If you own a brand, then social media is definitely an essential aspect of your business. If it is not already, then we assume you probably live under a rock.
Whether you are a Fortune500 company or an SME, your brand should have an active online presence. In this digital age, it is significant to decode where your target audience is spending most of their time online. Reach out to them where they already are.
96% of marketers consider Facebook as the most effective platform to boost sales via Ads, and we stand by their choice. In 2018, Facebook’s global advertising revenue generated was around a whopping $55 billion. This accounts for 98% of its total revenue.
Well, these numbers reflect the power of Facebook advertising.
To scale your business online, it is essential you leverage upon Facebook ads with a moderate budget and clearly set goals. If you are just starting out, keep your budget minimal initially and experiment with the target audience.
Running a strategically targeted Facebook ad can increase your potential conversions, generate engagement and increase your impressions. Facebook advertising is considered as a successful tool to increase traction on both B2B and B2C businesses.
What are Facebook Ads?
Facebook advertisement is an advertisement run by businesses online which carter to a specific Facebook audience which is filtered by their demographics, interests, profile information and other authorized off-site activities.
It allows you to run campaigns on time, increases awareness of your business or generates leads with customizable images to justify your ad. Running successful Facebook ads is achievable if you have precise details and understanding of the objective for your goal.
Identify whether you want to :
- Get people to notice, i.e. create awareness
- Get people to engage, i.e. lead generation or web traffic
- Get people to act, i.e. store visits, sales or conversions
Facebook ads are pretty versatile in its functionality, but it is not necessary to have a big budget to run strategically targeted ads. With facebook’s immense pool of information and target filters, you can achieve significant results in small investments as well.
If you carry out consistent analysis and improvise on ads regularly, they are powerful enough to generate proportional ROI.
To start advertising, you need to turn your account into a business account. After filling all the information, open Business Manager section and start your campaign with Ads manager.
Before starting your ground-breaking ad campaign, take a sneak-peak at these basic facebook ad terminology.
- Ad Creative — An Ad Creative is defined as the visual asset of the advertisement. Whether it is an image, video, event or just copy all of it falls under the broad spectrum of Ad Creative.
- Actions — Action is known as the engagement your Ad receives i.e. people who liked your Facebook page via awareness ad or took action (Going or Interested) on the event you posted about. The count of the number of likes or comments on your Ad title doesn’t count under action.
- Average CPC — Cost per Click is the average amount of money you spend for each click on your Facebook Ad. This metric helps in evaluating the monetary value of single users click, calculated by the total budget divided by the total number of clicks on your ad campaign.
- Average CPM — Cost per 1000 Impressions (M resembles the roman number 1000), is the average amount of money you spend per 1000 impressions on your Facebook Ad. This metric evaluates costing of your impressions, it is calculated by dividing the total amount of money spent by the number of impressions in units of thousands.
- Bid — It is the amount of money you’re willing to pay so that the customer can view your ad and takes the desired action.
- Broad Categories — It is an audience targeting parameter which allows advertisers to target users with information about specific interests on their timeline.
- Conversion — Conversion is the most sought end result of an ad. It is a phase in which the user accepts all the CTAs on your ad and converts into a potential client. This can be either liking your page, visiting the website, redirecting to the app or joining a mailing list.
- CTR — Click-through rate is the ratio of the number of clicks your ad received divided by the number of total impressions on your ad. Facebook pays attention to high CTR rate, as higher CTR resembles high engagement.
- Lookalike Audience — Lookalike audience is automatically created by Facebook to reach out to the audience which is similar to advertiser’s pre-defined audience. To create a lookalike audience, you need to have a Custom Audience, which is the current user base of people who have interacted with your business.
- Precise Interest — It is an audience targeting parameter which allows advertisers to target a high-value audience. This allows precise filtering by offline information like apps they use and other profile details which involves their likes, interests, groups, education and job titles.
- Placement — It determines where a Facebook Ad will be placed on the screen. There are a variety of options available like Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed, and right column. Ads may also show on Instagram, Audience Network, Instant Articles, and Messenger.
- Landing Page — When a user clicks on a Facebook ad they are redirected to a facebook page or web page, which is known as Landing Page. Landing page should be designed in a way that it offers what was mentioned on the Ad so that user’s attention is retained.
How to create an Ad on Facebook?
