Facebook Advertising - a step by step guide

(Patel, n.d.)

Advertising on Facebook is, in a nutshell, paying to place promotions and product

offers in the news feed of a specific, targeted audience on Facebook.

Top Reasons To Advertise on Facebook

They’re very profitable. (If, and that’s a big IF, you know what you’re doing.)

Nearly all social media marketers (96%) consider Facebook advertising the most
effective paid option out of all social networks, according to recent studies.

One reason is Facebook’s size. Billions of people see ads on their platform each
month. People spend almost an hour on it each day.

Another reason is Facebook Advertising gives smaller companies a competitive

advantage, if used correctly. You want to reach people online? Facebook is the
single best alternative to Google AdWords. AdWords is great but it’s also expensive.

It’s different with Facebook. You get access to the same number of people. But for
far less.

Facebook Advertising Definition

Facebook gets tons of data from their users, who enter it voluntarily on their profile
(things like age, location, and interests), they have a good idea of who users are
and what they like.

Therefore, Facebook can serve them targeted ads that show them products that
they are likely to buy, sites they tend to like or events they’d love to attend.

There are a few features that every Facebook ad has and these make
ads unmistakable.

Here they are:

You can see a “Sponsored” tag right underneath the name of the page that is
advertising to you.

There’s also a unique “Like Page” button, in the top right corner, that’s never visible
on regular posts.

Finally, unlike regular news feed items, all Facebook ads have a call-to-action (also
called a CTA), in the bottom right corner, which might say one of the following
things:

 Learn More
 Sign Up
 Download
 Contact Us
 Shop Now
 Book Now
 Watch More
 Apply Now

Facebook integrate their ads into the natural flow of the experience, as seamlessly
as possible. This is different from YouTube which interrupts your experience with
adverts. In longer videos they feel like ad breaks like you’d find on TV. Because
Facebook drops an ad into your feed, you are not interrupted. You can look at it or
just keep on scrolling.

Facebook Advertising Overview

There are 5 types of Facebook ads:

 Inside the news feed on desktop

 Inside the news feed on mobile
 Right-hand sidebar on desktop
 Audience network on mobile
 On Instagram

Placing ads in the news feed or on the right column is obvious, but what does an
audience network ad look like?
These ads are placed on regular websites, inside apps or even in games.

This way, Facebook extends its possibilities for advertising from just inside Facebook
to basically any platform, app or site that they own.

Instagram ads are also placed inside the app’s natural feed, which relies on the
same principle as Facebook ads: don’t interrupt the user experience

There are 2 ways to manage your Facebook ads, which often confuse people.

First, there’s the Ads Manager, which is the standard dashboard that you get when
creating your ad account.
This is the option for beginners and you should use it too, when starting out. Then,

there’s the Power Editor, which is for more advanced users.

The Power Editor just a different way of organizing your ads and gives you a few
more options to customize your advertising.

Instagram ads, for example, can only be run using the Power Editor.

When you first sign up for Facebook advertising, they will immediately prompt you to
create your first campaign.

A campaign is the most abstract and broad level of your advertising efforts. The only
thing that’s determined here is your target outcome, which can be things such as
increasing likes, sending traffic to a website, converting leads to sales etc.

The level that follows is ad sets. An ad set is where you decide what type of ads that
you want to run and the target audience that you want to see your ads e.g. you
could create one set for Instagram ads and one for desktop feed ads.

Finally, there are the ads themselves. This is the level where you design your ads and
decide elements like copy, images and CTA buttons.

You can have multiple ads in each ad set, to test which ones work best.

2 case studies from successful Facebook advertisers

Look at this ad from LeadPages:

(Image source: Leadpages)

Wait a second…an ad for a giveaway?

Is she trying to flush money down the toilet? She’s already giving away something
and then she’s paying to promote that?

And, I don’t think she regrets a single dollar spent.

This campaign helped Marina De Giovanni collect 17,000 emails in 6 weeks.

She built an email list that it takes most people years to build, in less than 2 months!

To pull this off, she gave away a $300 item every month. Sometimes, it was a piece
of jewellery, sometimes a box with cool makeup, etc.

