What Are Paid Social Media Ads?

Paid social media ads are display advertisements that can be targeted to specific people using that platform. They do this based on the data these users provide in their online interactions.

You can advertise on all kinds of platforms, but in this article we’ll focus on Facebook and Instagram, covering the Meta ads algorithm and the different components of an ad.

If you’re interested in paid advertising for your business, read on.

Key Terms

Reach — The number of users who view your ad once.

Impressions — How often your ads were on screen for your target audience.

Placement — The places within the platform where you can run your ads. The most common is the Facebook and Instagram news feed, but others include Facebook marketplace, the Instagram Explore page, the Messenger inbox, and many more.

Campaign budgets — One overarching budget that Meta distributes between your ad sets based on performance. In other words, Meta decides the spend per specific ads.

Ad set budgets — Individual budgets chosen manually for each ad set. In other words, you control the spend per specific ads.

Daily budgets — A daily budget is applied, to be averaged per ad over the course of a week.

Lifetime budget — A hard cap or total amount you're willing to spend over the entire run-time of your ad set.

PPC (Pay Per Click) — The cost per link click or web page visit. You only pay when the user actively engages with the ad. This is best for awareness objectives.

CPM (Cost Per 1,000 Impressions) — The cost per 1000 views of your ad. You pay for views. This is best for the other objectives.

Understanding the Meta Algorithm

To determine the best ad to show to a person at a given point in time, Meta will consider a few different factors.

One of the most important is relevance. This refers to how useful your ad is to the audience you’ve targeted. Meta’s algorithms determine this mostly through your ad's creative. That is, the text, images, or videos you use. It also scores relevance on how your audience has interacted with similar content in the past. A high relevance score makes the algorithm happy — and more likely to optimise reach.

Secondly, every time users engage with your ad (i.e. clicking, sharing, commenting) Meta interprets that as a signal that it’s valuable to the audience. It also tracks the time users spend viewing your ad, especially with video content. The algorithm is more likely to display an ad to new people if it’s already detected high engagement with others. This means that hooking the audience should always be your priority.

The Anatomy of an Ad Campaign

Now for the fun part. There are multiple components that make up an ad, and most of it happens under the surface. Yes, the look and feel of your ad content is important. But so is the planning process involved in identifying your audience, campaign type, and objectives. Here are the absolute basics.

You’ll need to choose an audience type.

That is, who you want to target and how. This usually means choosing between two options:

An interest-based audience comprising users with certain hobbies, likes, and values specified by you

A lookalike audience comprising users who have similar traits to your existing audience

There are other audience types less commonly specified. You can target broad audiences, defined by only a few traits such as age and gender. You can also choose to show your ads only to users who’ve already interacted with your website or social profile before.

The campaign type is also important.

This will directly affect the content of an ad, as it relates to its intended outcome. In the industry, this is sometimes referred to as a ‘funnel type’ and comprises Prospecting, Re-Targeting, and Re-Marketing campaigns.

Prospecting focuses on new customer acquisition.

Re-Targeting is aimed at users who’ve already engaged with your website or social media profile in the past.

Re-Marketing is when you target users who have already completed a business transaction with your brand.

On the campaign level, you’ll specify objectives.

Also known as Performance Goals, these are the intended outcome of your ads. They’re labelled on Meta as follows.

Awareness means achieving reach and impressions

Traffic means generating views of your web page or Instant Experience linked in the ad

Engagement means increasing the interactions with your post and profile

Leads are any customer action on your website excluding a direct purchase i.e. form submissions and enquiries

App Promotion means encouraging actions specific to app events

Sales means maximising direct purchases and return on ad spend

Now, it’s time for the ad creative.

This refers to the actual design, format, and content of the ad post. Within a campaign, you can create multiple different ad sets with multiple different creatives. It might be a video (which often out-perform other mediums) or a static image. You can use carousels, infographics, animations… Anything goes.

A key part of the creative is copy.

This will almost always incorporate a caption, but sometimes you might want to include text overlays in the actual creative too. Each platform has its own guideline for word limit and layout, so take that into consideration when trying to optimise copy.

To summarise, this is just an overview of the process involved in creating Meta ads. It might seem complicated at first, but the great thing about having so many options is that you don’t have to stick to one formula. Once you have a basic understanding of the algorithm, terminology, and steps of creating an ad, you can begin planning and managing your own campaigns.

Read more about the benefits of paid advertising.