Advertising on Facebook is an amazing way to reach specific audiences and increase your sales or interaction with your website – But in order to have a successful Facebook advertising campaign, there are many factors that must be considered.
Within this article, we have included all of the steps from the start to the finish of a Facebook advertising campaign on Facebook. There are many tips and tricks that will help your campaign be more successful than your competitors, and help to increase your sales or customer engagement with your company’s website or profile. Consider all of the information included in this article and you will develop a strong advertising campaign for your company.
Developing Your Profile
The first step to getting started with Facebook Advertising is to make sure that you have set up a profile followed by a business account. If you already have a business profile then you can disregard this first part. However, it might be a good idea to check it over to make sure that all the information is still accurate and relevant.
This will allow you to develop your dream Facebook profile for your business where you can customise all of the aspects of the page including the name, description, profile picture and more. From here you can begin to work on developing your individual campaigns.
Advertising is a great way to build your platform as a company and gain more attention for your goods or services. There are two ways to approach Facebook Advertising; You can either boost your posts, or create advertising campaigns using Ad Manager. Although the first one is great for creating extra engagement on your Facebook or Instagram profile, in order to drive website traffic and increase sales, you will need to create an advertising strategy using Facebook for Business and Ad Manager.
So, head on to https://business.facebook.com, and login to your account or set up a new one. In order to do this, you can click on Create Account and then enter a name for your business, your personal name and your email address. After that, you need to enter all of your business details and click submit to finalise your Business Manager account.
Once you go through these simple steps, head over to Settings where you will be able to add your Facebook page and Instagram, apps, and also other people to help you with running the account.
How to Use Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to manage your Facebook campaigns, ad sets and ads all within your own profile.
When developing your Facebook ads there are three different levels where you can create your advertisements. The first is the overarching campaign level where you can select the ad objective or the main goal of your campaign. Then there is the ad set level where you can define your target audience, choose your specific ad placements, determine the budget for your project and set a schedule for all of your advertisements. Finally, there is the ad level which is where you can work to develop the ads themselves by selecting their format, upload images and videos to use, and finally add any text, links or other options.
How to Create Ads
Once you have opened Ads Manager on your Facebook Business profile the next step is to create your campaign. In order to do this from the main table in Ads Manager select create and then from there choose the Create a Campaign window. Once that is open you will be able to select the basic settings for the new campaign you are working on, you will also be able to use existing campaigns, ad sets, ads or develop new ones for your profile.
Then from there, you can work to refine your settings within the Create a Campaign window by selecting the “Continue” option once you are confident and happy with the changes you made to the basic settings of your campaign. By selecting Continue, you will be moved to the editing pane of the Ads Manager. Within the editing portion of the campaign, you will be able to select a campaign objective, audience, placement and ad format.
The first step is to select which campaign objective is best for the future of your project. Within these objectives, Facebook will list eleven different choices which you can pick from, as well as a brief summary of what all of those objectives will do for your campaign.
Those objectives include brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalogue sales or store traffic. Each objective will offer different goals for your business and therefore you have to find the one which is the best fit for your company.
The next step is to name your campaign within the Ads Manager. This is when you can decide if you would like to use A/B testing for your advertising campaign. A/B split tests are a great way to determine which ads are more effective. You can test your audience, placement and your creatives.
In this same section, you will be able to select if you would like to have budget optimisation for your campaign. If you have very similar audiences in each ad set, setting up a budget on a campaign level can prevent your individual ad sets from competing against each other. If you decide not to do that, you can set up the budget in the next stage as shown below.
Within this section, you are able to select if you want a daily or a lifetime budget for your ad sets, and how much you want to spend for either of those options. After that, you can decide whether or not you want to schedule your ads on specific days and times. This means that rather than having it be active and therefore costing you money during times where your target audience is offline. However, this option is available only if you choose a lifetime budget.
Choosing Your Audience
Before going into any advertising campaigns, it is crucial that you understand which groups you are looking to target in the first place. Knowing exactly who your potential client is is one of the most important aspects of marketing.
Facebook gives you several options to reach your ideal audience. The first is detailed targeting, which is where you can decide to either include or exclude specific individuals based on their interests, demographics or behaviours. And the options here are absolutely endless.
The next category to take into consideration is whether or not to promote your advertisements to people who have engaged previously with your business.
Custom Audiences allow you to connect with those who have already shown an interest in either your products or business overall. This audience could be created based on your client database, website traffic or engagement with your social media channels or apps. Facebook will find these individuals so you can successfully keep reminding them about your services or products.
Once you have created custom audiences, you can now create lookalike audiences which will enable you to reach people who are more likely to be interested in your goods or services because they are very similar to your current customers. Depending on which custom audience you will select as a source, the program will identify the qualities of the people who are included in your audience and work to find people who also fit into those characteristics.
Something to consider during this process is the size of the lookalike audience you are hoping to make. You can select the percentage from 1 to 10, 1 being the most similar and 10 the least. At this stage, it’s important to pay attention to the size of your audience, as if it’s too small your advert might be expensive.
After making all of the decisions for who you will be targeting with your ad campaign, the next step is to decide where you should place your ads. Facebook recommends using Automatic Placements, which means that Facebook will automatically place the ads you develop across all of their platforms including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and the Audience Network. However, if you already know which platforms are used by your core audience you can edit this section and choose only the placements you are interested in.
Then you can decide if you would like to optimise your bidding strategy and bidding type, and if you are not sure which is the best fit for your campaign yet, you can elect to use the default options which should be just as successful.
The final step of developing your campaign is to actually create the advertisements which could include videos, photos, carousels or interactive mobile experience. It’s a good practice to use dynamic ads, which can be chosen at a campaign level. Dynamic ads work to deliver ads to people based on their individual’s preferences making your ads the most successful. Just remember, this style of Facebook advertising is not a substitute for A/B testing.
Creatives
Now it’s time for you to create the ads. You have a choice of photos, short videos, carousels, slide shows and an Instant mobile experience. The best practice is to test different variations of your ads to see which type gets the best results.
Always ensure it fits within the ad spec requirements including text and format. Bear in mind that your creatives should be adjusted for all placements you selected previously, including stories as it may affect the look of your published ad.
Ideally, the uploaded files should be either a JPG or PNG file with a ratio of 1.91:1 to 1:1 and a resolution of at least 1080 x 1080 pixels. Your primary text should not exceed 125 characters, a headline of 40 characters and a description of 30 characters. Finally, the technical requirements are a maximum file size of 30 MB, minimum width of 600 pixels, a minimum height of 600 pixels and finally an aspect ratio tolerance of 3%. It is also important to note that panoramas or 360 photos can be used on Facebook as an interactive experience with some objectives.
Meeting all of these requirements is the most important part of having a successful campaign because if you are unable to fulfil all of these requirements, then your advertisement will never be posted correctly in the first place. Make sure that your advertisements meet these requirements prior to uploading them.
Final Thoughts
Developing an advertising campaign can seem like a daunting task at the onset of the project, but after going through all of the steps you will get used to the complexity of it all. Always remember to monitor your results and check how each campaign is performing on a regular basis. Perhaps you might find those small adjustments can make your campaign even more successful.
However, be careful of any major changes as they might reset your ad performance back to the learning phase. If you are looking to change the budget for your campaign, avoid doing so by more than ten or twenty per cent at a time.
As social media continues to grow, there are only more opportunities to develop a strong advertising campaign. By taking all of the information included in this blog you should be able to develop a successful campaign that will increase sales for your company. However, if you still have questions, please feel free to get in touch with us so we can help you make the most of Facebook Advertising.