She then created a landing page, which she published as a tab of her Facebook
page, where people could sign up to enter the giveaway in exchange for their
email address.

The final part of her set up was using Facebook ads to drive traffic to the sign-up
page.

Yes, she spent some money on this, but she’s also monetizing her blog and email list,
for example, through private coaching sessions for $225 each - now fully booked

The question is: Would you spend $1,000 to make $10,000?

Um, yes, I would!

Some other success factors of her campaign were:

Using video to welcome people and tell them how to enter

Letting the traffic stay on Facebook, which makes it more likely for people to sign up
(since they trust Facebook)

Constantly testing and tweaking her ads and doubling down on the best ones

You might have heard that you can expect to make $1 per month per subscriber
from your email list.

Even if you only do half as good, you can still make a good living off an email list the
size of Marina’s.

OK it works but Blogger, but does it also work for start-ups?

Yes!

Look at this ad this ad via WPCurve:

Design Pickle offers unlimited graphic requests, something which would typically
make people sceptical.

This ad with its “Ah, a free design can’t hurt” attitude is directly responsible for almost
$6,000 in monthly recurring revenue for Design Pickle.

They used it to target highly qualified leads, which were then sent to this survey.
Why so many questions, won’t that drive down conversions?

Yes. But, they chose to do that, on purpose. They decided to weed out the
scroungers, so they only got leads which were likely to convert.

Doing a free graphic design within a day is a lot of work and they follow up with
each client via phone within 24 hours of delivering, so the last thing they need is
thousands of people to call who won’t buy a thing.

Instead, their campaign generated around 500 leads, 30 of which turned into
subscribers to their $200/mo service.

What’s more, they estimate their customer lifetime value (CLV, the average
expected money a customer will spend with them, once a customer) to be around
$1,100, resulting in 633% ROI for the campaign!

How to Setup Your First Facebook Ad Campaign

Facebook gives you two ad management tools that we just discussed:

 Facebook Ads Manager

 Power Editor
Both are free.

You’ll probably use the Power Editor once you get a little experience. But for now,
it’s a little overkill for what we’re trying to do.

So instead, let’s stick with the Facebook Ads Manager for now which will let you do
everything set out below:

Setting up new campaigns

 Create new ads for each of these

  Manage your bids (or how much you’re spending on each ad)
 You can create different audiences to target
 Optimise, enhance, or improve these campaigns while they’re running
 Even track and test ad campaigns, too.

When you’re on Facebook, you can also click on the menu in the upper-right hand
corner to Manage Ads inside the Ads Manager.

At the top, you should see different tabs to organize your account. There’s a
‘hierarchy’ to help organize how you manage everything. Here’s how it looks:

 Account: Holds all your campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Typically, you’d have a
single account for your business.
o Campaigns: Individual campaigns can be created for almost
anything. Some might be for specific products or services. While others
are merely for driving traffic back to your site. (Ideally, you want both)
 Ad Sets: Exactly what it sounds like. Useful for organizing different
groups or categories of ads.
 Ads: Finally, all of your ads. This is the only part that
people will see eventually.

Each of the above options contain a few different Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs). That way, you can quickly look at how your campaigns or ads are performing
(and how they compare).

The menu will house all your other major ad options. For example, the pixel that you’ll
need to install for conversion tracking or the audiences section to create and
manage custom audiences - more on this later.

Before we go any further: there’s a reason people say, “Facebook ads don’t work.”,
even though they do!

It’s because they’re doing it wrong. For example, they’ll try to force the same
AdWords strategy… even though people use Facebook and Google
Search completely differently.

Here’s what they’re doing wrong, and how you can avoid the same fate.

How to Foolproof Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

What do you do when you hit Google’s homepage?

You search. Right? You look for something specific. You type out a few words,
looking for “red Nike running shoes.” And then you see relevant results that
contain red Nike running shoes. Simple. Effective. And very profitable!

Almost 70% of Google’s $75 billion in revenue in 2015 came directly from their ad
network. That’s how powerful their search business is.

