Algorithms, newsletters and increasing your reach through paid ads

As 100 Days in Appalachia has worked to expand its capacity, we tested what a social media advertisement could do for us. We wanted to see if we could attract more newsletter subscribers and get insight into how to run a successful social media advertisement that reaches potential readers. 

With a budget of $150, we felt we could get more value if we ran two ads, each targeting a different audience to see which performs better so we could gain insight for future ads on what works. We decided to run two ads for one week each at $70 per ad. 

Creating the advertisement in Meta

We wanted to highlight 3 things in the ad. The Appalachian Mountains, the “free” aspect of our newsletter, and the community aspect of our newsroom. 

We used Canva and a stock photo of the Appalachian mountains:

The work inside of Meta’s Business Suite to set up the ad was pretty simple. Some of the goals you can choose for your ad in Meta include getting more messages, more page likes or more website visitors.

We linked our newsletter sign-up page, copied in the graphic, and wrote a headline and description. We wanted the description to emphasize the unique perspective that our newsletter can offer from an internal Appalachian essayist. 

Below is an example of what people will see on Facebook: 

The ad creator gives options to select different audiences you’d like to reach with the advertisement. These options are: 

• Advantage Audience
• People you choose through targeting
• People who like your Page
• People who like your Page and people similar to them

Meta does not include a lot of information on how to navigate these audience selections, so I decided to run an A/B test between choosing the “advantage audience” and “people you choose through targeting.”

We wanted to see if this decision would significantly impact the ad’s performance so in the future we can have a sense of what works best for our audiences. 

For the first ad, we simply chose Advantage audience, meaning Meta’s algorithm identifies people who have interests related to our business. 

For the second ad, we created a new audience titled ‘Targeted Appalachian Audience.’ This audience would consist of women over the age of 55 in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. 

Identifying the target audience

To select this target audience, I looked at our newsletter audience, Facebook’s audience, and the Advantage audience’s results.

Our newsletter audience is mostly female and 20% are above the age of 65. We thought if we targeted this niche audience the accounts reached would be more likely to subscribe. 

For location, we looked at the Advantage audience’s top-performing locations. Our newsletter subscribers are mostly in Ashburn, VA, Atlanta, GA, and Morgantown, WV. The previous ad was shown in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky.

Results and next steps

Targeted audience

We obtained 53 new newsletter subscribers while the target audience advertisement was running. 

Advantage audience

We obtained 84 new newsletter subscribers while the advantage audience advertisement was running. 

We thought the targeted audience advertisement would get less reach but more link clicks (and newsletter subscriptions) because the people it was reaching were a better match for our existing newsletter subscribers. However, the opposite happened — Meta’s algorithm created less reach yet more newsletter subscriptions. 

Overall, we gained six times more subscribers in the period when we were advertising compared to the previous three-week period when we were not advertising. 

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Cite this article

Rhoads, Colin (2024, Aug. 12). Advertising on Meta. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/advertising-on-meta/