Facebook Boosted Posts vs Facebook Ads

DIY Sprocket Solutions

Facebook advertising is a large focus of many online marketing efforts currently. Marketers are tracking the benefits of advertising on Facebook, figuring out the best ways to post and evaluating what advertising methods are most lucrative and efficient. When it comes to Facebook advertising, the question that tends to come up is: What is better? Boosted posts or traditional Facebook ads?

Recently for a client running a flash sale, we were encouraged to boost a post for a budget of $200 for one day. We ran through the steps laid out and boosted the flash sale post for $200. We then sat back to see the results. At the end of that one day boost, Facebook only spent about $16 of the allotted budget.

In this specific case, to see results, a traditional Facebook ad should have been utilized instead of a boosted post. In comparison to this boosted post, we set a daily budget of $10 per day for each of our other two traditional ads that we run for this client. These two traditional ads are run with custom audiences and these $10 ad budgets are spent in full and reach their target audience daily.

Boosting is a way to improve the reach of an individual post, but boosting is not the same as traditional advertising on Facebook. With boosting, your targeting options are extremely limited. You can choose behaviors and interests, demographics, and geography. But, you can’t use your custom audiences and this is a huge difference. Each business page should have a pixel installed. This will build a custom audience based on your website traffic, your Facebook page and post engagement, your Instagram traffic, and your email lists. From here you can create lookalike audiences and include zip codes, specific interest groups and more. Boosting does not allow you to use any of these audience options. It has two objective options: website visits and engagement.

Our recommendation? If you want to see real results over an extended period, create a traditional ad with that same content instead. Boosting posts is certainly a quicker and simpler way to post, but it’s not going to generate the same results as a traditional ad.

There are several more benefits to using ads (especially for such a short time period). One being that Facebook ads allow you to schedule ads to run during times that matter to your business. For example, you can choose not to spend money during the times of 2am-5am when no one is around to see your post anyway. Facebook ads also allow you to generate unique call to action buttons that you don’t get with boosted posts. The general rule of thumb is to only boost the posts that you’ve noticed have gotten some degree of organic interaction. If you create a post with the sole goal of boosting it, you don’t know if it will perform yet because it hasn’t gotten any chance at organic interaction.

Here is a good explanation of how the limited options of goals of a boosted post negatively affect whether your ad will be delivered: 

[L]et’s say you’ve chosen to optimize for link clicks. Essentially what you’re doing is telling Facebook that, out of your selected audience, you’d like to target those who are more likely to click on links than others, based on their history of engagement with similar ads. […] When you are optimizing for conversions, Facebook uses conversions as a ”source” for finding good targets for your campaign. But if you have no conversions, the campaign ends up running for a few days and then just stops [because Facebook] doesn’t know who could be interested your campaign because it has no data (i.e. conversions) to work with.

While boosted posts can be a quick and easy way to advertise for just a few dollars. You are mostly likely going to get the same return as the time that you invested – very little. What are your thoughts on boosted posts vs traditional Facebook ads? Are boosted posts worth it? Comment below!

Breanne BannonBreanne Bannon

Breanne is a Content Writer, Social Media Marketeer, and Sales Associate for Sprocket Websites.

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