Because there’s nothing else like it. There’s a reason over 30% of new product
searches all start on Google, according to BigCommerce. Nowhere else do people
tell you exactly what they want and then let advertisers compete to show it to them
first. Especially not on Facebook.

Think about it. Most people go to Facebook to avoid looking for stuff. They don’t
want to shop. They don’t want to buy necessarily. They’re just looking to kill a few
minutes and catch up with friends or family.

That changes things. It means the way you approach Facebook advertising needs to
be unique.

You can’t just throw up an ad for random, ‘cold’ people to buy your product… and
expect any significant results. And that’s why people fail with Facebook advertising.

Instead, we need to build a Facebook sales funnel, first. That means a series of
campaigns all with different objectives. Some get you attention and awareness.
Others do the nurturing. So that one or two can do all the converting.

For example:

Step #1. Awareness: First you need to get people’s attention. You do that through
awesome content that makes them laugh or helps them solve some problem. Then
you pull them back to your site.

Step #2. Consideration: The first campaign built up awareness for who you are. Now
you can capitalize on that by sending those people offers that will transform them
from strangers into leads.

Step #3. Conversions: You’ve now done all the hard work. You’ve built up attention,
nurtured them and started generating leads. So now you just need to send them
product offers that are too good to be true so they hand over their payment info.

This looks a little time-consuming because it is. But that’s OK because it’ll be worth
the effort.

The first campaign will bring people in. The second will warm them up. And the third
will get them to convert.

Step 1: How to Create a Realistic Budget

Now you know the secret. You need to have a few campaigns running,
simultaneously, to slowly but surely transform strangers into loyal customers.

But… how are you supposed to come up with a budget for something like that?
What is a ‘reasonable’ amount to spend? Especially if you’ve never run a single
Facebook ad before?!

That’s a good question.

Let’s start with a few other questions, first:

1. How much is your product or service?

2. How many do you want to sell?
3. What’s your conversion rate already?
If you don’t have the answer to any of these, that’s OK. We’re just trying to put
together a few rough ranges. That way we can start estimating your sales.

For example, let’s say:

1. Product value: $100

2. You want to sell: 10
3. Conversion rate: 1%

So, to make $1,000, off of 10 sales with a 1% conversion rate, you’re going to need
1,000 visits (or clicks on your ad).

So… how much is it going to cost to get those 1,000 clicks? That’s what you want to
figure out here, because it will tell you how much to set aside for a Daily budget. This
is the max number you want to spend each day to hit your goal. It’s just a small
piece of the overall Lifetime budget for the entire campaign.

After defining budgets, you can select an objective so that Facebook will
automatically help you do a better job of reaching your goals. For example, you
can select either Conversions or Link clicks as your Ad Delivery Optimisation
method to get the best results.

Why mess with these options?

Because Facebook will help you out. For example, if you select clicks, their own
system will monitor and adjust to get you the most clicks.

If you choose conversions, they’ll watch patterns for what’s working (like what types
of people, what times of day, etc.) and help self-correct the campaign as it runs.

Therefore, over the first few days, you can expect results to improve a little bit.

That’s how you determine what you should be spending in total. Here’s how to
adjust the incremental bids (like how much you spend per click) to get the most
value for your investment.

Your two main bidding options are manual and automatic.

Manual means you can control the limits for how much you spend. But automatic is
good when you have no prior experience of what an ‘acceptable’ limit should be.

The other important point here is that your Cost Per Click isn’t the primary metric you
should be watching. Instead, the Cost Per Action (or Lead or Acquisition) is when
you’re driving product or service sales. So, by selecting Automatic bidding, it will
help adjust things for you to maximise what matters: sales.

You can also use Delivery Schedules to adjust how much you’re spending by day of
the week (or even time of the day). For example, it makes no sense to show ads on
weeknights or over the weekend if your office is only open from 9-5 to take phone
calls and respond to new leads.

After running campaigns for a few weeks, you might also notice that certain days or
times generate the best results for the least amount of money. You can use this
option to control how and when your ads are shown throughout the course of the
week.

