How to Set Up Successful Facebook Ad Campaigns
You want to set up a Facebook campaign, but have no idea where to start? Previously, we’ve seen a lot of individuals and businesses guess with Facebook ads. Sadly, they didn’t see results because they didn’t have the right campaign for their goals, and nothing was aligned.
Read on to learn the key considerations you need to make before getting started, the ways you can approach Facebook ads, and some useful tips for success.
Important Considerations
What do you need to keep in mind before creating an ad campaign?
Your Goals
First and foremost, you’ll be wasting your own time and money if you choose to start a campaign without even thinking about what you want to achieve. Are you strictly pushing for sales? Do you want to boost exposure or even generate engagement on each ad?
When you first launch a new campaign, the platform will push you into choosing a marketing objective and this shouldn’t be selected at random. For example, a conversion campaign will run differently to a traffic campaign. We’ll dig deeper into the different ad types later in the guide.
Your Audience
Next up, Facebook ads is one of the best platforms for targeting so don’t let this opportunity pass you by. While setting up a campaign, you’ll choose from three audiences:
- Those connected to your page
- All those on Facebook
- A custom audience
Wherever possible, we recommend choosing a custom audience because this will allow you to upload your very own curated list. If you’ve been building a list over a period of time, now’s the time to bring this to life and transform leads into customers. What’s more, the Lookalike Audience feature will generate a list of users who have similarities to those in your own list. Suddenly, you’ll have access to a wider base of people with a potential interest in your service.
If you don’t have a list, choose the option to target those connected to your page. If you’re working with a blank canvas, the next section is for you.
Read More: How To Use Facebook Lookalike Audiences
Building Your Audience
If you’ve never used a platform of this nature to build an audience before, you won’t go far wrong using the ‘demographics and interests’ option. Depending on your target market, you’ll be able to select:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Language
After setting this ad up, you’ll target those who have never previously interacted with the brand. If you’re brave enough, you can also play with the Detailed Targeting options which allow you to adjust your audience based on Behaviors, Demographics, Interests, and More Categories. Why not start with a general audience before narrowing down as the campaign progresses?
If you don’t have a custom audience, don’t be afraid. With Facebook, you have one of the best platforms for setting up a new audience so there’s no better place to get started. As long as you’re willing to experiment and test different audiences over time, you’ll get the most from Facebook.
Types of Facebook Ads
When attempting to set up successful Facebook ad campaigns, half the battle is choosing the right ad type, so this will be the next section of our guide. Considering there are more businesses battling for attention than ever before, you don’t want to get this wrong. Rather than wasting your investment, choose the ad type that matches your goals.
Brand Awareness
It’s not always about making sales, and you may have a simple goal of getting exposure on the world’s largest social media platform. Although this ad type actually suits most campaigns, it’s designed for the very best content. If you go down this route, you want to pique the interest of Facebook users and leave them wanting more of your brand.
App Installs and Engagement
Ever see a mobile game advertised on Facebook? Well, this could be you. If you have an app you wish to share with the world, you can either highlight specific features to encourage engagement or simply state the app’s main purpose to encourage installation.
Store Visits
If you own a local business, there’s no need to feel left out because you can take advantage of Facebook ads too. Want to target a particular geographic region and tell them about your new store? Make it happen with local awareness and store visit ads. In order to maximize your efforts, use your Facebook page and set up a location structure.
Clicks to Website
This option is for those who are only worried about traffic and getting people to their website. Depending on your needs, you can send people to a product offer, blog post, site page, or any other page. In fact, using the carousel feature, users can be sent to a variety of pages.
Website Conversions
Your campaign may be more urgent, and you may want short-term success rather than building for long-term results with brand awareness. If this is the case, website conversion campaigns push for the user to click and take action.
Page Likes
While some ads will see you pay for each result, encouraging page likes opens the door for organic growth. Not only do you get the initial like, you can reach out to all new users with your fantastic content.
Events
As the name suggests, this ad type is designed for special events in order to build excitement and generate a buzz around your brand. Interestingly, many businesses have found website conversion ads to be more effective if the sign-up page is on your own website.
Lead Generation
For many years, the biggest problem with getting Facebook users to your web page forms was the lack of motivation for users to leave Facebook. Now, with the introduction of the lead generation ad type, Facebook users can fill out a form and provide their information directly from your Facebook ad.
Post Engagements
Just as we saw with page likes, Facebook provides opportunities to grow organically and this is the case with post engagements. With these ads, you can expand the reach of your posts and encourage users to like, comment, and share.
Offer Claim
Finally, you can advertise a specific offer and use CTAs to get people to visit your website and learn more. In the past, an effective technique we’ve seen is to promise this special offer for a limited time or for only a limited number of people. With this sense of urgency, Facebook users will know they either need to act now or risk missing out.
Facebook Ad Top Tips
There we have it, we now know the main aspects of building a successful ad campaign; you’ll need to consider your goals, your audience, and the ad type. With these three forming the foundation, everything else you do will be a simple case of refinement.
To finish, we’ve got some top tips to get your ad the attention it deserves.
Create Multiple Ads
All good marketers will tell you that campaigns should have multiple ads. After creating your first single image ad, this is great, but play around with the image, font, text, and format to see if you can make improvements. Over time, people will get bored of seeing the same ad so it can be useful to test different designs. In this process, you’ll also learn what does and doesn’t work for your business.
As the relevancy score drops, you can split test images, ad format, copy, and other aspects. Sometimes, making simple changes works just as well as starting a whole new campaign — it’s cheaper and less hassle too.
Catch the Eye
You could target your market perfectly, and even choose the ad type that aligns with your goals, but you still need to choose imagery and font that catches the attention of Facebook users. These days, we tend to scroll through our feed quickly so your ad can’t just blend in or it will be lost forever.
As well as your images, the copy should grab the attention of users too. With the first sentence in particular, this is where you either win or lose with Facebook ads.
Use a Natural Tone
Just because you’re paying for an ad, this doesn’t mean you need to treat it as such. In the modern world, consumers don’t like pushy or ‘salesy’ ads. Instead, you should simply explain the benefits of your products/services and why they should click on your CTA.
Additional Tips
We also recommend the following for a successful Facebook ad campaign:
- Utilize re-targeting techniques
- Take advantage of A/B split testing
- Install conversion pixels
Finally, don’t be afraid to spend money and don’t neglect your landing page. Your entire campaign will fall apart if your landing page doesn’t continue the user’s experience in the right way.
Good luck, make the most of our advice, and don’t go searching for the ‘perfect’ ad. Just launch and assess results as they come.
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
