Brand recognition. How do you build brand awareness using Facebook?

What are awareness ads on FB?

Recognition is one of the goals of the Facebook Ads system. The main goal of this type of setting is to make the recipient remember the ad. 

Ad recognition will be the best choice if:

• Do you want to focus on brand promotion, increase brand awareness, or change brand perceptions
• you want to maximize the reach of your advertising, that is, reach as many people as possible within a given advertising budget
• you have videos and want to make it available to the maximum number of people

Brand recognition goal videos are often used in rebranding, i.e. changing the name of a brand.

What is the role of brand awareness in marketing?

Before moving on to creating the campaign structure itself, it is necessary to understand the role of awareness in the overall marketing strategy. For those involved in sales funnel optimization, this may be an obvious thing, but it’s worth reminding yourself 

First of all, you may come across several terms to define awareness, such as brand awareness, recognition, brand, advertising awareness, beginning of the path, top of the funnel (TOFU), and a few more. In the simplest terms, awareness/recognition campaigns are designed to introduce your audience to your brand. They will usually be that first or one of the first contacts with the brand. Only after leaving this phase will the recipient move on to the consideration stage (consideration), and even lower to acquisition, purchase, and decision (acquisition). 

What is key in the consciousness phase?

The awareness phase is the stage of insight transferred to the creative. The creative must be memorable, compelling, provocative, and direct. If you want to move effectively to the next phases, you can’t skip the recognition stage altogether. Why? Well, the phases at the bottom of the funnel are simply limited. The people who stay there are a closed audience basket. There are other reasons as well. First of all, it’s easier to close sales if you make yourself known in a positive way beforehand, especially if you’re operating in a competitive market. The top of the funnel helps break down initial barriers. The customer who comes to you is already familiar with the brand, understands its message, and knows what to expect. Once he starts actively searching the market for an offer, you will have an advantage over the rest of your competitors.

Where performance campaigns (at the bottom of the funnel) aim to get people to take a specific action in the here and now, brand awareness campaigns aim to introduce themselves, make them familiar, and get stuck in customers’ minds.

Methods for measuring brand awareness campaigns

Measuring performance campaigns in online marketing seems fairly straightforward. We analyze X period, compile costs, revenue, ROI, and „there you have it.” Expanding on the tracking methodology, we will think further about total revenue, profit, customer acquisition cost (CAC), even further about user lifetime value (LTV) in a specific attribution model, and so on. Although more metrics appear, they all refer to hard business metrics and are related to cash flow (cash flow).

The situation is completely different with brand recognition. Here, there is no single accurate KPI to assess whether a campaign is effective, what kind of impact it has on the business, and whether it is „worth running.”

The KPIs for brand recognition are not the same.

KPIs for evaluating recognition campaigns

We will look at some key indicators for evaluating brand awareness campaigns.

• Highlights (or reach) Simply the number of ad impressions or reach, which is the number of people reached in a given time period.
• Frequency (displays/reach) Frequency will tell us how many times one user saw our ad in a certain period of time. Too low a frequency limits recall, too high a frequency becomes intrusive and increases CPM cost
• CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) CPM is the cost per 1,000 impressions. As a rule of thumb, the goal will be to get this rate as low as possible.
• Video Engagement In the case of video ads, an important performance evaluation, in addition to reach or impressions, will be engagement. You can use a number of metrics here, such as assessing what point in the video users got to, or whether they left a comment or decided to share the video
• Ad recall metric This is a metric specific to Facebook ads. It is the estimated number of people who remember an ad up to two days after seeing it. To calculate this indicator, Facebook uses surveys, among other things, and compares the group that has seen the ad with those who have not
• Estimated increase in ad recall rate This is the quotient of ad recall rate and ad reach. This metric will tell you what percentage of the people who have seen the ad will be able to remember it after two days. The higher the rate, the more relevant the reception in the target audience.
• Cost of estimated increase in ad recall rate If you divide the budget spent and the estimated growth rate of ad recall, you get the result of this metric. In other words, this is how much you pay on average per person who remembers your ads
• Spontaneous and Aided Awareness Another measurement methodology for big brands is awareness surveys. These are performed by asking the measurement group in an open-ended manner or with the help of prompts (checklist). This type of measurement can be effective in analyzing the impact of large online and offline campaigns on brand perceptions.

