Facebook currently allows for a couple ways to advertise. Some are there to increases engagement with content already on Facebook, others are there to direct people to your site directly. In addition, there’s the possibility to work with RTB technology and retarget visitors to your site with an ad on Facebook.

The page promoting, post boosting ways to advertise on Facebook are really only relevant for a longer term engagement strategy and are suitable to increase brand awareness and attitude. With those tactics, you are basically paying to market to them another day; to allow your brand to be top of mind when the decision moment comes or to persuade those “unwilling” users to buy your product somehow.

Join the iFX EXPO Asia and discover your gateway to the Asian Markets

What you are doing in those cases is actually trying to get people that are in communication/passive reading mode to take action and that’s never a good place to be in if your goal is direct sales. If, on the other hand, you are using direct marketing tactics on Facebook and advertising your product directly, the one and only metric of success is ROI. The ROI of push advertising on Facebook is not great for brokers but it very much depends on the country and specific product promoted and certainly not the first avenue for paid advertising I would recommend. But it’s worth a test to see if it can be made to work.

As for retargeting on Facebook, this is a tactic every broker should use in our opinion (in combination with retargeting elsewhere) and there are lots of RTB companies (including MediaGroup) that offer this possibility.