range of campaign types available to target your Facebook Video Ad. Each campaign type will have a different cost base, usually calculated in CPM – or cost per thousand ad impressions. The pricing by campaign type varies massively – but typically Awareness campaigns are less than £2 CPM, Consideration campaigns between £2 and £6 CPM and Conversion campaigns £6+ – and can be considerably higher.
Campaign management and set up costs
Facebook is a complicated ad platform for the uninitiated. That said, it is easy to get a campaign live through the Facebook self service platform, but it’s also easy to waste your money without the right level of knowledge and understanding. So you will need to either develop Facebook campaign management knowledge quickly (no doubt making mistakes along the way) or hire a specialist or a specialist agency. Either way, it takes time. So costs may vary based on how much set up is required and the size and scope of the campaign. There will be a minimum fee, no doubt based on a specialists day rate; and then you should budget 10% to 15% of total ad spend to manage your campaign. These fees should really pay for themselves in getting your spending and results optimised and delivering. Our Facebook specialists can give you a quick estimate if required.
How can I buy Facebook Video Advertising in the UK?
You can buy Facebook Video Advertising either yourself, directly in the Facebook Platform or via a specialist advertising agency.
If you are buying yourself, you will need a Facebook account and ideally a Facebook page for your business. You can then open a free Business Manager account and from there create an Ad Campaign. You will also need to add a Facebook Pixel to your website, so that Facebook can build reports and track the success of your campaign. As discussed above it can be a little daunting, so make sure you read the Facebook Business set up section of their website before you start.
Alternatively, do contact a specialist agency. They can help navigate set up and will be able to create Facebook Video Ads (and non-video ads), and create campaigns which are optimised using the full suite of tools available. If you want to discuss Facebook Video advertising, please call us on 0800 133 7104 or contact us and we’ll get right back to you.
