Marketing Mondays: Facebook Ads Part 3

In part two of our Facebook ads series, we discussed setting up your Business Manager, Facebook Ads Manager, and Facebook Pixel accounts along with the importance of each. If you missed our last blog, make sure to read it here! These next steps will be difficult to accomplish without your Business Manager and Ads Manager accounts set up properly.

This week, we are going to go over choosing your audience, creating your ad, tracking, A/B testing, and evaluating.

To start creating a brand new ad, go to your Ads Manager account.

Once you’re in Ads Manager, you will be able to see all of your current and previous campaigns. Here, you can then “Create” a new ad.

Before designing your ad, you need to select your campaign objective. The options include:

• Brand Awareness
  
  • Increase the overall awareness of your brand among your selected audience.
• Reach
  
  • Show your ad to the maximum amount of people in your selected audience.
• Traffic
  
  • Increase the number of visits to your website.
• Engagement
  
  • Get more people to engage with your post or page.
• App Installs
  
  • Send people to an app store where they can download your app.
• Video Views
  
  • Maximize the number of views you get on your video ad.
• Lead Generation
  
  • Collect information from your audience or people who are interested in your business/services.
• Messages
  
  • Increase the number of messages and conversations on your page.
• Conversions
  
  • Get more people to your website or mobile app to track and measure conversions.
• Catalog Sales
  
  • Show specific products from your catalog.
• Store Visits
  
  • Promote multiple business locations to people who are close.

Depending on the goal of your campaign, you will have the option to select “A/B Test.” To learn more about what split testing means read this article here.

The concept of split testing involves using two or three different ads at the same time to see which one performs better. This will give you insight as to what ads you should and shouldn’t be creating for your specific audience.

There are a few different tests you can do for your A/B experiment.

• Test your imagery
  
  • When creating an ad, you want to know what images are going to perform the best among your audience. The best way to test this is to create two ads that have the same messaging but have different images. For example, one could be a more lifestyle-based image, where the other image is more vector-based. Run the ad for the same duration, and view the results to see which one performed the best.
• Test your messaging
  
  • The image isn’t the only important element of your Facebook ad, but your messaging is just as . In order to determine which messaging works the best for your audience, create three-to-four different ads that have the same image, but different messaging. For example, “We offer express phone repair!,” “Ask about our express phone repair service today!,” “Get our express phone repair for an additional $9.99!” Once your ads have run for the same duration, you can then evaluate which message was the most effective!

Split testing not only helps you understand your audience more, but it has the potential to help you lower advertising costs and increase the effectiveness of your ads.

When setting up your ad, you will also have the option to “Optimize Your Budget.” This means that Facebook “automatically and continuously finds the best available opportunities for results across your ad sets and distributes your campaign budget in real time to get those results.”

Next, you need to choose your audience.

You can create your audience based on:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Relationship
• Education
• Financial
• Life Events
• Parents
• Politics (US)
• Relationship
• Work
• Interests
• Behaviors

Facebook also gives you the option to create a New, Custom, or a Lookalike Audience. See the image below to view your options for Custom Audience.

From here, you’ll be able to target based on your Customer Files (emails), Website Traffic (using your Facebook Pixel), App Activity, Offline Activity, and Engagement.

For this example, we’re going to choose Website Traffic. Here, it will bring up our Facebook Pixel. Now we have the option to target all of the people who have visited our website in the past 30 days, or we could target all of the people who have purchased from our website in the past 30 days.

Once you’re done selecting which segment you would like, all you have to do is name your audience and watch it populate.

When creating a lookalike audience, Facebook populates an audience based on the custom audience you’ve uploaded. For example, using your CRM, you can upload every customer who has an iPhone in your system. Then, Facebook will populate an audience of people who also have or are interested in iPhones.

If you decide to create a new audience, view our example below.

Let’s say I’m a repair store that is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I have the option to target based on location. This will be the most powerful way to target customers on Facebook for your repair store. If you have more than one location, create different ads for each location so that you can easily track their success.

Next, choose automatic placements and determine your budget and schedule.

You have the option of having a Daily Budget or a Lifetime Budget. If you would like your ad to run continuously throughout the day, you’ll want to choose the Daily Budget. Facebook uses the amount you set and splits it up throughout the day. If you’re hoping to run your ad during a specified length of time, a Lifetime Budget will be the best option.

Next, comes the fun part: creating your ad! If you’re not sure about the differences in Facebook ads, read our previous blog here.

For this example, we chose a video. On the left, you will fill in all the necessary information, and the right side of the ad will auto-generate based on what you type in. Once you’re complete, all you will have to do is confirm your ad and let it run!

Make sure to watch how your ads are doing on a daily basis. You can view all the results of your ads in the Facebook Ads Manager. This way, you can see what ads are performing the best.

After reading this blog, we hope you’re able to better understand how to create a new Facebook ad! If you have any specific topics you would like us to cover in our Marketing Monday’s series, please email [email protected].