Why Your Facebook Campaign Doesn’t Work (And What You Can Do to Fix It) by @adamlundquist

Facebook is the future of Internet advertising. Or so you might have heard.

While it seems that everyone else’s ads are generating revenue, your ads sit there on the side of the page—unclicked like an ignored friend request from that person you barely even knew from high school.

What is going on with your Facebook campaign? Your ads go unnoticed, people bounce off of your landing page, and your value proposition seems to offer no value.

You wonder: Do companies actually make money with Facebook ads? Is this all a lie?

As you read case studies about success with Facebook ads, you may want to drag Mark Zuckerberg by the hoodie to your office and show him what exactly is going on with your particular campaign: The ROI is not case study worthy, in fact your ROI isn’t even positive.

If this sounds like you, then you are missing a vital link about how advertising on Facebook works. Here are the most common reasons why your Facebook campaign is failing.

You are Advertising on Facebook Like it’s a Search Engine

As someone who reads Search Engine Journal, you probably know how to make Internet advertising produce the business results you want on Google AdWords. AdWords has been around since 2000, so you have had some time to experiment with the system and learn how to use it effectively for your specific business model. You know about keeping your ad Groups tight, using negative keywords, and sending users to the right landing page.

However, when you take what you learned from AdWords and try applying it on Facebook the results are disappointing. This is because you are trying to advertise on Facebook like it is a search engine, while your potential customers are using Facebook like the social network it is.

Facebook Users Browse While Google Users Search With a Goal in Mind

People use social channels like Facebook with different intent than they use search engine channels like Google. 

You need to match the intent of the channel with your advertising campaign’s strategy.

When users search on Google they have a specific intent in mind, which often boils down to knowing, going, or doing. Each one of these intents is a type of question which requires a specific answer:

Knowing looks for more information on a product, service, or person.Going looks for a destination (like typing in Search Engine Journal into the search bar).Doing looks for a place to make a transaction or other conversion.

If everything works as it should, Google is there to provide the link to the exact answer the user is looking for. Your ad on Google should be as relevant to that specific intent as possible. In fact, when you get down to it, Google’s whole ad system is based on relevancy to your specific query, Google just calls it a quality score.

If you read Google’s own help section it states:

“having a high quality score means that our system thinks that your ad and landing page are relevant.”

The following is an example of a Google AdWords campaign that answers my specific query intent well. Let’s say I am your average customer and I am performing a doing search looking to buy a Celtics jersey:

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How to Use Facebook for Targeted Content Promotion

August 18th, 2014 - Posted by Paddy Moogan to Content, Social Media and Paid Search Marketing (PPC)

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

As much as content and advertising agencies would like you to believe it, content produced by a business doesn't just go viral on it's own. There is often something that pushes it really, really hard when it first goes live which gains momentum, and eventually the content is spread far and wide enough that it doesn't need you to push it anymore. Those of you who have read Good to Great may be making associations with the flywheel principle, but that's a post for another day!

In this post I want to talk about one of the ways you can give your content a nudge in the right direction and get more people looking at it: Facebook advertising.

I won't go into too much detail on the basics of Facebook advertising; there are lots of resources and posts out there which do this. Instead, I want to dive straight into the methods you can use to promote your content to an audience on Facebook.

One of the advantages of using Facebook is the fine level of detail you can go to in terms of targeting an audience. In my opinion, this is one of the areas where Facebook is actually better than Google when it comes to advertising. They have so many options when it comes to targeting your audience:

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