The hard line of any ad is what the return of investment actually is. Money in vs money out.

But you don't always know this upfront. So you need a proxy. Something you can measure which helps you get to your end goal. In facebook ads that thing is the CTR (click through rate).

If you have ever tried creating an ad with facebook you know it can be an achievement just to get your ad live. Which begs the question:

“How do you improve the CTR of your ads?”

I then stumbled upon an article on connect.io which lays out a simple but effective 4 stage strategy.

“Step 1 – Select the right audience for your ad

This is the first and foremost the important step of all.

You need to target the right set of audience for your ad.

If you are targeting Apple Juice to Orange Lovers, do you expect high click through rate? Obviously not!

Though you might get some traction but this is not you want to achieve and neither did the targeted audience.

So you need to put the first step right by selecting the right audience for your ad.

The audience targeting starts from;

A – Geographic Location – Select the geographic location. For example, if your ad is targeted for people living in Phoenix, Arizona US – you don’t need to target the whole Arizona settlers.

B – Age and Gender – Some products might be suitable for all age groups but not all of them. Make sure you select your age group and the gender right.

C – Detailed Targeting – Facebook’s detailed targeting enables you to drill down and find your niches from hundreds of categories segmented by demographics, behaviors, and interests. Use these targeting capabilities effectively to filter out an ideal audience for you than just to target generically.

To see the magic of detailed targeting, we created a post that explained 25 unique facebook’s ads targeting ideas.

D – Placement – Facebook gives multiple options when it comes to placing your ad. If your ad requires visually more space to understand / be effective, it’s better to target your ad in Newsfeeds and desktop devices only.

With over 2 billion Facebook users, you need to be very specific people of how you set your audience targeting. The more targeted audience you have the better your chances of getting clicks and engagement on your ads.”

Guess what – it all starts with the audience. The article goes on to detail 3 other steps. They are worth checking out over at: connectio.io