Planning to start your own Facebook Marketing Agency? Or perhaps you want to establish your brand and get popular on social media? Advertising on Facebook is something all businesses should think about, given how popular the platform has become.
Facebook is the most influential social network on the planet right now in terms of most active users. Do you want to get lost in the sea of over 1.5 billion daily users, or do you want your business to stand out from the 70 million active business pages?
To get you started with your Facebook campaign, here’s our comprehensive guide. Follow these steps, stay sharp, and you will start earning from your Facebook ads in no time!
The first thing you need to know is the components of Facebook advertisements. Campaigns are where you can show all your assets. You can opt for Ad sets if you have separate groups of target audiences. Based on their characteristics, you can create individual ad sets. And within the Ad sets are the actual live Ads. You can include varying types of ads in each ad set.
Now, here’s how you can get started with advertising on Facebook:
1. Facebook’s Ads Manager
With Facebook’s Ads Manager, creating paid ads on the platform is a walk in the park.
You have to log in to this page with your Facebook account, and you will see this dashboard:
This performance dashboard has the sections for campaigns, ad sets, ads, and also analysis for their performance.
To start your first campaign, first, choose if you want to go for a campaign, ad sets, or ads, then tap on the “+ Create” at the top left corner.
2. Objective
All social media advertising networks are designed with your campaign objective in mind. You need to first choose the objective of your advertisement to get started on your campaign.
You can choose from 11 different options: brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalog sales, and store traffic. If you choose Traffic, for example, you will be next asked to enter the URL you want to promote. When the ads manager has these 2 bits of information, it will show you the best ad options to suit your needs.
3. Audience
Next, you have to define your target audience. If you are going for different target groups, you have to create separate ad sets for each group under the same campaign. If you are a newbie, you will have to try out a few audience options before you can figure your best group.
To help you narrow down your group, Facebook offers you an audience definition gauge.
This option on the right-hand side takes your inputs to come up with a potential reach number.
Apart from the gauge, you can create your audience base from the many targeting options Facebook gives you:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Languages
- Relationship
- Education
- Work
- Ethnic Affinity
- Generation
- Parents
- Life Events
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Connections
If you have already done your market research, you will have a demo group in mind. In that case, you can go for the Custom Audience option and easily start advertising on Facebook. When you have got your group of audience who respond well to your ads, you can save that information for future campaigns.
4. Budget
With Facebook Ad Manager, you can select a daily or lifetime budget limit. With the daily budget option, Facebook will pace your per day spending, but the minimum amount for an ad set is $1.00. This amount has to be at least two times your CPC.
If you are advertising on Facebook for a specific period of time, opt for the lifetime budget option. This will help Facebook pace your spending to be utilized for your specific period.
If you tap on the Advanced Options at the bottom, you will get options like Schedule, Optimization & Pricing, and Delivery.
You can schedule your ad to start running on a specific day in the future, or you can select periods of time when you want them to run. With specific timings and days, it will be easier to reach your target audience.
With optimization and pricing, you can bid for your clicks, impressions, and objective. Facebook usually controls the maximum bid, but you can go for manual bidding as well. With manual bidding, you can pay per action completed.
If you go for manual bidding, you will have the option to choose accelerated delivery. This is helpful if your ad is time-sensitive. Otherwise, you will get the standard delivery where Facebook displays your ad throughout the day.
5. Create The Ad
Based on your objective, you have to now create the ad. If you go for a Links ad to increase the number of clicks to your site, this is how it will show on Facebook:
While link ads show only 1 image, carousel ads will have the option of multiple images.
There are certain design criteria you have to adhere to.
For Link ads:
1. Text: 125 characters
2. Ad Headline: 25 characters
3. Image ratio: 1.91:1
4. Image resolution (including CTA): 1080 x 1080 pixels
For Carousel ads:
1. Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels
2. Image ratio: 1:1
3. Text: 125 characters
4. Headline: 40 characters
5. Link description: 20 characters
These are the options you get for the “Traffic” objective for advertising on Facebook.
If you go for something else, like the “Boost” option, you will get options like Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. You can click here to better understand all the different design recommendations.
Next, the Ad Manager will ask you how you want your ad displayed. You get the options of Mobile News Feed, Desktop News Feed, and Desktop Right Column.
Mobile News Feed
Desktop News Feed
Desktop Right Column
6. Performance Report
Once your advertising on Facebook goes live, you will need to track its performance. You can again rely on Facebook’s Ad Manager for the reports. The key metrics that Facebook takes into consideration are Performance, Engagement, Videos, and Website. The other options are Apps, Events, Clicks, and customized settings.
You can include metrics like reach frequency, impressions, results, etc., in your Performance criteria. Page likes, page engagement, and post engagement are some of the things you can include in your Engagement metric.
You can also find the average percentage of views for your video advertisements. If you are going for your website, you can include metrics like checkouts, payment details, adds to cart, etc. So on and so forth, you can include multiple metrics to better understand how your audience is engaging with your content.
If you follow the right practices, advertising on Facebook will take your business further. Stick to the guidelines Facebook has and play fair!
