In the dynamic realm of digital marketing, Facebook offers a treasure trove of options to boost your content's visibility and connect with a broader audience. Among these options, boosted posts and paid ads stand out as popular strategies. At first glance, they might appear similar, but they serve distinct purposes and come with their unique attributes. In this blog post, we'll embark on a journey to uncover the key disparities between boosted posts and paid ads on Facebook, shedding light on their individual strengths and best-use scenarios.

So, what’s the difference between boosted posts and paid ads? 
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Boosted Posts: A Closer Look

So, what exactly is a boosted post?

A boosted post represents a feature that empowers you to amplify the reach of an existing Facebook Page post. In essence, it takes content you've already shared on your Page's timeline and infuses it with an advertising budget to expand its visibility and impact.
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Key Characteristics of a Boosted Post:

• Effortless Setup
  The process of boosting a post is refreshingly straightforward. You handpick the post you wish to elevate, define your target audience, allocate a budget, and set the duration of the boost.
• Engagement-Oriented
  Boosted posts primarily aim to elevate engagement metrics, including likes, comments, shares, and clicks. They shine when it comes to connecting with your existing audience or their social circles.
• Customization Constraints
  While you can finely tune the targeting of your boosted post based on   demographics and interests, your control over ad placements and advanced features remains somewhat limited.
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Paid Ads on Facebook: Unveiling Their Power

Now, let's explore the world of paid ads on Facebook.

A paid ad on Facebook represents a meticulously crafted advertisement tailored to achieve precise marketing goals. It stands as a comprehensive and versatile tool compared to its boosted counterpart.
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Key Characteristics of a Paid Ad:

• Advanced Targeting
  Paid ads grant you access to a wealth of targeting options, encompassing demographics, interests, behaviors, and even custom audiences shaped by website activity or customer lists.
• Objective Diversity
  Paid ads offer remarkable flexibility in terms of marketing objectives. Whether you aim to boost website traffic, generate leads, foster app installations, or drive conversions, you can cherry-pick the objective that best aligns with your campaign.
• Creative Mastery
  You wield complete control over ad creative aspects, formats, and placements. This freedom fuels A/B testing and optimization, paving the way for peak campaign performance.
• Budget Strategy
  The strategic allocation of your budget across various ad sets and campaigns falls within your grasp, ensuring resourceful spending.
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Choosing Between a Boosted Post and a Paid Ad

The decision between a boosted post and a paid ad hinges on your marketing budget, objectives, and strategy.

• Opt for Boosted Posts when your aim revolves around heightening engagement on a specific piece of content, especially if you seek to connect with your current audience or their extended network.
• Embrace Paid Ads when you harbor specific business goals extending beyond engagement. These ads offer advanced targeting, more goal-oriented options, and greater control over creative elements.
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Use Cases

If your quest is to attain maximum reach for a particular piece of content you've already shared with minimal time investment, boosted posts can yield impressive results. They often boast some of the lowest costs per result, occasionally as low as $0.02 per post engagement, along with cost-effective reach, defining how many accounts lay eyes on your post.

When your ambitions set sail towards well-defined business objectives such as driving website traffic, lead generation, or purchases, your best companions will be ads designed for these specific goals. While you can still leverage reach and engagement objectives and repurpose previous posts within your ads, the advanced targeting and expanded goal options will play a pivotal role in steering you toward your desired outcomes.
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‍Are Boosted Posts Better Than Paid Ads? 

At Good & Gold, we understand that choosing between boosted posts and ads on social media isn't about what's "better." It's about selecting the right tool for your unique marketing goals and strategy. Both boosted posts and ads have their distinct advantages, and the decision should align with your objectives.
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Boosted Posts

Pros:

• Quick and Engaging
  Boosted posts are your swift ticket to increasing engagement on your existing content. They're like a friendly wave to your audience, encouraging likes, comments, shares, and clicks.
• Foster Connections
  These are perfect when you want to connect with your existing audience or extend your reach to their friends.
• Cost-Efficient Visibility
  Boosted posts can be remarkably cost-effective for increasing visibility among your loyal followers.

Cons:

• Some Limitations
  Boosted posts come with some limitations regarding customization, and they aren't the best choice for advanced objectives like lead generation or laser-focused targeting.
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Paid Ads

Pros:

• Precision and Versatility
  Paid ads are the Swiss Army knife of social media marketing. With advanced targeting capabilities, they allow you to pinpoint your message to a specific audience.
• Diverse Goals
  These ads support a wide range of marketing goals, from driving website traffic to lead generation, app installs, and conversions.
• Creative Freedom
  You have complete control over ad creative, formats, and placements, making it possible to craft compelling campaigns.
• Efficient Investment
  Smart budget allocation ensures your dollars are well-spent.

