Facebook is still the most popular of all the Social Media platforms available, and therefore it makes sense that advertising on Facebook is likely to have the largest audience. But there are often pitfalls for the unwary, and there are many articles about people who have spent a lot of money on Facebook advertising but not got the leads or sales they were hoping for. So what can be done? In this article we are going to look at creating and managing your Facebook advertising to get the most out of the platform.
1. Building your Facebook ad campaigns
1. Campaign objective
Facebook defines each objective like this:
Brand awareness: Show your ads to people who are most likely to remember them.
Reach: Show your ads to the maximum number of people.
Traffic: Send people to a destination, like a website, app, Facebook event, or Messenger conversation.
Engagement: Get more page likes, event responses, post reacts, comments, or shares.
Conversions: Show your ads to people most likely to take valuable actions, like making a purchase or adding payment info, on your website, app, or in Messenger.
2. Page and account
Remember that Facebook owns Instagram. So if you have an audience there too, this is the platform to use to run those ads.
You’ll want to split your campaigns by platform even if you want to run the same creative and audience. Otherwise, Facebook will optimize your budget for the platform performing the best as it sees it as just one of several ‘placements’.
3. Schedule
You can choose when Facebook shows your ad in the schedule section. You can probably run your campaigns continuously in most cases, but in B2B ads, you might want to limit your views to ‘working time’ in your target market.
4. Audience
Although you want to keep a wide enough audience so Facebook can optimize for user behavior, you should still have a basic idea of who your ideal customer is — this is where to put those demographics.
You can choose location, age, gender, languages, as well as detailed targeting based on interests and behavior, connections, and even create custom audiences.
5. Creative, format, and placement
Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook’s Audience Network all have different requirements. Have a look at all the options before producing any creative content, as you might find yourself without the right format when it’s time to launch your ad.
6. Optimization and delivery
This helps Facebook decide who to show your ads to, for example, who would most likely click on your ad based on their previous behavior.
7. Budget and estimates
Once your budget has been set your ad is good to go
2. Optimising your Facebook ad campaigns
Audience
If you’re just starting to run your first Facebook Ads, you should probably start with a broad audience and analyze your campaign data. Many tips you’ll find online, and even here are tips that worked for that person, that business, and at that moment. They might not even apply to you. The best thing to do is gather some general tips depending on your industry or product and start testing.
Testing
If you want to find out if something specific works well for your audience, try an A/B test. What’s an A/B test? It’s simply running two identical campaigns while only changing one variable. Keep it simple and small. You can run two different images but keep the same text, audience, CTA. Or try two different target locations, but keep everything else exactly the same. You can also use one campaign as your ‘control group’ to keep that one unchanging and test your ideas against that base one. A good ‘control’ campaign would be to use a broad Facebook optimized audience and test one idea at a time.
3. Key success metrics for Facebook Ad campaigns
Facebook offers advertisers comprehensive analytics capabilities but can also be a source of confusion if you don’t know where to focus. To determine your success metrics, start by identifying your objectives: brand awareness, engagement, website traffic, and conversions. Depending on what objective you’re trying to reach, try tracking a few key metrics to gain an understanding of what is working best with your audience and messaging.
4. Facebook Ads Reporting
Once you’ve set up your ads and have some tests running, you need to set up a report to be able to clearly and easily monitor the performance.. It’ll make your analysis much easier, and you can spend time actually getting the most out of your ads instead of manually creating a report for yourself every time you want to analyze data. No matter what system you use, be it Excel, Google Sheets or the in built Facebook reporting, you want to be looking for trends and behaviours across your adverts. Times of interaction, details of the types of interaction, and these insights are key to being able to get the most from your Facebook advertising.
Conclusion
There is much to think about when creating your Facebook campaign, and it certainly isn’t a set it and forget it type of situation. To get the most out of the campaign you should be continuously monitoring, adjusting, and trying new things, all based on the data that you capture. If you would like to talk to us as to how we can help you to optimise your Facebook campaigns, click on the image below and schedule a conversation with us. We’re here to help!
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