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If you’re completely new to Facebook ads, then this might be the right blog post for you. We’ll provide an overview of how Facebook advertising works, how to get started with a new account and some tips on creating successful adverts. Once you have read this blog, we highly recommend checking out our Paid Social Online Course where you’ll learn everything there is to know about starting, creating, and running Facebook ads. But for now, let’s get started with the introduction.
Before you can even start to advertise, you need to make sure that you have set-up a Facebook page and have created a Business Manager or Ads Manager. Once this is done, you can go ahead and create your first ad by visiting Ads Manager and clicking on the green “+ Create” button. You will then be presented with the below suggestions and based on the options you choose; you’ll get a different type of advert to create. These are broken down into adverts for your pages, website, app, events or offers you are running on Facebook.
Brand Awareness: Brand awareness is a brilliant way to reach people who are more likely to pay attention to your ads and increase awareness for your brand. This should be used in your early days of marketing when you’re trying to spread your business name and message.
Reach: This objective is very similar to Brand Awareness however, it will show your ad to the maximum number of people, regardless of the users’ likeliness of intentions. This is one of the cheapest ways to obtain some brand awareness or if you have a message that you want to be seen by your selected audience.
Engagement: Get more people to see and engage with your post or Page. Engagement can include comments, shares, likes, event responses and offer claims
Post Engagement: This is a brilliant way to obtain more post reactions, comments, and shares. You can either select an existing post or create a new one and Facebook will show your ad or post to people who are most likely to engage. This is great if you’re trying to find out more about your audience or if you’re trying to engage in conversation.
Page Likes: This is nothing but a vanity ad. If you’re low on page followers and you would like a vanity boost, use Page Likes via the Engagement objective to obtain more followers. You may want to use this when you’ve begun to post organic content on a daily basis.
Event Responses: If you have an event or activity coming up but you’re not seeing that many event responders, use this objective to spread the word and to get people to RSVP.
Traffic: You can sue traffic ads to send more people to a destination such as a website, app or Messenger conversation. However, it’s most commonly used for website traffic. We recommend optimising for Landing Page Views in the Ad Set section as you’ll pay for the people that actually load your website rather than just clicking on the link. You’ll receive a more accurate result by having your ad shown to people more likely to load websites from clicks.
Lead Generation: This objective helps you collect lead information from people who are interested in your business. This is a brilliant tool when trying to obtain info from potential customers. You can customize your form templates with multiple questions and info requests allowing you to make your forms truly unique. You must make sure that you have a privacy policy otherwise people putting in their information may be put off.
Conversions: Can help with getting people to take valuable actions on your website, in your app or in Messenger, such as adding payment information or making a purchase. This should be your final for Facebook advertising. Use this function when trying to get sign-ups, purchases, and leads. Use the Facebook pixel or app events to track and measure conversions. From here you can turn pixel and standard/custom event data to turn into custom audiences for further remarketing.
What makes Facebook a great advertising platform is that it allows you to target people via very specific criteria rather than on just a series of keywords. Below, I’ve compiled core pieces of criteria so you can better understand how to change each setting to your advantage.
Location: If you only sell products in certain locations or you want to target a specific place with an offer you can choose to show adverts in specific countries, counties or within a certain radius of specific towns. Use the pin drop to select your desired area. You can also negate certain areas too if you’re trying to be more precise.
Age: This is a handy setting for B2B clients who would be unlikely to want to target anyone under the age of 21. It’s also useful if you want to target a different audience or target multiple age ranges.
Gender: You can target people of a specific gender to either create a more natural split or focus on a core audience. Alternatively, you can choose “all” if you do not have a preference. Use this if your product or service is gender orientated.
Detailed Targeting: Facebook already includes thousands of interests, behaviours, and demographics that are tagged to people and you can browse these either by typing in a query here or working through pre-set categories. You won’t find every interest in here and if nothing comes up you can’t add it, but if you have specific criteria in mind that does come up, then it’s one of the best targeting options at your disposal. Try to keep the potential audience greater than 1,000 to ensure a good pool of candidates.
Connections: There are two things you can do here, the first is targeting people who have not connected to you already or alternatively only targeting those who are connected to you. This lets you either try and get more from existing fans or only focus on getting in new likes.
Languages: You can target users based on the language people have set, and if you do this it’s also recommended you create specific adverts for this language and target them accordingly. This is great if you sell to other regions but only cater to certain languages.
Placements: Use automatic placements to maximise your budget and help show your ads to more people. Facebook’s delivery system will allocate your ad set’s budget across multiple placements based on where they’re likely to perform best.
Use manual placements to manually choose the places to show your ad. The more placements you select, the more opportunities you’ll have to reach your target audience and achieve your business goals. However, you may want to split your ad sets out by platform if you know you achieve better results from one over another.
Campaign Settings: Within here you can determine the daily budget of your campaign and create a new campaign or add the advert in an existing campaign. I typically group these campaigns around similar criteria and then add multiple adverts into the campaign to test which ones perform best. You can also set a start date if you want to gain approval before you make the adverts live, and an end date for when they need to stop.
Bidding and Budget: When setting your budget, you have the choice of Lifetime or Daily Budget. If you are setting up ongoing ads, it’s best to select daily. If you have a strict budget and the ad has an end date, select ‘lifetime budget’. Your daily budget is down to you, but we recommend £10 daily as a minimum.
Your bidding will automatically be set to ‘lowest cost’. If you are running conversions or lead generation ads for the first time, we recommend leaving it on lowest cost on a short 2-week test run to identify your average Cost Per Action. After you know your average and target CPA, change your bidding to Bid or Cost Cap as this will help your ads achieve your target CPA depending on what you set this as. Your ad may not spend the full budget on these bidding types but you are more likely to achieve your target. If you are running any other type of ad, we recommend ‘lowest cost’.
Creatives: This is where you need to make sure you have scroll-stopping creatives. Use a variety of images, carousels, and videos. Make sure you don’t just settle for one ad on conversion ads as it will unlikely achieve great results. The more ads you use, the more chances your ads will be shown and convert with a wider or different audience.
If you need an advanced guide, we recommend taking a look at our Online Paid Social Course. I hope that helps you get started with Facebook adverts and we’ll be taking a more in-depth look at some of these and other aspects in the future. If you have any questions, please let us know.