Cons:

• Time and Effort
  They may require a bit more time and effort to set up compared to boosting a post.
• Budget Considerations
  Costs can vary depending on your objectives and audience.
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The Good & Gold Approach

When deciding between boosted posts and paid ads, we believe in aligning your choice with your campaign objectives. If your aim is to quickly promote existing content and foster social engagement, boosted posts are your friendly companions. However, when you have specific business goals beyond engagement and require laser-focused targeting, paid ads become the strategic choice.

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Both boosted posts and paid ads on Facebook are valuable tools for expanding your reach. Understanding their nuances and making the right choice based on your campaign objectives is paramount. Ultimately, it's not about one being "better" than the other; it's about selecting the right tool for the job and ensuring it fits seamlessly into your broader social media marketing strategy. Whether you're nurturing engagement or steering your audience toward conversions, Facebook provides the tools to help your agency scale its digital marketing efforts effectively. At Good & Gold, we're here to help you make strategic decisions and create impactful campaigns tailored to your unique needs.

Need some help navigating the world of social media marketing? We’ve got your back. Reach out today!

The time has come for Google to launch a new advertising product, and it’s one we’re very excited to present to our clients—Performance Max has arrived! 

So, what is Performance Max? Well...it’s a little complicated. But here’s the simplest overview we can muster: Performance Max allows you to create a single, goal-based campaign that is deployed across all of Google’s channels, including YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Essentially, you provide the objective, the creative assets, and the Audience Signals, and Google’s automation and machine learning handles the rest. The goal? To dynamically deliver the right ad to the right people on the right channel at the right time.

As a new product with a new algorithm, we like to give it plenty of runway to gather learnings. Therefore, we’re rolling this channel out to our clients slowly and deliberately. But Google’s internal study of Performance Max shows that most campaigns see an increase of at least 11% more conversions at the same CPA, and we're excited about the potential for quickly reaching clients’ target audiences.

So, are you ready to learn how Performance Max works? Let’s get to it. 

When would you use Performance Max?

Performance Max ads generally focus on traffic, engagement, and conversions, giving you the opportunity to work toward the following campaign objectives:

• Sales
• Leads
• Engagement
• Traffic
• Local Store Visits and Promotions

While it is more of an “all in one” solution, there are campaign goals that are outside of what you would look to accomplish with Performance Max:

• Product and Brand Consideration - Video
• Brand Awareness and Reach - Display and Video
• App Installs and In-App Action - App Campaigns

Although Google doesn’t allow us to optimize toward brand consideration or awareness objectives specifically under Performance Max, Google has made sure to make this campaign type an extremely viable and multifaceted option. 

For us, Performance Max is the initial all-in-one approach for new accounts to give us a solid performance baseline across Display, Shopping, Youtube, Search, and Gmail. Although it does include Search as a feature, it will not outperform single Search campaigns and they are to be used in concert.

What if you already have Smart Shopping or Smart Display campaigns running?

If you are already running these campaign types, odds are that you will be adding to your data sets that measure how people have interacted with your business. This includes, but is not limited to: 

• General Site Visitors
• Product Viewers
• Add-to-Cart Abandoners

This will help new campaigns get off on the right foot, especially in this transition. We can expect an initial learning phase with Performance Max that will be slightly different for every account and depend on many factors including products, industry, and prior data accrued in the account. 

We use Performance Max as the pivot from Smart Shopping and Local Search, although there are times when we can’t fully extend the performance in terms of RoAS and CPA because the campaign is both conversion and awareness based.

In a case like this, we would use a combination of segmented Standard Shopping and Performance Max to achieve the most desirable results. That leads us to the assets we can and can’t use. 

What assets can we include in Performance Max?

• 15 Images
• 5 Logos
• 5 Videos
• 5 Headlines
• 5 Long Headlines
• 5 Descriptions

That’s a lot of content, right? Google uses the algorithms we know and love from crowd favorites like Local Search, Smart Display, and Smart Shopping to show people the kind of assets it needs across different devices.

How does Performance Max know who to target?

Google has introduced Audience Signals alongside Performance Max, which allows us to target audiences tailored to a  business. When creating an Audience Signal, we can look at data related to how people interacted with your business and get info on  Demographics, In-market Audiences, and Affinity Audiences. 

Performance Max uses Signals to find new audiences to target with Google Insights and can market to audiences across different platforms—it’s great. 

For example: imagine we’re selling coffee. We would use Affinity Audiences and demographics to target past purchasers, product viewers, general site visitors , and target interests like Coffee, Coffee & Tea Shops, and Organic Coffee from In-Market Audiences and Coffee Shop Regulars.

Maximizing performance over time

We're also excited to see how well Performance Max optimizes toward New Customer Acquisition (available in the coming months). While we hate to see some of our favorite great Google products leave, we’re always excited to see new digital tools coming our way! 

