14 Apr 10 Tips for Creating Successful Facebook Ads for Apps

Despite the steady decline of its desktop user base, more and more people now have in their two hands their primary access method to Facebook, which, as a result, keeps on growing its global MAU number (which was set at 2.50 billion, as of January 2020). As people have expressed their preference in regards to which way to spend their “Facebook time”, so is Facebook itself, which is well aware of the fact that about 98% of its customers join the platform only through their mobile devices, and is therefore coming up with mobile-only countermeasures (such as the continuous improvement on its mobile Ads Manager, for example). Learning how to structure a fail-proof Facebook mobile app marketing campaign has become necessary for marketers around the world, but not everyone knows how to do it the right way. In this article, we are going to outline some tips and tricks (some of which are well-known, others less so) that will help you in getting more leads and installs on your mobile app. 

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Here are the Top 10 Tips For Creating Successful Facebook Ads for Apps

Having a wide range of people to target doesn’t necessarily entail that whichever ads you run, you will get results; you can fail and spend unnecessary budget if you don’t have an idea about how to optimize your Facebook marketing for mobile apps. Efficiency and success must go hand in hand, and knowing what works is the first step for everything else to fall into place. 

1. Take care of your Facebook page

You might ask “How can social media content be responsible for my ads’ success?” Truth be told, it is more valuable than you think. More often than not, mobile users will check the ad’s source after clicking on it, which means that they are going to take a look at where that same ad is coming from. No one would want to land on a social media page that has a handful of followers, no content, and is not even close to being considered “taken care of”. Thus, create an organic presence first. 

2. Know your audience

Since the ad targeting phase can literally make or break the likelihood of your app getting any kind of positive ROI, you should know your customers upside down before making any ad at all. For a start, aim at understanding their age range and sex, their countries, where they gather and look for things, what behaviors they have, what they might be interested in, and what they’re exactly looking for. 

3. Target your audience

Once you know who your best mobile customers are, it is time to go after them. Although it looks nice to have a wide group of potential customers to focus on, don’t make the mistake of targeting too many (or not enough) of them. If, on one hand, your user pool is too small, you won’t receive as many engagement and downloads as you’d probably like to. On the other hand, if it is too big, you’ll end up throwing valuable money out the window, as your CTR will be very low. Ideally, aim at a range that is between 200k and 1M people.

4. Choose the best visuals

Given how easy it is for people to scroll past any type of marketing material, it goes without saying that your main mobile ad visual (or set of visuals) should be eye-catching and high-quality. Create images that are relevant to your core audience and easy to “digest”. Be also mindful of the fact that Facebook penalizes (either by not running it or drastically reducing its reach) any ad that has more than 20% of text in it. Hence, insert as few words as possible in your images; even a plain visual without any overlay text will be enough. 

5. Write a catchy and straight-to-the-point copy

As you might’ve guessed so far, Facebook marketing mobile apps optimization is no joke. Every single piece of information has to convey something to the end-user, and no exception is made for the copy, which represents your app’s main value proposition. In this section, you have to briefly (and effectively) describe what your app is about and, most importantly, how the person who’s seeing the ad could benefit from it. You only have 90 characters to do it, so be blunt and don’t waste any single one of them.

6. Craft an attention-grabbing headline

According to Word Stream, the perfect Facebook mobile ad headline is just 5-word long, which proves, once again, how customers simply don’t like to play around when it comes to them being marketed to. All in all, the rule is just the same as for the copy: even though in this case the limit is 25 characters, aim at being succinct, and grabbing their attention as quickly as possible. 

7. Offer something 

Knowing your customers is not just important for targeting purposes, but also for another reason: if you do, you’ll get to know what excites them the most, and you could anticipate that by offering something that is both contextual and valuable through your ads. If you know that most of them, for instance, might be interested in your app but also reluctant to pay for it right away, you might welcome them by offering a free 15 or 30-day trial, and let them make their own decision once the trial period is over. This, however, is just one example that shows how listening and foreseeing possible objections always come before crafting an offer that is deemed worthy of attention by the right people. 

8. Add a CTA

Every ad has to involve some kind of “work” on the prospect’s part, and a Call To Action serves this very purpose. Since your main goal, in this case, is that of getting as many app downloads as possible, your ad’s CTA will probably be one of the followings:

• Download
• Install Now
• Play Game
• Use App

Whichever one suits your app the most, make sure it properly complements the message you’re trying to get across through the other ad components.

9. Choose the metrics you’d like to measure

Once the ad creation part is over and your ad is up and running, it’s time to choose how to measure its effectiveness, so as to know whether or not all of your efforts paid off. Ideally, you want to track at least 3 or 4 KPIs, such as:

• CTR: gives you a fair idea of how many people interacted with your ad by clicking on it;  
• In-app installs: the number of downloads your app received through the ad;
• CPC: an efficiency indicator that measures how much you spend for someone in order for him/her to land on your mobile app’s page.

10.  Keep on testing

Once you’ve launched your first couple of ads, make it a point to periodically check how they are doing and what could be improved. With Facebook, it’s rare that you’ll strike it out the first time around, so start by crafting an ad with content and creatives that you think might appeal to your customers, but don’t forget to be open-minded and flexible in your strategy at the same time. 

Final Thoughts on How to Create Successful Facebook Ads for Apps

Facebook mobile ads are a complex science, but if you’d like to promote your app, they represent one of those tools that will give you the best ROAS overall. As you might’ve thought, and since the variables to consider are endless, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that always works with Facebook ads. but that shouldn’t intimidate you at all. Quite the contrary, take your first trials as experiments that will tell you more about your customers than what you might know now. As you keep running them, you’ll become way more crafty and strategic at it. That, in turn, will allow you to create high-converting mobile Facebook ads much more easily and consistently.