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6 Tips and Tricks for Successful Ads on Facebook

David Schafer
The Startup

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Have you always wanted to put ads on Facebook but aren’t quite sure even where to begin? Would you like to learn some of the tricks that have helped my campaigns grow at a very quick rate with high engagement and lowered impression and conversion costs? To all of you, I say welcome. Pull up a chair and get comfortable. You are in the right spot.

1: Define Your Objective

For campaign creation, make sure to create an account at https://Business.Facebook.com. The first thing you need to do is create an objective on your campaign and this is where things can get a little overwhelming. There are three main categories to choose from:

Awareness: Drive awareness or generate interest in your business. These would be people at the very top of the conversion funnel who don’t have strong, or any, familiarity with your business. Facebook is a great place to generate this awareness as over 50% of the US population is on Facebook.

Consideration: These are people who have awareness of your business and want to learn more about you. These people are really in the evaluation stage of the marketing funnel. They are interested in buying a product or service you sell and want to do further research. Link clicks, engagement with your ads and messaging ads are all great examples of these ads.

Conversion: This group of objectives focuses on encouraging the end user to buy from your brand. These are some of the most coveted people your business can have. They are going to buy the product that you sell from someone. Getting a high performing, converting ad in front of them could be just the nudge they need to convert.

2: Targeting

Targeting is critical to success. Having the right message in front of the right person at the right time is often the difference between a winning campaign and a campaign that really has a hard time finding the right audience. Creating custom audiences from past buyers or website visitors is an excellent place to start. Targeting specific geographic areas with Facebook’s location data can also be very helpful. Unless you have a very generic audience to target (age and gender) I would avoid utilizing Facebook’s default options and interests for targeting purposes.

Following this strategy should allow for a significant decrease in costs of your ad, both impression and conversion costs. By lowering these costs, your ad will end up showing to a much larger audience and have more opportunity for success.

3: Ad Testing

Facebook recently came out with a “Dynamic Creative” option in ad creation. This option allows you to load different images and headlines into your ad creative. Facebook will mix and match the options together for the highest performing ads. Don’t be afraid to take some risks when using this method of ad optimization. If the risk doesn’t work out, Facebook will just remove it from the rotation.

Testing ads is an ongoing process. I utilize the ABT (Always Be Testing) methodology for Facebook. This helps from getting stale ads and allows for constant improvement.

4: Landing Page

This is a process that often gets overlooked. Having a landing page that is relevant to the ad that the customer is coming from removes barriers from conversion. From my experience, having an ad specific landing page versus landing the user on the home page or an overly broad results set had a 15% higher conversion rate and a 10% lower bounce rate.

5: Budget

Budget for your ads will change depend on how you want to use it. You can set up budgets on a daily or lifetime basis. When setting up an ad, I recommend using the lifetime basis as this allows the platform to flex up or down depending on how much interaction your ads are getting. Under most campaign objectives you can choose to be billed in different ways. I also recommend starting with Cost per Click over Cost per Impression. From my experience, cost per click typically stretches a budget farther by finding more people interested in clicking on your link and normally gives more impressions.

Facebook works well for a wide range of budget amounts. Whether you are a fortune 500 company or a small business, Facebook advertising has the ability to fit into your marketing budget.

6: Ad Schedule

When scheduling your ads, make sure to set a specific start and end time. Facebook defaults to running ads continuously. Unless you have a very high performing ad set, I normally set them up 4 weeks at a time. This gives you a good opportunity to review results and see if any tweaks need to be made to the ad, such as targeting or messaging.

Facebook can become a strong part of your marketing plans. This advertising works well in a variety of business. Whether you are a B2B or B2C business Facebook advertising works executed properly. The same goes whether you are a company selling a product or service. Facebook ads lets you interact directly with customers and prospects in a way that E-mail, paid search, direct mail, radio and television advertising are unable to.

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Thank you for reading! I am Dave Schafer, an always learning entrepreneur, recovering accountant, aspiring marketer and amateur writer hoping to strengthen my writing skills. One of my large passions is all things digital marketing, an ever changing field that offers so much upside done right. I would love to hear your feedback on this article.

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