When asking a business if they utilize Facebook advertising, the majority will say yes. Unfortunately, most of them have only utilized the Facebook boost option, which pales in comparison to Facebooks Ads within the ad manager.
Because of how extensive the ad manager within Facebook can be, many businesses choose to simply boost their posts without knowing the full capability that Facebook ads present to their business because of the convenience. Which brings up the question, what is the difference between Facebook Ads vs Boosted Posts when it comes to advertising your business on Facebook?
If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between boosting a post on Facebook and running an Ad on Ads Manager, then you will love this Post.
What is a Boosted Post?
A boosted post is a post to your Page’s timeline that you can apply money to in order to boost it to an audience of your choosing. This is the simplest way to advertise on Facebook, As you can see below, it is conveniently located in the bottom right-hand corner of your post so that you can advertise at a click of a button on Facebook.
The objective of a boosted post is to maximize the visibility of that particular post so that users can take certain actions such as liking, sharing, and commenting on that particular boosted post.
What Are Facebook Ads?
While boosting a post is still considered an ad, Facebook ads are created through Ads Manager and offer more advanced customization solutions. There are many advertising objectives to help you reach your specific business goals and the audiences you care about most.
The reason why you want to have more objectives at your disposal when advertising on Facebook is that you are defining what actions you want audiences to take when they see your ad. You can also follow your buyer’s journey directly, to better optimize your campaigns towards your audience’s specific needs.
Here are the 5 reasons why you should choose Facebooks ads over boosted posts:
1. Facebook Ads Offer More Objectives Than Boosted Posts
Within the Facebook ads manager, there are 11 objectives that you can choose from opposed to the 2 objectives that the boost post option provides you. The reason why you want to have more objectives at your disposal when advertising on Facebook is that you are defining what actions you want audiences to take when they see your ad. You can also follow your buyer’s journey directly, to better optimize your campaigns towards your audience’s specific needs. By choosing certain objectives you are spending your advertising dollars more efficiently at an audience that is likely to convert into a lead or an eventual sale.
Here are the 11 Facebook ad objectives and what they cater to:
- Brand Awareness – Increases the awareness of your brand by reaching more people who are more likely to be interested in your brand and pay attention to your ads.
- Reach – Show your ad to the maximum amount of people as possible.
- Traffic – Optimize your ads to lead your potential customers to a destination on or off Facebook such as your website, messenger conversion, or app.
- Engagement – Can get mistaken for the boost post option. This objective gets more people to engage with your page or your post. The reason why this objective is more impactful than the regular boosted post is that you can target more engagement to not only specific posts but also events, offers, and page likes.
- App Install – Get more people to download your app by sending them to the app store where they can download your app.
- Video Views – Promote your videos to get more people to view your video content such as product launches, brand stories, and behind the scenes footage.
- Lead Generation – Drive and capture more lead information such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers from people interested in your business.
- Messages – Entice people to send you messages or have conversations with your business on messenger to answer questions and offer customer support.
- Conversion – Have more people take valuable actions on your website, app, or messenger such as adding payment info or making a purchase. You can also add a Facebook pixel to track these actions.
- Catalog Sales – Create tailored ads that show items from your catalog or e-commerce store based on your targeted audience.
- Store Visits – Promote multi-location brick and mortar businesses that drive more traffic to your locations.
2. You Can Create And Target Custom Audiences With Facebook Ads
With Facebook Ads, you have more customization when it comes to creating and nurturing your audiences. As you can see below, you have three options when creating audiences on Facebook’s ad manager: create a custom audience, look-alike audience, and saved audience.
3. You Have More Placement Options And Customization With Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads allow you to have numerous choices when it comes to the placement of your ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Unfortunately, when using the Boosted Post option, you do not have the ability to customize where or how your ads are placed.
By having complete customization of where your Facebook Ads are placed, you are giving yourself the ability to only serve your ads where they are most effective. For example, if you were running a conversion campaign ad on Facebook, you would want to exclude the “Audience Network” placement. The reason being is the “Audience Network” placement is on mobile apps and websites off of Facebook and Ads on these places rarely convert.
4. Boosted Posts Have Limited Creative Options While Facebook Ads Have More
In order for your Facebook Ads to stand out and entice users to take action, your creative has to catch their attention. Unfortunately, with the Boost Post option, you are only relegated to the single image and video ads.
Facebook Ads not only allow you to use single image and videos ads, but they also allow you to use an additional three types of formats, depending on the objective you choose. For example, if you were using the conversion objective you can choose the carousel, slideshow, and collection format for your ad creative, in addition to the single image and video ad format as seen below.
5. You Can Add Call To Actions On Your Facebook Ads
Adding a Call to action on your ads serves as the transition in the buyer’s journey. It makes it easier for your potential customers to take the next action or step. Nothing is worse than having a potential customer confused or disappointed because they don’t know the next step or action to take.
Because of this, not having a call to action on your ads will kill your conversions. So why choose the Boosted Post option when you can utilize Facebook Ads because of the ability to add a call to action?
Should I Ever Use Boosted Post?
Boosting a post is a great way to ensure your posts are shown to more users, and it can be used to effectively grow brand awareness and even to drive page likes. Boosted posts are optimized to drive more engagement (like likes, comments, and shares) on your content, so if that’s an important part of your Facebook strategy, they can be a great fit.
But if your advertising goal is outside Post Engagement, then Boosting a Post won’t be good. You would have to consider running a Facebook Ad from Ads Manager.
Here’s the BIG takeaway.
“The secret sauce and key to marketing online successfully and creating ads that connects, attracts and brings a return on your investments is to connect with people who might already be interested in what you have to offer – based on their pains and desires and using language and words they understand”
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