Advertising on Facebook is available to businesses in many formats. Ads can be as simple or as sophisticated as they want. No matter the scope, the reach is wide: Businesses have the ability to market to two billion people on Facebook every month.
Maximize Your Business with Facebook Ads.The process is easy.Facebook allows users to target audiences through self-serve tools and it gives them analytics reports that track the performance of each ad. The reach and visibility can help level the playing field for an independent business that wants to compete with companies with much larger budgets.
How to Set Up Your Facebook Advertising Account
Maximize Your Business with Facebook Ads.The first step is an easy one: Set up a Facebook Advertising account. This is a fairly straightforward process and involves the following four steps:
- Set Up Facebook Business Manager. First, you create a Facebook page for your business. From there you can create a Business Manager account that allows you to run ads for that page. To start go to the home page for Business Manager and click “Create Account” — Then log in using the email and password you used to set up your business page account.
- Install the Facebook Pixel. Go to your website and install the Facebook pixel that allows Facebook to identify people who visited your website, create custom audiences comprised of those visitors, and then show ads to them.
- Create Audiences to target users. This tool allows you to create and save audiences that are most relevant to your brand. Go back into Business Manager and select the “Audiences” option from the assets column.
- Create a Facebook Ad from a Facebook post. Now you can try it out. First decide what you want to accomplish — do you want more clicks, sales, video views, or leads?
Facebook Ads Manager is the primary tool for creating and analyzing your Facebook ad campaigns. Maximize Your Business with Facebook Ads.Creating the ad itself just involves selecting “Create Ads” from the drop-down menu in the upper right of your business page.
- Plan. The Plan section contains tools that help you learn things about your audience and give you creative ideas for running your ads. With the Audience Insights tool, you can find out a lot of information about different audiences on Facebook.
- Create and Manage. Here you find tools for creating your ad and managing your campaigns.
- Measure and Report. When you want to analyze how your ads are performing, check out the tools in the Measure and Report section. For example, here you can create those custom conversions to track whether ads are meeting your business goals.
- Assets. This section gives you quick and easy access to key assets that you’ve used to build your ads, including audiences that you’ve saved for ad targeting, images you’ve used, your Facebook pixel, and more.
- Settings. The settings area is where all of your account information is stored. Go here to update payment information, your email, and so on.
How to Get Started With Facebook Ads
Understanding the Facebook Ad algorithm is important because it identifies ads that provide a good user experience.
- Research competitor campaigns and consumer markets. Seeing all the ad campaigns your competitors are running is invaluable as you consider your own campaign.
- Get inspiration for using new ad features. New ad features roll out all the time on Facebook and Twitter. Look to major brands like Home Depot, Target, or Airbnb to see how they’re using new ad features; it’s a good way to see what each feature does and how it works without investing your first dollar.
- Share active campaigns with customers and prospects. Because users can engage with the ads in the same way they would if the ad appeared in their news feed, customers and prospects now have an opportunity to begin a purchase or a signup they might have missed out on.
How to Improve Facebook Ad Targeting With Custom Audiences
The real impact of Facebook fans on your business is not just about the size of your audience; it’s how engaged they are with your content. Previously, the only way you could target your audience with ads was either as a whole audience or by creating segments with basic demographic and interest targeting.
- Dynamic product ads let you target customers who have visited your website and browsed a range of your products but left before completing the purchase. This is a very hot audience so it’s important to target them to encourage them to convert.
- With dynamic product ads, you can create a tailor-made ad for each person with the products they’ve viewed on your website and a range of other products. They’ll see these ads on their Facebook feeds the next time they log in.
Here are seven types of audiences you can target:
- Everyone who visited your website.
This is the default option and a good one for smaller businesses that don’t have enough website traffic to target people by page views. - People who visited a specific product page but didn’t purchase.
This is an advanced website custom audience that combines a URL condition with an event action. - People who viewed your lead magnet landing page but didn’t opt-in.
Similar to the previous website custom audience, you can use this next audience to target Facebook ads to people who visited your lead magnet landing page but haven’t opted in yet. - People who viewed your contact page.
This next audience is ideal for service businesses that want to target people who are interested in working with them. This audience groups people who have visited your contact page but haven’t completed your contact form. - People who started the buying process but didn’t complete it.
This next audience uses your event actions and is very effective for ecommerce companies. Creating this audience allows you to group people who have visited your website and started the buying process, such as adding a product to the basket or initiating checkout. - People who previously purchased from you.
One of the best ways to increase your revenue is to drive repeat purchases from existing customers. You can introduce new product offerings and exclusive discounts to encourage further purchases. - People who read your blog.
If you have a blog, this website custom audience is for you. This is a hyper-responsive audience to which you can run offers or even just promote more content to build stronger brand awareness and deepen your relationship.
How to Control Facebook Ad Spend
When setting up these campaigns you need to have a budget. But for how much? Estimating a Facebook ad budget is important because it should be based on the amount of revenue you want to generate. To do this requires the next few steps.