New to Performance Max or simply want to nerd out about digital marketing? Contact us and let’s get down to business!

Given the vast landscape of platforms, strategies, and ad types that it encompasses, Search Engine Marketing is one of the toughest parts of the ever-changing digital marketing universe. Need some help navigating it? We’ve got you covered.

1. What is SEM?

• Search engine marketing (SEM) leverages paid (as opposed to organic) efforts to show ads for your brand on the results page of a user’s online search. Paid search is typically also called pay-per-click (PPC), and is most commonly used in Google Ads, with Microsoft Advertising for Bing being an alternative option. 
• You may occasionally hear other Google or Bing channels be put under the broader umbrella of SEM (such as Shopping), but for the purposes of this FAQ we’ll be sticking to the primary search functionality of the channel.

2. How does an SEM ad get placed?

• SEM ads are shown based on the results of an automated real-time auction every time a user makes a search. Which ads show up in which positions are based on how much an advertiser bids; the quality of an advertiser's ads; and the increased likelihood of a user clicking based on ad extensions.
  

3. How can my search ads take the top position?

• Google has a vested interest in making sure that nobody can achieve top position 100% of the time, but a number of factors can affect how often you appear at the top of the page.
• Some are in your control. For example, Quality Score: A measure of the relevancy of your keywords to your ads to your landing page, along with the experience users have on your website (e.g., do they bounce right away or stick around and convert?). Ads with higher quality scores get an effective discount in the auctions that take place to show an ad each time a user searches. Bid: While Google is encouraging users to move towards smarter methods of bidding, such as Cost Per Acquisition and Maximizing Conversions, in cases where position is important to your business raising maximum bids can help.
• But a lot of things are out of your control as well, such as changes in competitors and competitor bids and seasonality. Ultimately, the best search strategy is to be prepared to adapt tp changing trends and to continuously pivot to improve ad rank and keep your ads competitive.

4. What are Google Ad extensions?

• Extensions allow you to expand the amount of information that is available in your search ads, giving people more reasons and opportunities to engage with your brand on the search results page. They are a free addition to any paid search campaign and have been proven to increase your ad’s click-through rate and quality score, which increases your chances to show at the top of search results. The added content from ad extensions will also give you more real estate on the page, providing an edge against competitors by pushing them down the page and out of sight.
  

5. Do I need to bid on my own brand’s business name?

• Yes! Not only is it important to protect against other brands running searches on your terms so that your brand consistently owns the top of the SERP when people are looking for you directly. Another benefit of running branded search is controlling the messaging more fluidly than one can with SEO—for example, promoting sales or specific products or offerings. Additionally, taking up as much of the top of the search engine results page (SERP) as possible makes it more likely that users will click on your links rather than scroll down to find either irrelevant listings or competitors.

6. Is SEO or SEM more important for my marketing strategy?

• The short answer is that they’re both equally important. Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) both aim to improve your brand’s appearance on SERPs, helping to boost your visibility online and grow your brand. 
• SEM tends to have more immediate results as your listings can shoot to the top of the results page shortly after going live, while SEO takes more time to show results as you build credibility and relevance online.
• SEM and SEO can and should have a symbiotic relationship: lessons from paid search can be applied to your longer-term SEO strategy, while the strength of your on-site SEO can affect the amount you pay for ads as more relevant ads tend to get a “Quality Score” discount from SEM platforms.

The world of social advertising is a complicated and ever-changing place. For instance, advertising through Facebook means advertising on more than Facebook. Because the Facebook family supports multiple advertising types across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. And every single ad has three key components: The placement (where it will be displayed), the format (what it looks like), and the objective (how success will be measured). 

When we develop social advertising campaign strategies, we recommend a selection of placements, formats, and goals based on a combination of business objectives, historical data, gut instincts, and general channel expertise. But the options and permutations are limitless. Below, you’ll find an overview of these components, so that you can better understand the tools you can use to leverage your brand’s offerings and available assets.‍

Ad Placements

The places where you can run your ads are called Placements. Depending on the objective you choose when you create your campaign, your ads can appear on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

Facebook

Facebook News Feed: Your ads appear in the desktop News Feed when people access the Facebook website on their computers. Your ads appear in the mobile News Feed when people use the Facebook app on mobile devices or access the Facebook website through a mobile browser.

Facebook Marketplace: Your ads appear in the Marketplace home page or when someone browses Marketplace in the Facebook app. Learn more about ads in Marketplace.

Facebook Video Feeds: Your video ads appear between organic videos in video-only environments on Facebook Watch and Facebook News Feed.

Facebook Right Column: Your ads appear in the right columns on Facebook. Right column ads only appear to people browsing Facebook on their computers.

Facebook Stories: Your ads appear in people's stories on Facebook. Learn more about ads in Facebook Stories.

