Advertising on Facebook is both incredibly successful and incredibly challenging at the same time explains Peter Decaprio. So many people are using it; so many brands are fighting for attention that simply getting your ad shown in front of the right audience can be difficult. The truth is though if you know how to approach advertising on this social platform you will see great results almost every time.
So with all that in mind I’ve put together some tips and tricks to help guide you through the basics of what you need to know about Facebook Ads to be able to compete against large corporations but also get a fantastic ROI from your campaigns.
What are the basics of Facebook Ads?
When you start an ad account on Facebook there are 2 main options that will be available to you. You can either create your ads using their Ad manager platform or through Power editor which lets you upload audiences, edit ads and track everything within one spot. I recommend using power editor if it’s available to you as it is much more powerful than the standard ad manager. To do this sign into your normal Facebook account, click the drop down arrow at top right, choose business manager and then “add app”. From here you’ll want to search for Power Editor so just follow the prompts from there. It took me about 1 minute to set up my account with Power Editor so it shouldn’t take long at all.
The next thing you’ll need to do is set up your ad accounts, if this was a new account for your business with no previous ads you can skip this step but if it’s an existing one with past ads attached you may want to adjust a few things before continuing. To get started head to the manage section in Power Editor and scroll down until you find the “accounts” tab. From here click add account and enter your information for that account. If you have multiple sales channels associated with the same business be sure to add them all in here as well or else Facebook won’t be able to track conversions properly.
After that simply continue making all of your ads from within this single interface for everything from campaign creation to ad set optimization says Peter Decaprio. This is the easiest way to manage all of your ads without having to switch back and forth between the standard ad manager, excel sheets or some other 3rd party tool.
How do I create an amazing ad?
- This might seem obvious but you really need to consider what your target market looks like on Facebook before simply creating any random ads. If you are advertising a product aimed at young people it makes no sense for you to show your ads only on LinkedIn because that’s not where their attention is focus. There are 2 main places that you should be targeting with these ads, either through interests or via Facebook pages.
- When adding in interests there are 2 ways to do this, firstly just by entering keywords into the box and choosing interests from the list that appears or by actually going through and curating your own custom lists. If you choose the first option just be aware that Facebook’s definition of an interest can vary wildly from what you might expect it to be so take a little time to read their guide on how they determine this stuff.
- On the other hand if you’re wanting to target specific pages then Facebook makes this really easy for you, simply click the “pages” tab at top left of your ad manager interface, enter in some keywords into one of the search boxes there that relate specifically to your business/product and then select “likes”. You’ll now see all relevant pages come up on the right with 4 tabs where you can further adjust things like the category of page, city of users and more says Peter Decaprio.
- When it comes to actually creating your ads you’ll want to make sure. That these are always focus on producing a click through rate (CTR). The CTR will provide Facebook with feedback as to how good your ad copy and images are. And whether people want to click through or not. If they do then their feed will open up with thumbnail pictures of all relevant posts. From that specific page so even if people don’t end up buying anything directly from you. They may still check out some other products/services as well as possibly leaving their email address for future mailings etc.
Conclusion:
The more ads you create the better Facebook’s machine learning algorithms will get at determining. Which ad combinations are producing the best results so don’t be afraid to experiment says Peter Decaprio. The main thing you should keep in mind is that CTR is your goal here. Once you start seeing 0.5%+ growth rates on all of these things I guarantee. That your business will see a huge boost within months as long as your product isn’t complete trash!