Rose Leadem says, “As a small business, you don’t need to spend loads of money on advertising. There are plenty of free or low-cost tools that you can use to effectively market your company. One of the biggest opportunities is through social media, specifically Facebook. Ninety-five percent of social media marketers say that Facebook gave them the best return of investment out of all the social platforms. With more than 1.5 billion monthly users, that’s not surprising. Although Facebook advertising is pretty straightforward and easy to use, there are certain things you should know before... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “Facebook’s iAd-like Canvas ads can be as labor-intensive as they are immersive. The social network unveiled the creative kitchen sink of an ad format in September 2015. Since then, brands have had to manually create each individual Canvas ad on Facebook’s desktop site — uploading the photos and videos, typing out the text and links, placing each element on each page and so on. Now, Facebook is automating that production process. On Monday, Facebook debuted a way for brands to create Canvas ads through third-party software tools that use its Marketing API. As a result,... [...]

Ayaz Nanji says, “The average clickthrough rate (CTR) for Facebook ads across all industries is 0.90%, according to recent research from WordStream. The report was based on November 2016 through January 2017 Facebook advertising data for 256 US-based WordStream clients in 18 industries: apparel, auto, B2B, beauty, consumer services, education, employment/job training, finance/insurance, fitness, home improvement, healthcare, industrial services, legal, real estate, retail, technology, and travel/hospitality. Legal advertisers have the highest average CTR on Facebook ads (1.61%); employment/job... [...]

Zak Stambor says, “Facebook Inc.’s newest shopping ad format, which it calls Collection, aims to drive product discovery while also presenting mobile users who tap on the ad a direct-response format that leads them to click and buy. The ads will begin rolling out Thursday. Collection provides a mobile ad format for retailers to tell “visual product stories,” says Maz Sharafi, Facebook’s director of product marketing. The ads feature a primary video or image above product images. When a user clicks on the ad, it quickly opens a full-screen display that features up to 50 products at... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “Traditionally, clicking on a brand’s ad on Facebook would open a dedicated microsite or product catalog hosted outside of Facebook. But Facebook continues to roll out mobile ad formats that bring those off-Facebook experiences inside the social network. On Thursday, Facebook unveiled a showy new shopping ad format called Collection, the latest addition to the line of immersive, mobile-only ad formats that it introduced with the iAd-like Canvas in September 2015. If Canvas was aimed at brands looking to attract attention, Collection is intended for marketers as concerned... [...]

Antony Maina says, “According to the latest report from research firm eMarketer, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are continuing to consolidate their hold on digital advertising. The firm says that total digital spending will increase by 16 percent this year to $83 billion. Google’s U.S. revenue from digital ads is expected to increase about 15 percent while Facebook’s is expected to jump 32 percent. The Benefits of Google and Facebook Advertising “Google’s dominance in search, especially mobile search, is largely coming from the growing tendency of consumers to turn... [...]

Tim Peterson says, “Facebook is opening up its video ad revenue stream to more publishers and creators, though it’s not giving advertisers any more control over or insight into which videos include their ads. On Thursday, Facebook extended the ability for certain Pages and Profiles to insert mid-roll video ads within their Facebook Live broadcasts, and at the same time, the company officially announced that it has started testing these mid-roll ads, which it calls “ad breaks,” within non-live videos, as was reported last month. Facebook also expanded in-stream video ads to all eligible... [...]

Laura Forer says, “Facebook ad targeting allows marketers to carefully select an audience. It’s a powerful way for Facebook advertisers to hyper-target very specific groups. But ad targeting can also be overwhelming, because there are so many options to choose from. An infographic by Facebook ad agency Advertisemint brings clarity to the ad targeting choices by breaking them down into five categories: 1. Demographics: Targeting options include age, gender, interest, and language, among many others. 2. Connections: Targeting options include people who liked a brand’s Facebook page... [...]

Hope Horner says, “Finally! You can now make real money using Facebook videos. This mega-platform is clearly taking video seriously as an advertising resource — as it should. Historically, Facebook videos have been free of advertisements; but then came last year’s announcement that pre-roll ads would play before videos within Facebook’s Audience Network. And that started brands exploring new ways to leverage video on the platform. What’s become popular over the last year, for example, is in-article ads appearing between paragraphs of text on mobile; they begin playing silently... [...]

Kerry Flynn says, “You may scroll through something so fast on Facebook that you don’t notice it. But Facebook wants every moment to count — at least in what it presents to advertisers. The company announced Friday they will provide millisecond-level data for ads on Facebook, Instagram and its online ad ecosystem Audience Network. Now, for the first time through Facebook, advertisers can see how long their ads were seen by the millisecond. That includes how many milliseconds overall the ad was on a screen and then broken out into how many milliseconds 100 percent of the ad was on... [...]