You know that Facebook ad campaigns are worth the hype, but you don’t know who should be in charge of them: you, a freelancer, or another agency. In this article, we’ll explain whether it’s worth it to manage your Facebook ads alone or hire someone to do that for you.
Understanding Facebook Advertising
What are Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads are a powerful tool for businesses looking to reach their target audience on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms within the Facebook ecosystem. These ads come in various formats, including image, video, carousel, and collection ads, each designed to achieve specific marketing goals. Whether you’re aiming to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, generate leads, or boost sales, Facebook Ads offer a versatile solution. By leveraging the platform’s extensive user base and sophisticated targeting options, businesses can connect with potential customers who are most likely to be interested in their products or services.
How do Facebook Ads work?
Facebook Ads operate through a combination of precise targeting options, diverse ad formats, and strategic bidding. Advertisers can tailor their campaigns by selecting from a range of targeting criteria, such as demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections, ensuring their ads reach the right audience. The ad formats available, including image, video, and carousel ads, allow businesses to creatively showcase their offerings. Facebook’s algorithm then uses a bidding system to determine which ads to display to each user, considering factors like ad relevance, user engagement, and the advertiser’s bid. This dynamic system ensures that your ads are shown to the most relevant audience, maximizing their impact.
Are Facebook Ads worth it?
Absolutely, Facebook Ads can be a highly effective way to engage with your target audience, drive traffic, generate leads, and boost sales. With over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides a vast pool of potential customers. The platform’s precise targeting options, clear reporting features, and relatively affordable costs make it an attractive choice for businesses of all sizes. However, the success of your Facebook Ads depends on several factors, including the quality of your ads, the accuracy of your targeting, and the effectiveness of your bidding strategy. When executed well, Facebook Ads can deliver significant returns on your ad spend.
Benefits and Effectiveness of Facebook Ads
Generate demand for your brand quickly
One of the standout benefits of Facebook Ads is their ability to generate demand for your brand swiftly. By leveraging Facebook’s extensive user base and precise targeting options, businesses can increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads in a short amount of time. The platform’s diverse ad formats, such as video and carousel ads, are designed to capture users’ attention and drive engagement. This means you can showcase your products or services to people who are most likely to be interested, leading to quicker conversions and sales. With the right strategy, Facebook Ads can help you rapidly build demand and grow your business.
Manage Facebook ads campaign yourself
Technically, beginners can manage their Facebook ads. Still, whether it’s a good idea or not depends on your experience and willingness to learn. If you’re clueless about targeting, content creation, and planning an ad budget, there’s definitely a learning curve!
Benefits of running your Facebook ads yourself:
- No extra costs (or small costs)
- You’ll have total control over creation and budget. When you work with your own materials and have a clear vision, it’s easier to make it happen.
Unfortunately, the cons are that:
- You might allocate the budget inappropriately and accidentally waste resources.
- Campaigns are less easy to optimize when you don’t have a reference point to compare your ads to. Basically, you might not get the results you were hoping for.
- There’s a risk of overspending because you don’t know much about budget optimization and how to set ad spend on Facebook.
- Your ad analytics could confuse you and you won’t know if you actually met your OKRs.
- Additionally, without regular updates and fresh content, you may encounter ad fatigue, where your audience becomes less responsive to your ads over time.
How to manage your ad campaigns wisely?
If you lack the expertise and time to develop necessary skills in advertising, you can choose an advanced analytics tool like Sotrender Ads which gives you access to comprehensive, well-visualized data. The web app comes handy in both Instagram and Facebook ad analytics.
Thanks to Sotrender Ads you can:
- track key campaign indicators (KPIs) presented on readable, interactive charts,
- check useful data which is not accessible in Facebook Ads Manager,
- analyze your past and existing campaigns and plan your budget more accurately,
- compare campaigns between each other to make conclusions, improve ad creations and optimize expenses,
- generate detailed reports within a minute and easily summarize your advertising activity.
Hiring a freelancer to manage Facebook ads cost
The biggest difference between freelancers and marketers that work in an agency is that marketers in an agency have more resources and support. You can find freelancers on sites like LinkedIn or UpWork, in case you wanted to know. ?
Pros:
- Their services are more affordable so overspending isn’t much of a concern.
- They can devote more time to your ad campaign and answering your questions.
- They can also set up and utilize the Facebook Pixel to track conversions and optimize your ad performance.
- More experienced and knowledgeable about how ads work and how to manage bigger activities.
Cons:
- If the freelancer gets sick or something comes up in their life, there’s nobody else to take over for them. You’re literally relying on this one person.
- Invoices can be tricky or they might take time to acquire since they’re responsible for their own finances.
- It’s hard to find a trustworthy freelancer who matches all of your criteria and will quickly understand your brand.
- In the end, it’s still more expensive (initially) than managing your own Facebook ads.
Hiring a freelancer makes sense with medium-sized campaigns. You could “test out” the freelancer by paying them to perform a few tasks to see if they’re worth hiring for a bigger project.
Hiring an agency to manage Facebook advertising costs
Agencies are known for successfully planning and setting social media ads. It’s easier to be confident in an agency because they are a collective of people with different skills and ready to take over for each other.
Still, you’ll have to research different agencies to see which one fits you best. You could initially email them and ask if they have experience in creating ads for your type of company. It’s also good to know what their prices are and whether you can afford them. Since this is the most expensive option, you really need to make sure they’re worth it.
Why it’s worth it:
- It’s easy to check their reputation. They’re actually pretty easy to find on review sites.
- Because they’re using tools that they have a lot of experience with, your ads will end up fitting the budget better and target the right users.
- Agencies are skilled at optimizing ad placements across Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network to ensure maximum engagement and effectiveness.
- Cooperation is streamlined because they have multiple departments in one building.
- They can offer up more services like prepare professional shoots and actors for your ad.
- They’re ready to validate their results with reports or summaries.
- Agencies will usually have one main person who’s in charge of managing your account
Lots of good reasons to hire an agency to get all of this done for you, right? Well, get ready for a pretty big invoice. It’s hard to estimate how much money it will take to fully prepare and analyze your Facebook ad. You’ll all have to talk and determine how much effort and resources they’ll need to meet your expectations.
Who should definitely hire an agency? A bigger company, for sure. Even when you visit an agency’s website, you’ll notice some pretty big names that are easy enough to recognize. Trust us, their budgets don’t suffer when they hire an agency to create perfect ad campaigns for them.