Finally, Delivery Type dictates how frequently you want ads shown. For example, you
can have them shown as quickly as possible (exhausting your daily budget the
soonest). Or you can spread them out evenly throughout the day.

This will make more sense once you’ve begun your first campaign.

Step 2: Create your first campaign

To get started, go to the top right of your Facebook page, click promote and then
select ‘Go to Ads Manager.’

You will then be redirected to the dashboard that I showed you earlier, where you
should click ‘Create Campaign.’

Then, you can choose your objective. As with our Google ads, we want to keep it as
simple as possible, to just get started.

So, choose ‘Send people to your website.’

Now, enter the link to your website. If you’re promoting a product, this would be the
sales page. If you’re promoting an event, make it the sign-up page.

That’s it. Creating a campaign is as simple as that, because it’s just the top part of
the structure.

Step 3: Create your ad set

You’ll then be taken to the ad set creation section, where you first must decide on
your target audience.

Starting with the size.

This part’s kind of tricky depending on how big or small you are. For example, 10,000
might be an OK audience size if you have a tiny budget and are just dipping your
toe into Facebook ad waters.

But if you’ve got a healthy budget, you can go up to between 500,000 and a million.
(You’ll need enough people to allow Facebook’s technology to help optimise your
campaigns)

You can even go up to two million people for a new audience if you’re savvy and
have the money to spend.

But 186,000,000 like the example below? Never.

That’s way too big.

Starting a campaign with an audience this size will squander your budget on people
who have zero interest in what you’re talking about.

So, start small. You can always expand later.

Let’s start by using different demographic information in order to continually refine

your audience.

For example, pick a few specific cities in the countries that you want to target (even
better to focus on one country) and narrow down the age span to about 10 years.

If I want to get young entrepreneurs to sign up to my email list, I can narrow down
the age group to 24-32, then select that I want only men in Seattle and specify even
further.

If I find a statistic that shows that most entrepreneurs in that age category are single,
then I can set that as criteria for my targeting, too. You more you know about your
target audience the better.
After selecting a few interests and behaviours, the audience immediately shrinks
down to less than 1,000. That’s too little, but you can easily open it up again, by
adding a few more locations.

By adding a few bigger cities, especially ones with high concentrations of tech
entrepreneurs, like San Francisco, New York and Austin, the my audience jumps to
6,700 people. Perfect.
Next up, you need to set a budget.

You want to start small, remember? This is just an experiment.

So, set your daily budget to $3.33 and fix the end date for the ad campaign to be a
month from today. That way, you won’t spend more than $100 to start.

Otherwise, Facebook will happily show your ad to as many people in your audience
as possible, instead of trying to get them to click (by maybe showing them the same
ad more than once).

Under ‘Optimise For,’ set it to ‘Link Clicks to Website.’ You don’t want to pay for
impressions, you want to pay for actual clicks.
Under ‘Pricing,’ change the bid to manual and make it $0.75. This should also be in
the range that Facebook suggests, but on the lower end.

For ‘Ad Scheduling,’ you must leave it set to running ads all the time, since your
campaign has a fixed start and end date. You could change this by setting it to
ongoing and then just turning the ads off manually at the end date.

You can also just select Standard for ‘Delivery Type’. That way your ads will be shown
evenly, and you have enough time to adjust along the way.

Step 4: Create your first ad

Now, you get to choose the layout of your ad and what content to put in it.

If you choose multiple images in one ad, you will get a carousel that looks like
this example:
The images will slide through the ad, giving you more space to advertise. You can
also use video in your ads.

Do we want that? No! Well not yet.

Keep it simple to begin with!

Videos, carousels, and these other ad types have their place. For example, carousel
ads might be great for showcasing various blog posts so that hopefully one will
appeal to almost everyone you’re targeting.

Simplicity is key when you’re first starting out. You don’t want to get too fancy, too
early, and bogged down in all the details.

Only when you’ve been doing this awhile, with a few profitable campaigns up-and-
running, should you come back to these other ad types.

So, let’s start with a single image ad first.

Stay with a single image and then choose ‘Select Images.’

