FB Ads: Power Editor, Ads in Newsfeed, New CTAs & Dark Posts

A round up of FB best practices incorporating some of their recent changes BOTH to just posting and advertising…

TRADITIONAL FB ADS IN NEWSFEED
We've noticed that the traditional ads you've been doing (like the David Mark one) have not been set up to appear in the newsfeed but in the right hand column.
Its worth noting that although promoted posts (to friends of fans of a page) appear in the newsfeed, traditional Facebook targeted ads (to say fans of a comparative author) don't have to be stuck in that far right column and can now appear in the newsfeed too and the received wisdom is that they are way more effective when done in this way.

POWER EDITOR
There have been some significant changes to Facebook posts and ads in the last month.
To see these you need to be able to access your accounts via Power Editor, an app only current available on Chrome.
Power Editor gives you more detailed tracking / ways of laying out data not dissimilar to Google ads ad manager.
You still won't get conversion rates to third parties (as we don't own Amazon's shopping basket and can't place cookies in it). BUT it is possible to track to our own shopping baskets (if we were to run a campaign targeting our own site). It is arguable that without some products that are unique / very well priced to us we won't often want to do this. But if we do our team will need a heads up to make sure we have placed some tracking in the metadata / pixel in the shopping basket.
In addition, if we were to pay for advertising to send people to a sign up box with mail chimp we could track that conversion rate if we set up the tracking from our end and within Facebook properly.

NEW CALLS TO ACTION
ALSO, by accessing via Power Editor (and this is currently the only way to do this) you get to use several new calls to action on your Facebook Ads AND in Facebook Posts (Shop Now, Download etc.). As well as generally being generally useful this has an impact on the limited text you have for any ads. You no longer need to "say" Shop Now etc. its not part of the word count.

DARK POSTS
On top of this, a lot of the v savvy digital gurus are creating Dark Posts for their advertising.

Now we know that when posting from a page an image is much more engaging in people's news feeds. BUT the image you are posting is never a direct link to somewhere else (the image is NOT the link) AND tracking is hard. Also, likes and comments don't show up. AND if you run a post with an image that’s got too much text in it it just gets blocked by FB and you no clicks and no notification this has happened (but you are not charged).

I won't go into too much detail the tech of setting up a dark post but it needs to be a certain percentage image to text (tool to test here http://20percentrule.info), it needs to be 1200×627 pixels etc.

FB advertising whether organic through fantastic content at no cost or via paid for ads has developed into more of a dark art in the last 6 months. It is no longer, post some interesting text and go.