Are you still hesitating about enhancing your social media marketing presence by using paid advertising?
Just think about this. Specifically, on Facebook, you can find more than 2.41 million active monthly users. Also, it is the third most visited website in the world, only surpassed by the other two big titans: Google and YouTube.
This will allow you to see its importance at a Digital Marketing level and the reach of the platform.
Sadly, due to Facebook’s algorithm, it is difficult to connect organically with the audience. For this reason, the best you could do is use Facebook ads to reach the desired audience.
In the following guide, we will teach you everything you need to know about Facebook Ads so that you can put it into practice from the moment you finish reading this guide.
Tools to advertise on Facebook
To manage any kind of advertising on Facebook there are two types of tools that you should know about:
• Power Editor. This advertising platform is focused on accounts run by several advertisers, such as advertising or marketing agencies that need to make a large number of ads at the same time.
In this way, they will be able to keep a more detailed control of the results of the campaigns.
• Ads Manager. If you have a few clients or your own business/ project, it is better for you to opt for this tool. Good thing is that it is that easily and intuitively to use, so you will be able to create your campaigns and ads without having any problems.
Types of objectives for Facebook campaign
Within the Facebook Ads platform, you will find 11 objectives to choose from. It all depends on what you want to achieve for the campaign. Also, think about the purpose for which the campaign was created in the first place.
In the image below you will be able to see how the objectives are distributed in the Ads Manager.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness refers to the memory of your brand in your clients and a potential client’s mind. To generate such recognition the brand must have consistent visual content, so the user can identify it by their shapes, colours or style.
As a Facebook ad objective, it is useful to make your brand well known among a new audience.
Reach
Reach refers to the number of people who see your post on Facebook. The idea of an ad with this objective is to reach as many people as possible.
Traffic
Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your website or another external site from Facebook. These sites can also be applications or Facebook’s messenger.
Engagement
Engagement as an objective seeks to increase the number of people who perform relevant actions with your content. For example, leave likes, comment, or even subscribe to events or claim special offers.
App installs
You must choose the app installs objective if you are looking for people to download your mobile application.
Video views
The video views objective is ideal to get more people to watch your video. This refers to unique displays.
Lead generation
You use this objective when you want your customers to go into the conversion funnel. That is, follow a process you established until they reach the final goal, generally, it is that they make a purchase or that they take an action relevant to you.
Messages
You use the messages objective when you want to encourage users to contact you on Facebook Messenger. Typically this includes a call to action from the ad.
Conversions
The conversion goal is used when you want users to take a specific action. As mentioned above, it is usually a purchase, however, it can be any action relevant to you and your business.
Catalogue Sales
You can connect your e-commerce with Facebook. In this way, you can display the products that your target audience may be interested in, from the product catalogue.
Store traffic
Take Facebook users to visit your store or business premises.
Facebook ad format
Facebook has a wide variety of ad formats but keeps in mind that not all types of ads are available for all campaign objectives. Also, they have certain requirements, for example, the number of characters to be used in the ad’s design and the measurements.
This always keeps changing so you have to always keep updated.
Photos
Try to use good quality photos. Ideally, use little or no text in this ad’s format. Remember that if you exceed the required text length, your ad will not display normally because Facebook will consider that your content is not of quality.
Keep in mind that photos are a great way to get started in the world of Facebook advertising. You can use a post that you have already published and simply advertise or create something from scratch specifically for this campaign.
Remember that when it comes to visual content, what attracts the most attention is creativity. So be creative and always keep your target audience in mind.
Also, keep in mind that this ad type works for all campaign objectives except video view, because that objective is linked to a video format.
Videos
Videos are the type of content that Facebook users like the most. Users spend 5 times more on video content than on static content.
Videos work for all purposes except catalogue sales. They are also very good at creating engagement and conversions.
Try to keep the videos short and remember that the first 3 seconds of the video are crucial to hook the user and communicate the video’s value.
Note that a video ad does not necessarily have to be a video shot in this format. GIFs and other animations can also be used. You can also create videos through a set of images.
A good practice is to put together successful image content and re-release it as a video. Just take notice that everything together makes sense. There is also an exclusive video ad for cell phones. This includes polls where people interact. It is effective in creating awareness of the brand.
Slideshow
Slides are a great alternative to video as it allows you to merge images in this format. It is ideal when you are short on budget or short on time. You can use your images, stock images or the free stock that Facebook offers you.
You can also use pre-existing videos. In this way, you can convert this material into a photo by selecting what interests you, and placing it on the slide. A great benefit of this format is that it plays quickly even when the user has a bad connection.
Carousel
Carousels are used to tell a story or to display many of your products. You have the option to upload from 1 to 10 photos or videos and each of them is accompanied by a call to action.
Remember to be consistent when creating your carousel. It should have a narrative, a clear visual set and it should also look good.
The carousel works with all catalogue objectives except for engagement and video views.
Collection
The collection format is ideal to encourage users to buy your product without leaving Facebook. They work only for cell phones and you can display up to 5 products. As in the slides, it is beneficial because your images will be shown even with a bad internet connection.
The collection format is a combination of videos, slides, images and it is ideal if you have chosen the conversion objective although it also works for other campaign objectives like traffic, catalogue sales, and store traffic.