You can then choose to upload your own picture or browse free stock
images. Always use your own pictures.

But, look at the right sidebar. Facebook has some guidelines as to the types of
images that you can use and those that you can’t.

One quick thing to note, here.

Facebook used to have a ‘20%’ rule. Basically, their system wouldn’t allow any ad
that had over 20% covered with text.

In the past year or so, they’ve started relaxing that requirement a little bit. (So, you
may not get automatically disapproved like before.)

But you should still abide by that rule. Generally speaking, the less text, the better on
Facebook ads.

Instead, use wordless images that show examples of what people are going to get.
Or ones that convey some emotion that you want people to have (for example,
scared, triumphant, etc.)
It’s hard to guess how much 20% is, too. So, fortunately, there’s a free tool that you
can use to find that out.

Play around until it fits. Or, if you want to skip the hassle of this altogether, just go
with a nice head shot of yourself.

It’s always worth a try, especially if you appear trustworthy in your picture. It’s even
more important if you’re building a personal brand.

Once you’ve cropped the image and formatted it correctly, you’ll see a simple
preview of your ad.

Now you need to write the copy for your ad and choose your Call to Action (CTA)
button. Your Facebook page will be automatically connected (unless you have
multiple ones).
Headline: This is easy. Make sure that your headline grabs your reader’s attention.

How do you do that?

The trick is to tap into the underlying motivations that move people. Physically,
emotionally, and literally. The ones that get people to sit up and take notice. To stop
what they’re doing and pay attention.

You already know most of these feelings by name:

 Lust
 Greed
 Joy
 Fear
 Sorrow
 Guilt

These are the waves of emotion we go through constantly. And the best headlines
focus on them.

For example, finding good backlinks for SEO is tough. But it’s not just the difficulty. The
worst part is how time-consuming it can be.

What if I said you could get 50 backlinks in only 20 minutes? Now I’ve got your
attention, right?!

It’s a shortcut. I’m taking something you struggle with. Something that’s difficult and
complex. And giving you immediate gratification instead.
Now, how about blog posts. Creating good ones isn’t easy. Especially when some
marketers spend anywhere from 4-8 hours creating a single post.

But what if I told you there was an easier way?

Not only could you speed up the time it takes to create a blog post, but it would be
an awesome one. A Blockbuster.

Finally, you can also go negative.

This example is perfect because it starts off by being negative. Outbrain found
that negative headlines outperform positive ones by 69%!

This example is perfect because it’s also a surprise. It’s implying that I’m wasting
money (even though, when you read the rest of the article, you realize I’m not
actually wasting but investing).

This is a pattern interruption. You expect it to be one thing when it’s another entirely.

As you’re scanning different headlines, determining which one to read first, this one
jumps out at you because it literally ‘breaks the pattern’ of what you’re expecting to
see.

After the headline is the ad text: And fortunately, this part is fairly easy too. Try to get
2 things into this. A call-to-action and some social proof. Claire Pell’s has some great
advice on what makes great ad copy.

News Feed Link Description (under ‘Show Advanced Options’): Provide a clear call-
to-action for your readers that will be to their benefit.

CTA button: There are many different types of CTAs you can add to each ad. For
example, Download vs. Book Now. But interestingly, one study by AdRoll says you
should always choose “Learn more.” It’s been proven to convert the best.
(Study done by Adroll)

When in doubt give your prospects something for free. This could be a giveaway, an
e-book or a free webinar.

Here are the headline and copy Neil Patel chose for his ad.

Headline: Free Webinar Today

Text: The 3-step process I’ve used to build 4 multi-million-dollar businesses.

News Feed Link Description: Get the inside scoop on how I run the show, so you can
take your business to the next level fast.

This is what the preview of the ad looks like:

When you’re done, hit place order (don’t worry, nothing will happen, just yet).

Your ad is now in approval mode. You will get a Facebook notification, once it’s
approved.

You’ll then be redirected to your dashboard. While you’re waiting for your ad to be
approved, you should do a few more things.

First, turn off your ad set, again.

