Which is Better: Facebook Boosted Posts or Targeted Ads?

If you’re new to Facebook ads, all of the different options for promoting your page can be confusing.

Heck, I’ve been using Facebook ads for years and even I still get confused!

You’ve probably noticed that Facebook has several different terms that describe the process of promoting your business on Facebook. Two of the most popular are (1) boosting a post and (2) creating an ad.

In reality, when you hit ‘Boost’ on a post on your Facebook page, you are in fact creating an ad. It’s just a simpler interface than if you were to go through the Ads Manager.

With literally two clicks, you can create an ad that promotes your page.

Since it’s so easy, it’s tempting to just always use the ‘Boost’ option to promote your page. But today I’m here to tell you to STOP BOOSTING POSTS and start creating targeted ads instead.

Let me explain why.

Objectives

Facebook’s ad platform is designed around objectives. In other words, the goal you’re hoping to accomplish by running an ad.

At the time of this post, here are the different objectives Facebook offers:

You can see that they’re very specific.

If my goal is to grow my site’s traffic, I should choose a different objective than if my goal is to get people to install my app.

Facebook uses your objective to help determine who sees the ad, so it’s very important to choose the right one going in.

When you boost a post, however, Facebook automatically chooses your objective for you.

It doesn’t matter if the post is a funny photo of your staff (where you’re probably hoping for likes and comments) or your latest blog post (where you’re probably hoping for website clicks) or a holiday sale (where you’re probably hoping for people to buy your product).

No matter the content of your post, boosting it defaults to the ‘Boost your posts’ objective, which optimizes for page engagement—likes, comments, and clicks anywhere on your Facebook page.

It does not optimize for sending traffic to your website, gathering leads, or converting into sales. Pretty useless if you were hoping for any of those things, right?

Right.

If this all sounds super confusing, don’t worry.

I’m going to show you a couple examples to demonstrate the major differences between boosting a post and creating a targeted ad.

On December 29, I shared my latest blog post to my Facebook page.

Obviously, my goal was to get people to come to my website to read the post, so I should have created an ad using the ‘send people to your website’ objective.

All the holiday cheer must have gone to my head, because instead of doing this, I simply ‘Boosted’ the post instead.

What happened?

Basically, nothing. Here’s a look at the sad results.

I spent $5 to boost this post. In return, I got nine post likes and one—ONE—click on the link in the post. I essentially spent $5 for one visitor to my site!

That’s insane.

Now, let’s look at a post where I did things properly and set up an ad with the right objective.

In this case, I was also sharing a blog post. Instead of boosting it, I created an ad with the ‘send people to my website’ objective.

I used the same budget, $5. I also selected a targeted audience based on the type of people I wanted to see the post—more on that in a minute.

The results? I received 30 website clicks, for an average cost of around $0.17 per click.

That’s infinitely better than spending $5 on one lousy click!

And that’s the difference between boosting a post and creating a customized ad with the appropriate objective.

Targeting

There’s one more reason creating an ad is the better option for promoting your page on Facebook: targeting.

Facebook’s audience targeting capabilities are unmatched by pretty much any other advertising platform. You can narrow your audience by dozens of demographics, from job to marital status and more.

You’d be crazy not to take advantage of such specific targeting.

When you boost a post, the default choice is to target people who like your page.

There’s nothing wrong with this. If someone likes your page, they’ll probably be happy to see your latest update as they’re scrolling through their newsfeed.

But what about all the other people who don’t yet like your page, but might like what you’re posting?

Without using custom targeting, you’re not reaching those people.

(Note: you can use custom targeting in a boosted post, but it’s not the default setting so many people never even touch it. They just leave it set to target only ‘People who like your page.’)

Creating an ad forces you to choose your audience—and this is where the real fun begins.

Let’s say I want to get people to sign up for my free media pitching course.

Showing the ad to people who like my page is alright, because many of them are interested in marketing and PR.

But many of them aren’t. They’re my friends and family members who have no need to know how to pitch stories to the media. I shouldn’t waste my money promoting my course to them (sorry, mom).

Instead, I’ll use my ad’s audience targeting settings to reach the people who are most likely to care about my course and sign up for it.

I’ll begin by setting their age, gender and language—pretty straightforward.

Next, using the Detailed Targeting box, I can start to get down to the nitty-gritty of my perfect audience.

In this box I can type interests, job titles, names of employers and more.

I can also use the ‘Browse’ button to narrow my audience by tons of different qualifiers, from relationship status to political party.

When done correctly, this kind of microscope-level targeting can lead to an incredibly low cost-per-click and a great conversion rate.

The bottom line

I have yet to see an instance where boosting a post yielded better results than creating a targeted ad.

Remember—‘likes’ on your post are great, but they don’t mean anything in terms of generating revenue. If you’re after conversions, leads and clicks, targeted ads with the right objective are the way to go.