When you’re setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a few boxes that need to be checked.
- Are you targeting the right audience?
- Are your images to scale?
- Are you running the right type of ad for your campaign?
To help you out, we’ve put together a checklist to ensure you have all of your ad campaign details covered. And if you want to discover and learn more , you can also head to the Facebook Blueprint to learn all you need to know about Facebook Ads. But in this article, let us simplify it for you!
Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements:
- Campaigns
- Ad sets
- Ads
- The campaign houses all of your assets, such as Ad Sets and Ads.
- Ad sets help you to manage separate audiences with different characteristics. You’ll need an individual ad set for each.
- Your actual ads then live within each of your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in colour, copy and images.
Create Your First Facebook Ads
First, you need to log in to the Ads Manager. It is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview of all their campaigns. Next, you need to choose an objective for your campaign. Click “Create Ad” and Facebook Ads Manager will prompt you to Choose your objective.
There are 11 different objectives to choose from. These include:
a. Brand Awareness and Reach
b. Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, Messages
c. Conversions, Catalogues Sales and Store Traffic
By choosing your campaign objective, you’re giving Facebook an idea of what you’re intending to do, which then helps Facebook give you the best options for your ad. For example, If you’re interested in getting more traffic to your website, Facebook will ask you for a URL to promote it. Facebook will then display the ad options and choose the best suited to achieving your chosen objective.
Find and Choose Your Audience
We can’t stress enough that you need to know your audience. This is one of the main reasons that can determine your digital marketing success. Facebook has many options to help you with your choice, including location, age, gender, language and more.
We recommend experimenting with a couple of options to establish the best audience for your ads. If you already know your customer personas or types, it will be easier for you to choose your audience. To help you narrow down your audience, Facebook will show you the potential reach of your campaign when you define the key demographics such as age, gender, and location.
If you’re not sure what to choose here, look back at your objective. If you’re wanting to get more traffic to your site, focus on what your customers are specifically interested in seeing on your website, and the type of people who will benefit from your products or services.
If your campaign objective is to build an awareness of your product, service or a new offer, focus on a more general audience.
Custom Audience
Facebook also has the option for a Custom Audience. This means customers who have already interacted with your business page website. This may include customers in your database or newsletter list, people who have visited a specific page on your website, or customers who have already bought your product. You will need to experiment which types of audiences respond well to your ad, and you can then save this custom audience for later use.
Now you need to set your budget. You have the option to set a daily or a lifetime budget for your ad. You can choose to run your ads to run continuously through daily budget setting, or use the lifetime budget to run your ad for a specific length of time.
Ads Creation
Your ads need an objective. There are many creative options available for you to choose what your ad will look like. In our example, we want to increase the number of clicks to our website.
Here, we will choose Traffic as our objective. This will send people to a destination, such as a website, app, or Facebook event.
The platforms which support the Traffic objective are Facebook and Instagram, and you can choose to have your ad viewed as a photo, video, carousel, slideshow, or collection. Here you can choose a Link Ad, which displays a single image, or a Carousel Ad, with 3-5 scrolling images.
Facebook is set up in a way that makes it easy to navigate and create an ad. You can also click the “i” icon to find out more or “Help” section to get more tips.
Input Your Creative Designs
Next you need to upload your creative assets, which are your photos, graphics, or videos.
Facebook has some criteria that you have to adhere to when uploading creative assets, such as image dimension, quality, and the amount of text on an image. If your creative asset is not accepted, Facebook will reject it and ask you to replace your asset with one that meets its guidelines.
Once you have uploaded your creative assets, you’ll need to decide how you’d like to display your ad. The three main options are:
- Desktop News Feed
- Mobile News Feed
- Or Desktop Right Column
It is best to experiment with these options to find the one which is most engaging for your audience. We recommend heading to Facebook and researching other advertisers’ examples.
All that’s left to do now is click “Submit”! Once your ad is approved by Facebook, it will be out there ready to help you build and grow your business!
Facebook Ads Report
You can view your ad results on the Dashboard of your Ads Manager, or you can create your own custom reports.
It’s important to keep an eye on your ads and see how they’re doing. You can make as many adjustments as you like along the way.
Key numbers like Ad Performance, Reach, Cost, and Frequency are easily available and can be easily adjusted. You can also set up your own reports like in this screenshot above, depending on what you want to keep an eye on.
And lastly, before you run your first ad, decide WHAT GOALS you want to achieve and stick to them. KEEP TRACK of metrics that best reflect your success in those specific areas – whether that be through sales, website visits, or event sign ups.