Glossary of Facebook ad terms

Aspect ratio

The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. You’ll usually see it as two numbers separated by a colon, like “16:9”. It’s important to stick to a platform’s recommended aspect ratio so your images and video don’t appear stretched, pixelated or blurry.

On Facebook, it’s recommended that your videos are 16:9 and your images are 9:16.

Audience targeting

This is the practice of using data to segment all the people who could possibly see your ad by demographics or interests. It’s a way of pinpointing the right buyer or seller, at the right moment.

For example, say you’ve just listed a 4 bed cottage within walking distance of the local school. You could create an ad campaign and target your Facebook ads to:

men and women between the ages of 30 and 45
who live within 5 miles of the property
and who have children between 4 and 16

Contractions

You’ve only got a few characters to use in your Facebook headlines and ad copy. Contractions help you squeeze more info in, without wasting copy space.

The contractions you use depend on your own context. Bedroom is generally understood as BR. Your audience might understand Close is CL, Court is CT, Street is ST. You get the gist.

CPC

CPC is short for cost per click. Pretty self explanatory–it’s how much you’re paying every time someone clicks on one of your ads. The more people that click on your ad, the lower your CPC.

The average CPC for a Facebook ad for property is $1.81. Every time you run a Facebook campaign, take note of your CPC and try to improve upon it next time.

CTR

CTR is another contraction from digital marketing land. It means clickthrough rate, and it’s the ratio of people who clicked on a specific link (i.e. to view the property you’re advertising) to the total number of people who saw your ad. Clicks ÷ impressions = CTR.

The aim of the game is to improve your CTR so it’s as high as possible. This means that more of the people who are seeing your ad are clicking on it to find out more.

GB is short for gigabyte. It’s a unit of shortage, equal to 1,000 megabytes. The largest video file you use as a Facebook ad is 4GB.

If you’ve got a video file that’s too big to use, you can compress it using a free tool like this one.

Impressions

This is the number of times your ad was shown. Keep in mind that one person might’ve seen your ads a couple of times. The number of impressions does not directly correlate with the number of people who saw your ads in total.

Optimisation

In simplest terms, this means making something better. In this case, we’re talking about your ads.

You can optimise your ads by either pausing or improving the ads that are performing the worst. To improve your ads, try:

replacing the images with something brighter, that has people in it
changing the headline to be more attention grabbing
tweaking the ad copy to be more time sensitive

Pixels

A pixel is another unit of measurement. This one is used to measure digital images. It’s expressed as the horizontal measurement by the vertical measurement. For example, Facebook recommends 1,200 pixels X 628 pixels.

If you upload an image with less pixels than recommended, it’s likely going to appear blurry.

Retargeting

This is how you make sure potential buyers and sellers don’t forget about what you’re advertising. It’s a buzzword for a reason: it works.

Here’s how: someone clicks on one of your Facebook ads, but doesn’t submit an enquiry. They continue to browse the web and social media, and another of your ads appears. Your ads continue appearing until they click it again, and submit an enquiry.

For more information about how retargeting works, read this.

Rule of thirds

In photography, the rule of thirds is a type of composition in which an image is divided evenly into thirds, both horizontally and vertically, so you have nine parts. The subject of the image is placed at the intersection of those dividing lines, or along one of the lines itself.