Facebook In-Stream Videos: Your ads appear as short videos in Video on Demand and select Gaming Partner live streams on Facebook (ads in live streams are currently limited to approved Gaming Partners as part of a test). Learn more about in-stream video.

Facebook Instant Articles: Your ads appear in Instant Articles within the Facebook mobile app. Learn more about Instant Articles.

Instagram

Instagram Feed: Your ads appear in the desktop feed when people access the Instagram website on their computers. They appear in the mobile feed when people use the Instagram app on mobile devices or access the Instagram website through a mobile browser.

Instagram Explore: Your ads appear in the browsing experience when someone clicks on a photo or video. Learn more about ads in Instagram Explore.

Instagram Stories: Your ads appear in people's stories on Instagram. Learn more about ads in Instagram Stories.

Messenger

Messenger Inbox: Your ads appear in the Home tab of Messenger. Learn more about ads in Messenger.

Messenger Stories: Your ads appear in people's stories on Messenger. Learn more about ads in Messenger Stories.

Messenger Sponsored Messages: Your ads appear as messages to people who have an existing conversation with you in Messenger. Learn more about sponsored messages.

Audience Network

Audience Network Banner, Native, and Interstitial: Your ads appear on apps and websites on Audience Network. Learn more about banner ads, interstitial ads and native ads.

Audience Network Rewarded Video: Your ads appear as videos people can watch in exchange for a reward in an app (such as in-app currency or items). Learn more about rewarded video.

Audience Network In-Stream: Your ads appear as short videos that run before, during or after video content (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) in a video player on a website. Learn more about in-stream video.

Ad Formats

Whether you want to use video, images or words—or a combination of those elements—there’s an ad format for every business story. Here are the formats available within the Facebook family.‍

Photo: Photo ads offer a clean, simple format to feature engaging imagery and copy. Convey who you are and what you do through high-quality images or illustrations.‍

Video: Tell your story with sight, sound and motion. Video ads come in a range of lengths and styles—from short, feed-based ads you watch on the go, to longer videos you watch on the couch.‍

Collection: Collection ads let people discover, browse and buy what you offer. People can tap an ad to learn more about a specific product, all within a fast-loading experience.‍

Carousel: Carousel ads let you showcase up to ten images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link. Highlight different products or tell a brand story that develops across each card.‍

Slideshow: Slideshow ads are video-like ads made of motion, sound and text. These lightweight clips help you tell your story beautifully across devices and connection speeds.‍

Instant Experience: Instant Experience, formerly called Canvas, provides a full-screen, mobile-optimized experience instantly from your ad.‍

Lead Generation: Lead ads on Facebook and Instagram help you collect info from people interested in your business. A lead ad is presented using an image, video, or carousel, and followed by a lead form when the user engages with the ad.‍

Offers: Offers are discounts you can share with your customers on Facebook. You can design your offer ad to appear as a image, video, or carousel.‍

Post Engagement: Most Page posts on Facebook can be boosted to deliver more likes, comments, shares, and photo views.‍

Event Responses: Event response ads can be used to promote awareness of your event and drive responses. You can design your event ad to appear as an image or video.‍

Page Likes: Page likes ads can be used to drive users to like your page. You can design your Page likes ad with a video or an image masked to a ratio of 1.91:1.

Ad Objectives

Your advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ads. As businesses grow, the goals we create for campaigns often change. First, our campaigns may focus on building awareness and acquiring new customers. Later, we will likely encourage people to make a purchase, sign up for an event, or fill out a form. Objectives fall into three buckets, or user journey phases: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion.

Awareness‍

Brand Awareness: Increase people's awareness of your business, brand or service.

Reach: Show your ad to as many people as possible in your target audience.‍

Consideration

Traffic: Send people from Facebook to any URL you choose, such as your website's landing page, a blog post, app etc.

Engagement: Reach people more likely to engage with your post. Engagement includes likes, comments and shares but can also include offers claimed from your page.

App Installs: Send people to the store where they can download your business's app.

Video Views: Share videos of your business with people on Facebook most likely to watch it.

Lead Generation: Collect leads for your business. Create ads that collect info from people interested in your product, such as sign-ups for newsletters.

Messages: Connect with people on Facebook, communicate with potential or existing customers to encourage interest in your business.‍

Conversion‍

Conversions: Encourage people to take a specific action on your business's site, such as having them to add items to a cart, download your app, register for your site, or make a purchase.

Catalog Sales: Show products from your e-commerce store's catalog to generate sales.

Store Traffic: Promote your brick-and-mortar business locations to people that are nearby.

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Like we said up top...it's a lot. Some of the most time-intensive work we do is on developing the strategy and campaign architecture for paid media campaigns. Once that's in place, we can start having fun testing copy, images, audiences, and more.

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