While it is considerably easy to use Facebook advertising, but while starting out it also gets equally confusing. Once you understand the working of Ads manager, it becomes fairly easy.
There are two types of accounts on Facebook — Personal and Business Account. To run Ads on your account, it is necessary to convert your account into a business account.
After creating a business account, head to Facebook Business Manager. It is a tool which is designed to manage your facebook pages and ad accounts. This account also helps in working with agencies. if you make them an editor of your page, they can manage and run campaigns for your business.
You can add an Ad Account to your facebook page via Facebook Business Manager.
While creating Ad account, make sure you fill in all the information correctly with your billing details, as you can’t make changes once an account is added.
A single account can have upto 25 Ad accounts, and a regular account can hold an editorial role for a maximum of 25 pages.
Facebook Business Manages homes Facebook Ads Manager, a place where you can create and manage your ad campaigns. Ads manager can help you set up Facebook ad campaigns, manage ad bids, target different audiences, A/B test, evaluate and optimize your ad campaigns.
Facebook Ads manager has a bunch of in-built features that enhance your online advertising.
Now we will go through a step-by-step guide to create an Ad on Facebook
Step 1: Create a Campaign
As soon as you land on Ads Manager page, click on campaigns tab on the top and then hit “create” (Green button)
Step 2: Campaign Objective
Once you hit create, Facebook will ask you for your Ad’s objective.
Facebook offers a wide range of objectives which should match with your advertising goals while creating an Ad.
The three major categories are Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. For example: If you want to increase the reach of your page, you should click on Reach. But if you’re going to generate leads and drive traffic, try Conversions.
Here is a list of objectives you can focus on for your advertising campaigns:
- Local awareness
- Reach
- Brand awareness
- Traffic
- Engagement
- All installs
- Video views
- Lead generation
- Conversions
- Product catalogue sales
- Store traffic
- Messages
These objectives might seem daunting initially, but selecting a clear goal is very important to highlight the purpose of your ad. Facebook analyses your ad’s aim based on your objective.
If you want your campaign to work, make your specifics clear about what goal are you targeting. Do you want to…
Drive traffic?
Encourage users to attend your events?
Enhance your brand’s reach?
Generate leads?
Increase potential sales?
Get people to shop?
The more you are aware of your goal, the clearer your objective. Keep experimenting with multiple objectives instead of running the same ad campaign to generate results and have a better understanding of your ad.
Step 3: Campaign Name
Though this step may seem pretty naive, it is relatively significant in the longer run. Post objective selection, you have to give your campaign a relevant name.
This helps in organizing the campaign so that you don’t get confused when you have to rerun it as you scale.
For example, our campaign is about Brand Awareness of our client. We can name it as client’s name + reach. If you run Facebook Ads for multiple clients, make sure you use the client’s name in the title to avoid any misunderstandings in future.
The standardized naming system also proves efficient in analysing the reports later. You can also carry out a split test or optimize your budget.
A split test allows you to run tests which reflects data about best creative, placement, target audience and other strategies of your ads.
While budget optimization helps in distributing your budget across ads sets to get different results depending on your delivery optimisation choices and bid strategy.
Step 4: Audience Targeting
This is one of the crucial steps involved in facebook advertising to set up your target audience. Facebook is a vast platform, with over 1 billion users. Hence, your campaign must target potential customers.
In this step, you can either use the saved audience or create a new target audience. While building a new audience, Facebook offers the other two options for selecting your target audience. So your target audience can be
Saved Audience
This is the target audience from your previous campaigns and edits them according to your objective. The saved audience can allow you to target people based on their age, demographics, location, behaviour or interests.
Custom Audience
This feature allows you to create a highly specific target audience by using information from your database. You can re-target people who have engaged with your website or people who have installed your application.
You can create a custom audience from the Ads Manager> Assets section, and not from campaign section There are four different ways to develop your target audience via custom audience, these are
- Customer Files
As the name suggests, this feature creates an audience based on your current customer files. There are 15 selection options available to target ads your existing customers, but the most frequently used are Email Ids, Phone numbers or Age - Website traffic
This feature allows you to retarget people who have engaged with your website previously. There are different ways like people who visited a specific page or haven’t opened a website for a long time to funnel the users you want to include in your advertising list. - App Activity
This allows you to target people who have engaged with your IOS or Android App. - Engagement on Facebook
You can target people who have engaged with your Facebook. In this, you can segregate people based on their activities on your page like page visit, engagement with ads, clicked on CTAs, sent message or saved posts.
