Advertising on Facebook is one of the most cost-effective and scalable ways of using social media to get more leads for your business. With billions of people logging into the site on a monthly basis, there simply isn’t an excuse not to advertise on this platform.
But if you’re already advertising on Facebook, you might be doing one thing that’s driving your costs up: accidentally showing your ads to your competitors.
When you don’t exclude your competitors from Facebook ad targeting, this is essentially what you’re doing.
There are some obvious disadvantages to doing this:
- Exposing your campaign could encourage your competitors to copy it and launch similar initiatives.
- If your competitors choose to click your ads, it will increase your costs if you’re running a PPC campaign.
- It could also decrease your ad’s quality score if your competitors aren’t engaging with it. (It’s highly unlikely that your competitors will like, comment on or share your ads.)
Thankfully, Facebook now allows advertisers to exclude people that work for a certain company. And the even better news is that it’s super easy to do!
Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
- Create an ad on the Facebook Ad Manager.
- Under “Who do you want your ads to reach,” look for the “Detailed targeting” subsection.
- Click “Exclude People.”
- Click “Browse” and then choose “Demographic.”
- Scroll down and select “Work.” Choose “Employers.”
Voila! From here, just start typing your competitors’ brand names, and select each one.
You might even choose to add your own company’s name, if you don’t want your colleagues to click your ads. (If you’ve selected cost per click, you will get charged even if it’s your own people clicking the ads.)
A note on some of the shortcomings of this approach:
- For this to work, people need to have added their employers in their Facebook profile. Not everyone do this, so there is a possibility some of your competitors’ employees will still see your ads.
- Facebook may not include your competitor’s name on the list if not enough people have listed it as their place of work.
Despite these shortcomings though, I think excluding people from your competitor brands for every campaign is worth the time.
I hope this little Facebook advertising hack is useful! And if you have any Facebook hacks as well, let me know in the comments.
© 2016, KC Claveria. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please link back to kcclaveria.com