Instant Experiences
Instant experiences load faster than any page outside Facebook. They work in a vertical structure and work only on smartphones. It is an experience that seeks to fully attract the user’s attention.
Stories
On the platform, 300 million people use the stories every day. Although the number is not as high as that of Instagram, which reaches 500 million, it is a good opportunity to create ads.
The benefit of the story is that it takes up the entire screen and the user is not distracted by other elements. It is also at the top of the page so it is always visible.
It works with the following campaign objectives like messages, engagement, catalogue sales and traffic for your store.
Messenger
People will receive your ad as a message but they will know it is sponsored. However, it gives great results as it works as a more personalized and direct type of advertising.
Creating a Facebook Ad
Facebook advertising is done through the Facebook Ads Manager and you can have access from your computer or from a mobile device.
In this section we are going to show you the steps to follow to create your ad:
- Create the campaign and choose your objective
Create a campaign that is relevant to your business and consider the purpose for which you are creating it. Your objectives can be to give your brand recognition, consideration, or conversion, just as the objectives we saw before, you should choose from there.
Recognition
It means publicizing your company, product or service. To reach your goal you can use metrics such as reach, frequency or local diffusion.
Consideration
In exchange for giving information about your, company, product or service, potential clients keep your brand in mind. To achieve your goal you can use metrics such as clicks on the web page, reach, frequency or video views.
Conversion
It works when you need to increase the number of sales or you need the user to perform other types of specific actions. You can measure it through conversions on your website or installations of your application through dynamic ads.
- Select the audience
You can segment your audience based on different elements as detailed below:
● Location
● Age
● Gender
● Language
● Interests
● Behaviour
In the following image, you can see how an audience can be segmented by location, in this case, we chose Australia. Age (18-65+). Gender (All genders) and detailed targeting. This is just an example of how it works because when you segment your audience you want to do it as specific as possible.
How to define an audience?
It is normal that at the beginning people create very wide and very unspecific audiences. this leads to a very large audience and a not very high budget that will end up in not reaching the right people and not be able to optimize the ads.
However, it is important to use all the tools Facebook give us and get the most out of it. You can use a customed audience, a similar audience or a saved audience as shown in the image below.
Custom audiences
They are those audiences created from an origin to which you have access, such as your website, a list of your clients, a list of people subscribed to your mailing, visitors to a specific part of your website or people who have interacted with your page.
A personalized audience can normally be used as an audience for a remarketing campaign because they are people who already know your brand.
Similar audiences
Similar audiences are the ones that are like the customized audiences that you created. For example, you can say that you want an audience similar to the people who visit your website.
So basically, what Facebook does is collect information from users similar to visitors in your website when searches in its entire database.
In this kind of segmentation you let Facebook do the work and analyse all this information for you to find similar audiences, this means less work for you!
Similar audiences are ideal for scaling your campaign. If a specific audience has worked for you, then you can expand your audience with a similar audience
Saved audiences
The saved audiences are the lifetime ones. The ones that are just like your buyer personas and you managed the segmentation for.
Also, Facebook allows you to edit saved audiences a lot until you reach your ideal audience, so you don’t have to worry for that part.
Remember that in this type of segmented audience you must be careful not to make an audience too large since it will be impossible to reach the entire audience with a low budget. Also, a very large audience means that you are not segmenting well.
- Define your budget and schedule
Think about how much money you want to spend on the ad and define how long you want it to be circulating.
In the Facebook Ads Manager, you can see an estimate of your reach depending on the budget and other details.
- Create your ad
There are different types of ads that you can create depending on your goals. You can choose between the ad formats that we mentioned in the first part of the post.
- Measure results
This is the essential part of a campaign. Measuring the results helps you realize what works and what does not work with your target audience.
In the beginning, before launching the ad there will appear an estimate of your reach and how many people will perform the action required like is shown in the image below.
Use this as an estimate for possible results and when the campaign is done you can analyze it closely. In this way, you can correct what does not work for future campaigns.
Facebook Ads statistics.
Finally, one last thing you should do is monitoring campaigns. Look carefully at which ones work and which ones don’t. If one does not work, it is better for you to stop the campaign and invest your money in one that does work.
When you’re just starting, it’s ideal to keep a small audience and budget, so in this way, you can see if it really works and raise the budget if needed.
Remember that the statistical data that Facebook shows to you are related to the objectives that you chose at the beginning so don’t expect to see any other type of metric other than those related to your objective.
There is also data that will appear in the results of any campaign regardless of the objective that you chose based on the following metrics:
● Reach: How many people have you reached with your publication.
● Likes: How many times users have “liked” your posts.
● Comments: How many times users have commented on your post.
● Engagement: Audience engagement with your content.
● Impressions: How many times your publication has been viewed.
● Amount spent: How much you spent on the campaign.
● Relevance Index: Facebook’s rating regarding the quality of your content.
● Unique clicks on the link: How many users entered your link.
● Cost per result: How much did it cost you to obtain the desired results.
We hope you found this guide useful to put in practice everything you just learned.
Also, if you need any help with your Facebook ads we will be more than happy to help you. Also, don’t forget to check the Facebook ad hacks that really work before you get starting. Wish you the best of luck!
