What are the differences between Facebook Ads and Facebook Sponsored Posts?

Facebook is one of the most popular and widely used social networks in the world. Almost every business should have a Facebook page to interact with its millions of users. 

 

You will be able to publish creative content, which you can then boost. But above all, you can advertise online thanks to Facebook’s ad network. In this article, we explain the difference between Facebook Ads and boosted posts:

 

What is a boosted post on Facebook? 

 

 

Sponsored posts on Facebook 

 

 

Sponsored posts are an option offered by the social network Facebook. With these, you will pay to have one of your Facebook posts turned into an advertisement. You will need to have a normal post on your page beforehand. 

 

You will then be offered the possibility to boost it so that it reaches more users of the platform. Once boosted, it will then naturally appear in the feed, or news feed, of the designated target audience. 

 

 

 

Paid advertising on Facebook made easy 

 

 

This sponsored publication option thus appears to be paid advertising on Facebook simplified. This is because boosts do not require you to have a Facebook Ad Manager account. You simply need to have one or more Facebook pages. Please note that this option is only available for business pages, and not for private accounts.

 

It seems to be simpler and quicker to use because it only requires you to choose a publication to show to your target audience. However, is it as effective in reaching a large audience as a real Facebook Ads campaign?

 

 

 

Why use Facebook Ads rather than boosts? 

 

 

Marketing objectives and audiences 

 

 

Paid advertising via Facebook Ads has much more important marketing objectives. First of all, it is important to know that the boosted publication only allows to get reactions on the post. This is obviously ideal to get more visibility or interaction with the page. But running an advertising campaign on Facebook Ads will allow you to meet many other advertising and commercial objectives: conversions, sales, awareness campaigns, lead generation or qualified traffic to your website.

 

 

 

With this Social Ads platform, you will also have many more choices and options to create a high-performance ad or ads. In particular, you will have more choices for placements or formats, but also for optimisation. Thanks to the Facebook Pixel, you will also be able to do retargeting and precisely target users who have already interacted with your company. 

 

 

 

Finally, the segmentation and therefore the targeting of the audience are more advanced with Facebook Ads, and therefore less so with the boosted publication. You will have the possibility to create specific audiences, to reach a new target and to experiment. Because with sponsored posts, you cannot, for example, carry out A/B testing, which is a very useful option for testing different types of advertising.

 

 

 

All in all, Facebook Ads offers many more possibilities to effectively target an audience with creative ads. After all, this Facebook ad manager has been created and optimised over the years to allow advertisers to launch a highly personalised ad campaign.

 

 

 

Budget and cost control for your Facebook ads 

 

 

Another major point of difference between Facebook Ads and sponsored posts is in the budget and cost management. The price of the boosts is offered as a range and as a daily expense. In return, you get an estimate of the reach of the sponsored ad. 

 

 

 

However, the boosts will not allow you to measure your return on investment (ROI). Indeed, with this option, you will not have access to KPIs to analyse them. Moreover, you don’t know where your ads are actually placed.

 

 

 

In contrast, Facebook Ads offers you many possibilities to define your budget and control your costs over the course of the Facebook ad campaign. You can also set precise KPIs to monitor your results and adjust them if necessary. At the end of your advertising campaigns, you will have relevant data to know what worked and what didn’t, and act accordingly for the next ones.

 

For all these reasons, we invite you to prefer Facebook Ads to sponsored publications. The tool is more accomplished, more advanced, more targeted and more efficient. For a personalized support in your advertising campaigns, call on our agency Doko, specialized in Facebook advertising. Our expert teams will help you define your objectives, create effective ads and optimise your Facebook advertising campaigns.