Then, go to ‘Edit Ad Set,’ (the button will show up right next to your ad set name).

A tab will slide in from the right side, which, as a side note, shows you how many
people your campaign will likely reach each day.
(this gives you a good idea of what to expect)

Scroll all the way down and uncheck everything, except ‘Desktop News Feed.’

This section determines your ad placements. For example, there are a handful of
places your Facebook ad can show up (in addition to Instagram or their Audience
Network).

The desktop news feed puts your ad right in the ‘stream’ that people see first when
logging in. This one’s great for getting people’s attention. (And driving
conversions.) But it can also be expensive because you’re bidding against the most
competition here, too.

Then there’s the mobile variation of this news feed placement. Conversions might
not be as good, but it might be a little cheaper to reach new audiences (because
there’s less competition).

And then there’s the right-hand column on desktop devices, too. Many people
dismiss this placement because it’s smaller and out-of-the-way. But if you know what
you’re doing, it can be a perfect retargeting ad for people who already recognize
your brand. More about this later.

Once you start having some success, you can experiment with different campaigns
on each placement. For example, sometimes you can get better costs on mobile
devices. But then you’ll want to reserve desktop ones to maximize conversions.

But for now, let’s continue to keep it simple. Let’s just select one placement to begin
with the Desktop News Feed.

The reason is that we only want one ad in one channel, because otherwise,
you won’t be able to analyse the results.
Running one ad simultaneously on mobile, desktop and in the right sidebar will give
you data for all three combined, making it impossible to know which ad worked and
which didn’t.

But, having just one ad on one channel also won’t give you much to analyse – the
success of an ad can only be determined by comparing it to another ad.

That’s why you need to split test.

Step 5: Create 2 more ads for A/B testing

At this point we don’t know which ad will work best.

Nobody does! It’s impossible. Which means the only way to still create a profitable
ad campaign is to test a few different options and see which one works.

So now let’s take the same ad we just created, but give it a few minor tweaks to run
a split test. The ads will mostly be the same, so there’s not even a ton of work
involved.

Go to your campaign and click on the name of the ad set.

You’ll then be taken inside of the ad set, where your first ad lives.

Check the box in front of your ad and click on ‘Create Similar Ad.’

You’ll be taken to a new ad screen.

Facebook already hints that we should tweak something. However, don’t change
up too much…
The only way for you to determine what works and what doesn’t, is by changing one
single element, from ad to ad.

Why?

Imagine that you change both the copy and the image for the second ad. Then,
you change these two things again and create a third ad.

How will you know what made ad B better than ad A and, eventually, ad C better
than B?

Was it the new image? The updated headline? The CTA, maybe?

The only way to get absolute certainty of where your results come from is by
changing one thing at a time.

Since images get 53% more likes and 84% more click-throughs, start by only
changing those.

They are also generally the biggest success factor for your ad. Always focus on the
big wins first.

Just scroll down and upload a new image.

Other than an image of himself, what else can Neil use?

According to Facebook image best practices, happy people have a good click-
through rate.

Since Neil is talking about making money on his webinar, maybe money + happy
people = win?

How can we find out? Test it!

Neil is only showing his ad to guys, so he’s going to include a woman in the image,
since we all know that they get more clicks than men.
So, the new ad will look like this:

He also creates a third ad at this point. Three is a good number to start testing with.

This one is kept simple, with just an encouraging CTA in a simple design.

Canva.com makes this happen in a matter of seconds. They even have templates
for Facebook ads, ready to use.

Using those, Neil whipped this up in less than 2 minutes:

Alright, time to get the party started. Hit ‘Place Order.’

There’s another reason you want to constantly run split tests like this.

Facebook ads will suffer from ad fatigue at some point. That means the
performance of your ad will start to decline after a few days or weeks.

At first, you’ll be startled.

You won’t know what’s happening. Or why this ‘winning’ ad is collapsing suddenly.

Constantly split testing ads like this, though, will help you avoid that fate. It’ll keep
things ‘fresh’ so that audiences won’t get sick of seeing the same ad every single
time they login to Facebook.

