16 Benefits of Advertising on Facebook For Your Business

Facebook is now one of the most popular marketing platforms on the planet. As the social giant has grown to more than 2.7 billion active users, it’s also expanded its advertising network to suit a wide range of businesses.

Now a ton of the benefits of advertising on Facebook are obvious, but paid advertising does come with a lot of complexities. It’s important to understand what Facebook offers businesses and how its paid ad network is built to offer a bunch of advertising options before you can see how it might help you reach new audiences.

1. Micro-target your exact audiences

Social media advertising for most platforms means giving advertisers the ability to focus ads towards their own target audiences using data from users – and Facebook is no different. In fact one of the main benefits of advertising on Facebook is that the platform is very data-rich. You can micro-target the audiences that are best for your business.

Facebook has a meticulous level of detail that lets you narrow down the demographic for every ad you run. Businesses can create ads to narrow down their target audiences for segments under:

Gender
Age
Location
Spoken languages
Interests (expressed interests, likes, and hobbies from their Facebook profile)
Education level or history
Job title
Income
Political affiliation
Interests
Behaviors and recent purchases
Major life events

Facebook’s ads allow for extremely precisely targeted options. Businesses can define their own audiences based on the above categories and then set up campaigns for these “core audiences.” Another one of the best benefits of Facebook advertising for your business is that you can also target people who have previously interacted with your brand.

The platform’s ad network uses “Audience Insights” with aggregate data on people who interact with your brand page along with data on how they interact on the rest of Facebook. With custom audiences built-in Audience Insights, marketers can then move those over to the Facebook “Ads Manager” tool.

2. It has the highest retail ROAS for any social platform

Facebook’s user feed ads are the single best-performing ad type for eCommerce. In fact, Facebook is dominating with its Facebook Feed, Messenger, and Marketplace ad types all taking the top spots. Plus, according to Statista, 41% of surveyed marketers claimed that Facebook gave them the best ROAS, putting it at the top of the most popular social media sites for marketing.

3. Better ad types for your business needs

There are multiple types of ads to choose from for Facebook business advertising:

Photo – These are static single images, plus a caption.
Video – Video ads range in terms of length and can be set to appear in-stream, in user feeds, or in Stories.
Stories – Stories are customizable ads that take up the whole screen. They can be videos or static images and tapping on Stories ads brings the user to your site (or whatever page you set).
Messenger – These ads appear between conversations on the Facebook Messenger App.
Carousel – Carousel ads are comprised of up to ten static images that the user can scroll through.
Slideshow – These ads show short video-like clips made with motion, sound, and text.
Collection – Collection ads showcase multiple products in a single ad, all of which can be individually interacted with by a user.
Playables – These are interactive demo games that users can preview before they download the app or game.

One of the benefits of advertising on Facebook for your business is that you’re not limited to certain ad types and aren’t locked into plain text ads (like you are with search engine PPC). In fact these ad types cater better to branding since they give marketers the ability to create visual, creative, graphic-style ads with multi-media elements: video, photo, text etc.

4. They can be affordable and low cost (you set your own budget)

Like a lot of pay-per-click style advertising platforms, Facebook Ads are freely available to all businesses – and the Ads Manager tool is free as well. The only cost is the cost associated with supplying a budget and running ads.

The cost of running ads on Facebook is determined by a lot of factors (your budget, your ad types, industry, etc.) but generally, marketers should expect to pay anywhere from a few cents to a couple dollars per click.

5. Facebook ads can give results very fast

Once ad campaigns are set up in the Ads Manager, are reviewed by Facebook, and once they go live, they start working immediately and begin showing your brand/products to potentially thousands of people instantly. Ads are normally approved within 24 hours, so the Facebook advertising benefits come from giving businesses a way to start getting sales within a couple days.

6. Facebook offers ads for your specific business goals

Marketers can also choose from a range of “advertising objectives” that suit their business goals. This is great for businesses that want to prioritize different results for their ads. For example, ads can be designed to drive more: post engagement/interaction, more site traffic, lead generation, etc.

In fact a benefit of Facebook advertising for your business is that you can set up “Ad Objectives” for greater brand awareness, brand consideration, or for just straight conversions! For example, specific ads can be set up for:

Boosted post ads that are set to help improve engagement or for your high-value content.
Page promotions meant for getting more people to like and engage with your business’s Facebook page.
Website ads for website referral traffic.
Call-to-action promotions. This way people can interact with your page with a customize button designed for your goals.

Plus their ad platform also let’s business focus on broader goals for business growth like leads, sales, and expanding visibility. The Ads Manager tool offers Facebook advertising benefits in the form of ad objectives designed specifically for these needs. Ad creation and objective options include:

Lead generation and information collection based on audience interests.
Greater conversions which can include anything from product sales to app interactions, downloads, form-fill outs, and more.
Emphasis on brand awareness by reaching more people and displaying your ads to people that are more like to pay attention.

7. Access to one of the largest audiences in the world

With more than 2.7 billion active users, the Facebook ads platform gives businesses access to one of the single largest digital ad networks. But that’s not all, since its acquisition of Instagram in 2012, the social media giant has built out its ad network to give easy access to both platforms.

