Advertising on Facebook is one of the most targeted social advertising available. With their ability to narrow down your target audience considerably and reach millions of active users you’re sure to find a good number of people that fit your target and increase sales. Let’s dive into the available options on the Facebook ad network and help you get your ads set up.
The best thing to do is to follow along this blog post while logged into Facebook. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ to get started.
Destination
Before setting up you should make sure you’re clear on the destination you’re sending users to. You can advertising an external site like your website, or your Facebook page.
- External site – Good for newsletter sign ups, special offer within your website, service sign ups, and other actions available only via your site.
- Facebook page – Good for growing your fan base, engaging your audience with a promotion of some sort, and promote your Facebook page and Facebook store.
When advertising within Facebook you’re creating an engagement ad. A Facebook user can then like your company from within the ad even RSVP to an event you’re having or like a post you’re promoting. This increases your chances of growing your following and your future marketing efforts will return better investments.
- We will assume you’re opting to promote a Facebook page and direct customer to engage with you and buy online via your Wazala Facebook store, so moving forward these are your options.
Objectives
- Get More Page Likes – This allows you to grow and invest in an audience that is interested in your products and services, thus increasing your engagements on Facebook and building loyal followers to target in the future.
- Promoting Page Posts – This options allows you to advertise a specific post. The post can be a promotional offer or discount code, a blog post you published or a newly released product to your online store. No matter what this is you do need to make sure it is engaging and your target audience will find it useful. Usually these posts generate interest in your page, though the Facebook user can like the post, it does not necessarily mean they will end up liking your page.
- Advanced Options – This includes the ability to add stories – Sponsored stories is an optional features that allows you to broaden your reach to the friends of the Facebook user who interacted with you. When someone likes your page, their friends will see this engagement in their newsfeed as well increasing your target pool. They can also be less expensive than traditional Facebook ads. We recommend adding this and tweaking this later if it does not get you the results you’re after.
Your Ad
If you opted to promote a page post, there isn’t much to design. If you are advertising your Facebook Page you need a headline, body text and picture. The ad will default to your Page Profile Picture but you may opt to change it depending on your message.
- Headline – Make it interesting and address an issue or ask a question.
- Text – Now answer or give details to your Headline and make sure to cover the basic question a consumer asks “what’s in it for me?”. Add a call to action, like buy now, or redeem now. The more exciting this is the better your results.
- Image – The default will be your Facebook Profile Picture, but you can opt to change this and showcase a different image. If you sell handmade goods, for example you can change this to show a picture of your latest creation. Just make sure it’s clear as these images are not that big.
- Landing View – Let’s say you’re having a sale or have a coupon code you want people to use. Your main objective is to send them directly to your Facebook store so they can start browsing and buy. This allows you to select where your customers land within your Facebook page.
Audience
Now that you know what you want to promote, it’s time you nail down the who. Facebook allows you to narrow down your targeting to the following criteria’s:
- Location – Select the country, state, city and even zip code to narrow down. This is great if you’re a local business or only ship to certain countries.
- Age & Gender – Allows you to match users by an exact age and target both or either gender. Let’s say you sell cosmetics and only want to target women between the ages of 20 and 45, this will help you nail this.
- Interests – Here is where you can narrow down your audience with interests. The interests show up in users profiles under the “likes” section or even keywords mentioned in their about information. You can target users who like other existing Facebook pages that are similar to yours, or a broad interest like fishing, yoga, makeup etc. Broad interests are marked with a # and will include all pages that relate this to interest so you can be sure to target all of them.
- Connections – This allows you to either eliminate or include people who already like your page. A great tool if you wish to also entice your existing fan base with a promotion or sale.
- Advanced Targeting – These options are mainly to allow you to narrow down further and eliminating based on relationship status, languages they speak, education level and even the company they work in. Be careful here as it may narrow down your audience considerably and you’re left with a smaller pool of people.
Pricing & Schedule
Facebook ad pricing is auction based. If you’ve used Google Adwords before you’re find this very similar. Let’s go through what’s available to you..
- Currency, Country and Time Zone – Select this based on your local business. The timezone will affect the campaign start and end date so select this wisely.
- Campaign Name – Make sure to name the campaign with relevant keywords to help you remember who and what you’re targeting. This will make it easier on you when comparing campaigns and going through your analytics later on.
- Budget – Set a total budget for the campaign or a daily total. When starting out, it is usually preferred to set a daily budget so you limit the amount spent each day.
- Schedule – Select a start and end date to your campaign or continuously run this campaign. Depending on the total budget or daily budget you could end up with continuous charges on your credit card, so be sure to select what you’re most comfortable with.
- Optimization – This is where you need to really think through your options. You have the option to pay per click (CPC) or per thousand impressions (CPM). We recommend going with the CPC route, since the click-through rate of Facebook ads is usually lower than other online advertising and you may end up paying more with CPM. But it is always best to try both and test this out yourself. Once an ad is doing well and getting a lot of clicks you can consider changing it to a CPM. Many advertisers start with a large number of campaigns to find 3 or 4 that work for them.
- Bids – When opting on a bid, we recommend starting with the suggested bid Facebook proposes to you, or even higher to make sure your ad does get impressions. The best way to get cheaper clicks is to get an ad to get more clicks! Facebook actually rewards ads that get a lot of clicks with cheaper bids and higher positions, so going lower on your bid is not the best solution.
Once you’re ready, click on review ad, to see how this ad will look and confirm your settings. You will be asked to name this specific ad. Remember we just created a campaign with a single ad, and you can add more ads to this campaign once you’re done.
Click on place order to take your ad live. If you have not provided Facebook with a payment option yet you will get a pop up to do so. Your options are credit cards, PayPal or direct debit. Choose what you’re comfortable with and go live.
Congratulations you now have set up your first campaign and ad on the Facebook network. Split testing and optimizing your ads is needed to get more for your buck. We’ll be discussing this in our next post next week, and giving details on Google insights and analyzing your ads to make sure you’re ad performance is well optimized, so stay tuned.
Want to sell on Facebook? Here’s our guide on how Wazala store owners can easily sell on Facebook.
More help on Facebook advertising is found on their site here: https://www.facebook.com/help/425284084163299/
