Top Facebook Advertising Hacks

If you’re looking for social media black hat hacks… you’ve come to the wrong place. Maybe one of these tactics would be considered riding the line, but by no means are we looking to share tips that would be deemed as directly punishable by Facebook. For example, have a sketchy product that violates Facebook’s terms of service? There’s cloakers for that! But you won’t find that here.

Here you’ll find multiple ways that can boost either your research process, efficiency in the engine, or just little known tricks to most Facebook advertisers.

Related: What Every CMO Should Know About Social Advertising

Dark Posting

First and foremost, this tactic would be consider riding the line. Using this tactic isn’t technically blackhat, but you’d have to imagine that this is not necessarily a best practice in the eyes of Facebook.

So let’s say you’re looking to run conversion oriented ads. You want to push to a download. Often times, it may be very difficult to build engagement on those ads. Typically when you bid on conversions you won’t see too many people liking, commenting, and sharing (unless you’re a larger brand with strong brand recognition).

So what can you do if you’re looking to make your brand appear that people are engaging with it with the intention of still driving conversions?

Well, you can dark post!

First and foremost, craft your ad sets and ad in your campaign with the primary objective. In this example, we are trying to drive downloads. So let’s create our ad set in a conversion oriented campaign.

Related: Who Can You Target With Facebook Ads

If you’re running multiple ad sets, take that post ID and then place under each ad sets AD under “Use Existing Post”.

 

Great, now all of your conversion oriented ad sets will point to the same ad and all the engagement will build together.

Your ad would look as the following.

 

This right here isn’t riding the line – it’s great that these ad sets are building engagement together.

But, we can do this somewhat artificially by using that post ID for a Engagement Based Campaign while targeting extremely broad.

 

Now create your ad set.

 

Now click on “Edit”.

Do the same as before, go and “Use Existing Post” and post your initial Ad Post ID from the initial conversion oriented ad.

 

Now launch for minimal spend, this particular ad launch only spent $10. The whole goal of this was to build social proof for our conversion oriented ads.

 

Now look at that engagement, imagine if you had never heard of Power Digital, does seeing 511 likes make you trust the brand more?

Well I can tell you, when I see more engagement, I typically trust the brand much more.

And we’ve seen the same thing with our campaigns when we build social proof. While we may have spent $10 building engagement, the conversion rate % significantly decreased on the conversion oriented ad sets.

Spy Tools

A couple tools I’d like to introduce to you for targeting is the Google Display Planner and SEMRush.

While these tools are typically used for the AdWords side of the equation, it can really help you identify strong interest targets.

The GDN Planner is a little known weapon to identify Competitors for interest targets, or placements competitors are bidding on which could be incorporated on the Facebook side of the equation.

The other tool I’d always suggest to take a peek at prior to starting a build is SEMRush. These can show you both your main competitors on Google Organic or AdWords.

Related: How To Optimize Facebook Ads

One thing we can do here is either target these businesses directly or quickly identify their AdWords strategy and see if we can reflect any of that targeting on our Facebook campaigns.

Conclusion

This is our first round of showing a few social hacks. There’s plenty more to come. If you integrate these strategies into your Facebook campaigns you will not only increase performance, but save a great deal of time doing research.

What type of hacks would you like to see? Comment below!