Their ad network extents across both sites to give advertisers an option to have their ads display on each – with little extra set-up.

Instagram now has more than 1 billion users as well, and its daily active users are well over 500 million. In fact both Facebook and Instagram have great usage stats.

8. Access to powerful, in-depth data

Facebook’s Ads Manager gives businesses a wide range of performance insights and aggregate data. Each ad you create can be measured through their ad tools. This access to in-depth data exemplifies the profound benefits of Facebook ads, turning insights into impactful actions for businesses of all sizes.

Ad measurement gives insight into ad performance including ad demographics with anonymized information on users, multi-channel data comparisons (like with TV ads), and also negative advertising data (here Facebook gives advertisers control to make sure their ads don’t show up in areas where they don’t want it to).

Breakdowns in Ads Manager lets businesses see things like audience age, gender, locations, devices, and more, like breakdowns for ads types and user actions.
Attribution reports can help identify the most important touch-points of the marketing funnel.
Ad comparisons and split-testing options for fine-tuning campaigns with variations.

9. A/B ad testing for performance growth

Another benefit of Facebook advertising includes testing tools for your businesses to improve ad results. Namely A/B testing where marketers can display near-identical ads (with minor differences) to see which adjustments perform better over time, with data.

Facebook’s ad platform gives businesses the option to use splitting testing in order to test and display ad variants. Plus split test ads can be set up: for time periods (1-30 days), with specific budgets, and with custom audiences.

10. Pay-per-click ads through Facebook are easy to set up

Facebook advertising is available to basically all businesses and entrepreneurs. And the entire ad system exists within Facebook, all that’s needed is a Facebook page or an “advertiser” role for an existing page.

From there ads can be created:

From the business page itself (by clicking on “Business Manager” from the admin menu).
Through the ad creation page on Facebook.
Through the Ads Manager mobile app.

To take advantage of Facebook advertising, that’s all that’s needed to get started. From there marketers can set up goals, and ad campaigns, find audiences and more, using the in-house tools.

11. Filter ads to block audiences you don’t want

Facebook’s pay-per-click advertising model also provides marketers the options to prevent ads from showing for low-quality markets or non-performing audiences. This is one of the Facebook advertising benefits their system offers.

“Block lists” can be set up in an ads campaign to prevent your business ads from showing to URLs where you don’t want to appear. You can prevent your pages from showing in in certain apps, certain pages in the Audience Network.

12. Ad forecasting and performance estimates

There’s another big benefit of advertising on Facebook’s ad network: forecasting. With ads that have enough data, they can make estimates about how many people can be reached, and how many results can be gained per day (with a full ad budget).

Their “Estimated Daily Results” feature can be useful for brands that want to know more about adjustments in their ad campaigns. These predictions show daily estimated reach and daily estimated results that appear when you’re creating or editing an ad set.

Both estimated reach and estimated daily results are available for app installs, event responses, landing page views, link clicks, lead generation, offer claims, conversions, page engagement, page likes, post engagement and video views.

13. Facebook ads remarketing

Remarketing means advertising to audiences or visitors who have already previously interacted with your brand or expressed interest in your business. Usually done through cookies/session tracking.

One of the benefits of Facebook advertising for your business is that you can use this strategy to increase revenue, boost conversion rates or get better ROAS.

This strategy works using the “Facebook pixel” – a small snippet of code that you post in your site to help target customers and visitors. It tracks people, along with the types of actions they take on your site like any Facebook ads they viewed before visiting, pages they visit, add-to-cart actions, and more.

14. Sponsored messages offer very strong benefits

We already talked about the different ad types above – of which messenger ads are only one kind. But the benefits of advertising on Facebook’s messaging service are so strong that it’s worthwhile mentioning it again.

One of the biggest advantages of Facebook ads compared to other platforms – especially search PPC – is its Sponsored Message feature. Sponsored messages give businesses the ability to send offers, promotions, and updates directly to people who communicate with them on the Facebook messaging platform.

15. You reach more people than with just organic social media

This is another reason why advertising on Facebook is worthwhile. Because businesses will reach more people than with just their organic social media marketing. And they’ll be able to expand the reach of their existing content both on-platform and off.

Paid advertising and organic advertising aren’t exclusive though, you can do both! And with ad types specifically designed for engagement, signups, or followings, paid-ads can actually improve your organic traffic as well.

16. They give better content marketing results

Facebook ads can be used to bolster an existing content marketing campaign. Content marketing is a broad digital marketing method that involves on-site content, blogging, social media, and even search engine optimization. Facebook can help in all of these areas.

Facebook ads can help a business get more visibility for their Facebook content and boost traffic to their core website content – whether it’s cornerstone site content, simple ad copy, or blogs. Facebook ads can be set up to target greater site traffic, more impressions, and even click-through-rate (CTR).

Ad Objectives are set up specifically with these goals as available targets:

Traffic as an objective means ads built specifically to get people onto your site, for a specific landing page.
Engagement as an objective can help people interact more with your organic content on your business page – using comments, likes, shares, etc.
Video views can be prioritized for multi-media and video content campaigns.