- Set a target revenue goal.
Defining a revenue goal for your campaign seems like a simple move for an established business or marketing professional, but you’d be surprised how often people skip this step. There’s nothing wrong with this approach as long as the “see how it goes” part is strategized, tracked, and optimized. - Create a custom conversion path in the ads manager.
Once you have a revenue goal in place, configure Facebook Ads Manager to show you the data you need. - Create a two-part ad campaign.
When you calculate cost per lead, your audience, ad creative, and funnel strategy can have a huge impact on the results. - Monitor your results and adjust your ad campaign.
After you run your ads for a while and gather conversion data, go to the Ads Manager to take a look at your costs. To see the relevant data, you’ll need to configure your columns to show custom conversions.
How to Test Facebook Ads
The Facebook Dynamic Creative ad tool is an effective way to test Facebook ad variations automatically.
The tool delivers the best combinations of your ad creative assets. It runs different combinations of your ad components, such as images, videos, titles, descriptions, and calls to actions, across your target audience to determine which combinations produce the best results.
Maximize Your Business with Facebook Ads.Before the introduction of this feature, you had to create fully formed ads individually and test them manually to find the most effective ad creative and the best ad-to-audience fit. Dynamic Creative automatically randomizes ad variations for you, making it easy to show the right ads to people. Facebook lets you use up to 30 creative assets, including:
- Five title/headline variations.
- 10 images or 10 videos.
- Five text variations.
- Five descriptions.
- Five CTA button variations.
How to Combine Facebook Ads with Facebook Video
Like Facebook Messenger, Facebook video is another platform within Facebook to host advertising for your company.Maximize Your Business with Facebook Ads. Facebook Live allows users to broadcast streaming video as it happens in real time to other users within their network. A good strategy looks like this:
- Start with at least four Facebook Live videos.
These Facebook Live videos need to provide valuable content that helps your target market. First you need to research what people want to watch via a Facebook poll. - Develop a warm audience by boosting live video posts.
It costs about $1 per day. Keep in mind that these low-cost ads will save you even more money when the reach of your videos allows you to retarget warm leads later in this process. - Drive organic video views from other channels to augment your warm audience.
Promoting a post helps, but you should expand your reach through organic methods too. Expand the reach of your live video by posting it in Facebook groups and other social networks. - Create a lead magnet landing page.
Maximize Your Business with Facebook Ads.After you post several Facebook Live videos and follow the steps to promote those videos on Facebook and beyond, you should have an established (or warm) audience. Your next step is to convert them. - Create free content such as an ebook, guide, webinar, or another piece of collateral.
Make sure the collateral you create relates back to the Facebook Live videos. Doing so improves your chances of snaring leads interested in your offer. Then create a landing page where anyone interested enters their name and email address to receive a file, clicks a button to sign up for a webinar, or otherwise takes action to accept your freebie. - Deliver your offer via a Facebook ad that retargets your warm audience.
The final step is to create a retargeted Facebook ad that drives traffic to your landing page. The people you want to retarget are those who saw your previous Facebook Live videos.
How to Analyze and Improve Facebook Advertising
Analytics are key to understanding which ads work and which ones don’t. Facebook Analytics is a robust tool that lets marketers explore user interaction with advanced goal paths and sales funnels for Facebook ads.
In the past, Facebook allowed you to see only the last touch point in your funnels. For example, if someone interacted with seven of your posts but purchased on the eighth interaction, only the final interaction would be given credit for the conversion. Now you can see the full interaction path to the conversion, rather than just the last touch point.
Google Analytics works with Facebook to measure conversions from your Facebook ads. In other words, tracking where people are coming from before they land on your website. You can also use Google Analytics to track the actions people take while they are on your website. Those actions can include:
- Subscribing to an email list.
- Viewing product pages.
- Adding to their shopping cart.
- Viewing your landing page.
Cost per Result
This cost metric isn’t your overall spend or amount spent on each of your campaigns; it’s your cost per result based on your campaign objective and ad set optimization. If you’ve set a daily budget and aren’t scaling your campaigns, and you see your cost per result decreasing, your campaign results will be increasing.
Relevance Score
The next metric to look at is relevance. A relevance score is a rating from 1–10 that Facebook gives to each of your ads. This score reflects the ad-to-audience fit and how well people are responding to your ad. This metric can be viewed only at the ad level of your campaigns.
If your relevance score increases over time, you’ll typically see your cost per result decrease and your campaign performance rise. On the flipside, when your relevance score is decreasing, you’ll find your cost per result increasing, indicating your campaign performance is decreasing.
Frequency
The third metric to look at is frequency. Frequency is a delivery metric that tells you how many times on average someone has seen your ad. Your frequency will always start at 1 and increase over time as you spend more of your campaign budget and reach more of your target audience.
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