These are a few ways you can use the Custom Audience to create your highly valuable target audience list.
Lookalike Audience
It is a more natural way to enhance your reach, this feature targets an audience which is similar to your existing audience. Resembling the buyer persona of your current audience, lookalike audience have high chances of conversion.
So, after a brief of all the audience types, you have to select your desired audience list and fill in other information regarding the things discussed above. As you create your audience, Facebook will also give you information about the size of your audience simultaneously. Better targeted ads help in fetching better results.
After audience selection, let’s move on to another step.
Step 5: Placement
The placement of your Ad gives it the perfect visibility across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger. Ad manager offers automatic placement by default, but you can also set it manually for better results.
Apart from being robust, Facebook also offers flexibility in its delivery system. There are various sections where you can manually place your Ads on Facebook, and we’ve fetched the entire list for you :
Every objective serves the best results in a specific placement setting. For example, if you aim at conversion, place your ads in Audience Network and Facebook. But if your objective is awareness place your ads on Facebook Feed and Instagram.
The type of placement also affects your Average CPC, and hence you must place your ads where your audience is most active.
Step 6: Budget
After finalizing the audience and placement, the next step is imparting the right budget to your Facebook ad.
There are two ways of selecting budget, Daily budget and Lifetime budget.
Daily Budget is the estimated amount you are going to spend on your campaign to get desired results daily. When you set a daily budget, Facebook can auto-optimize your ads as well.
For example, If there are days when there is a higher potential of achieving the objective. Facebook will spend higher on those days and vice versa on low potential days, it is a fluctuating curve.
In Lifetime Budget, your total amount will be equally divided across the number of days your campaign is about to run.
The next step is to assign Optimization Ad Delivery, i.e. what is the end that you’re expecting out of this Ad. For example, if you are interested in brand awareness, you can go ahead with the Daily Unique Reach.
Select the bid amount for your Ad Campaign, this can either be done Automatically or Manually. Facebook homes a significant amount of advertisers, hence bidding on facebook is carried out in auction basis.
In your early advertising days, you can just go ahead with automatic bidding. But if you are willing to set the bid amount manually, research the Cost-per-click estimated action rates and relevance score thoroughly.
Schedule the ads and then set up your delivery options.
You’re now on the last stage of your Facebook Ad.
Step 7: Set Up Ad
Setting Up the Ad is the final step involved in your Facebook Ad campaign. This is the part where you create the Ad which the user on Facebook will see. Here you’ll require your creativity, copy and design of your Ad Creative.
Let’s dive in!
First, you have to select the account you want to run the advertisements on and then choose the format of your Ad ( Carousel or Single Image/ Video )
Then in the next step, we will focus on the Ad creative.
According to the specifics of your ad select the image, write an appropriate catchy headline, description and in the URL section stick to the landing page you want the user to see.
In the primary text box, write the caption for your Ad and add the URL of the website below it.
Later add a CTA button to redirect the user to take the desired action.
To promote CTA friction, ads are supposed to be creative and witty. No one likes boring and monotonous ads to interfere with their feed. Run creative ads to grab the user’s attention and stay on the top of the game.
After all this is done, turn on conversion tracking to generate a thorough report of all the activities carried out on your Ad.
That’s it! Your Facebook ad is now ready to reach out to all of your user-base.
Good to-go!
Facebook is a powerful platform, and it’s delivery options are flexible enough to tailor your own Facebook Advertising campaign which matches your efforts, budget and the target audience.
In a nutshell, it is a secure platform for conversion and awareness.
If you are consistent with your Ads, the user will make an effort to know more about it. You should keep experimenting with your campaigns and creativity to make an impactful advertisement and generate leads.
Start right away, head towards a whiteboard and strategize about what is your next objective, who are you targeting and how. It is crucial to create a thoughtful strategy before you run your ads. Dig deeper into your customer’s psychology — you can also create a buyer persona for this.
Facebook is growing rapidly every day, and the platform adds new features consistently to provide effective results. It is becoming a part of digital marketing you can not afford to avoid. Set aside some time and gather more information about it.
What are waiting for, start with your first campaign right away!
Originally published at recurpost.com on August 29, 2019.