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How to configure brand recognition campaigns on Facebook

After FB simplified the goals, you can now choose from 6 available types to purchase in the auction model:

• recognition
• motion
• activity
• contacts
• application promotion
• sales

Additionally, Facebook provides the opportunity to purchase ads in the „reach and frequency” booking model. In this case, you book in advance a specific date and select guaranteed reach. Before launching your campaign, you should have properly structured access in Facebook Business Manager

The structure campaign recognition is similar in its design to other campaign types. At the campaign level, you will configure the budget: daily or total. You will have the option to switch to an Advantage+ budget, which means that Facebook will distribute the budget itself among the ad sets you create later. This is the best option for most cases. At the campaign level, you will also create an A/B test, add a spending limit, and set a specific category (if your ad will be about sensitive topics like real estate, credit, employment, or socio-political topics you must mark the campaign, otherwise FB will reject your ads).

At the level of set of ads the key choice will be to create an audience, i.e. people who will see your ads. You can use a number of options for this purpose:

• country and language
• gender
• age
• demographics, interests, and specific behaviors
• non-standard audience groups (e.g., remarketing data, lookalike profiles, or people who have interacted with your FB profile) 

By default, ads will appear in all possible ad slots on Facebook, ad networks, Instagram, and Messenger. However, you can manually manage the slots, as well as use additional filters like devices, operating systems, or the need for a WiFi network connection.

The ad set level is placed for brand safety settings. You can limit the display of ads on sites with controversial content to reduce the likelihood of appearing in a negative context. You can also add so-called blocked lists. These are places where you do not want to display ads.

If there are places where you do not want to display ads, you can add a list of URLs so that ads will not appear there.

When configuring the ad set, it will be important to set the result target, that is, the target against which Facebook Ads will optimize the display of ads. In the case of recognition, this will be:

• maximizing reach
• maximize impressions
• maximize the increase in ad recall rate
• maximize the number of ThruPlay views of the video
• maximize the number of 2-second continuous views of the video

In all options, in addition to the ad recall rate, you have the option to add a control or bid limit. So you can indicate that you expect not to exceed the cost of X PLN for generating reach or a certain number of impressions. Remember that if you set the limit too low, the ad may not display at all.

It is worth noting at this point that Facebook Ads introduces its own unique metrics for measuring the effectiveness of video ads. ThruPlay is the display of at least 15 seconds of video, or the entire video if it’s shorter (it’s different for Google Ads, and the Trueview definition to date is 30 seconds). 

The second possible choice is to focus on uninterrupted video viewing for at least 2 seconds. In this option, the video must be visible for at least 50% of the user’s screen.

The second option is to focus on the video for at least 2 seconds.

When configuring your ad set, you will see estimates provided by Facebook regarding the size of your target audience, as well as estimated results.

The final step in creating a campaign is to set up the ad itself, the components of which will depend on the previously selected options at the ad set level. In the most typical ad on FB, you configure:

• linked fan page 
• linked Instagram account
• format (single image, carousel or collection)
• multimedia (images and videos)
• advertising text
• target page
• linked pixel
• additional tagging
• optional translations

Ready! You have reached the point where the campaign is ready to launch. Just the required moderation by the FB team and the ads will start displaying. Most ads will be ready to launch within hours, but the process can extend up to 48 hours. 

Summary of awareness campaign on FB

Brand awareness campaigns are crucial at the top of the marketing funnel, whether you’re operating alone or in partnership with digital agency Facebook offers some apt solutions that can be effective for building brand recognition.

• If your goal is low-cost displays and the ability to control frequency, choose a reach goal
• If you want to reach an audience that FB says will be more likely to remember your ads, choose brand awareness
• If you want to maximize video engagement, choose video views
• If you want to increase awareness of a focal point, choose local recognition