The best part, like we just discussed, is that you don’t need to make big changes to
avoid ad fatigue, either. Just little tweaks here and there.
So, you might be able to take the same exact ad, but simply change the
background colour. Or flip the layout. Test a new headline.

The point isn’t to completely ditch what works. Finding a successful ad is tough. So,
you must stick with it and just test little variations to make sure performance won’t
drop off a cliff.

Fire up a few variations to test.

And then…you wait.

Step 6: Wait for 24 hours

After the new ads pass the review, turn on your ad set and let it run for a day to get
some results.

You need to give your ad campaigns enough time to get some meaningful results.

As discussed, Facebook’s platform needs a little time to help you optimise (or self-
correct). So that means your performance can start to improve after a few days.

A huge mistake many new advertisers make is pulling the plug too early.

Results don’t look promising after only a few hours or a day. People will get nervous
because it looks like an ad isn’t taking off. So, they kill the campaign before it’s had
a chance to start working properly.

For example, Digital Marketer ran the same ad to the same audience, but switched
up the ‘objective’ (that Facebook was optimizing for). After a few days, the first
campaign generated 59 leads at $7.81 cost each. Not bad!
But the second one generated 332 leads for only $1.38 each!

Just by picking a better campaign objective and allowing it to do its thing, they
generated five times as many leads.

So, give it a little time to run. Then come back in about a day or so to decide which
one is outperforming the others.

Step 7: Kill the ads that don’t work

Once you have some data on which ad works the best, turn off the other two. Run
with the best performing ad until it stops working.

This might be a week, although it’s usually more in the range of 4 to 5 days.

Then, you’ll have to change the image and copy, because everyone relevant will
have seen your ad already.

It also depends on how big your audience is.

If your ad is served to 500 people per day, you’ll go through most people from a
3,000-people audience within 5 days.

Step 8 [Optional]: Increase your budget

Before you dump more money into the ads, make sure that you’re converting on the
back end!

If your ads drive sales directly, that’s perfect. But, if you’re collecting email, for
example, make sure that the maths is holding up and that people end up paying
you.

Otherwise, this step could lead to a big hole in your wallet, fast!

However, if you’re positive that your ads are providing a positive ROI, you can start
increasing your budget, slowly and creating more ads and reaching the news feed
of more Facebook users.

For example, let’s say you’re able to generate a new customer who pays you $100
for only $10. That’s great!
It’s so great, in fact, that you can probably even afford to spend a little more to
make sure that you’re getting each customer you deserve.

So why not increase your bids a little bit?!

You can simply go into your campaign and increase the cost you’re willing to pay
per click, and then the daily or lifetime budgets.

Or, if you’re feeling advanced already, you can try automating this process with one
of Facebook’s built-in Optimisation Rules.

Admittedly, these are kind of advanced. But once you see how they work, you’ll see
that you can easily re-create them on your own.

For example, if your costs are low and you can afford more (to get more total
customers), you can set up a rule that says to increase bids a little bit (as a
percentage) automatically.

That way you can set-and-forget it. Facebook will take care of the rest.

Don’t worry, though. You can also set-up another one of these to decrease bids if
they get too high. For example, let’s say that Cost Per Click starts creeping up to
$0.50 and that would threaten your profitability.

No worries. Just create another one of these that says to decrease bid by a certain
percentage when your CPC starts reaching those heights.

You can even pause campaigns entirely, too, if things start to go awry. So, if you start
getting nervous when the CPC hits $0.50, just tell it to pause the campaign. That
way, you can go into manually check it out before deciding whether to keep going
or pull back.

These little tricks might take a few minutes to set up. But they’ll end up saving you lots
of time on a daily basis.

The highest performing Facebook campaigns usually have one thing in common:
custom audiences.

Here’s what those are, and how to start using them.

Step 9 [Advanced]: Expand your reach with custom & lookalike audiences

Custom and lookalike audiences are a great way to increase the detail of your ad
targeting (custom audience) and expand your target audience reach (lookalike
audience) to maximize your ad campaign results.

Why go to all this trouble?

Two reasons.

The first is that ad campaigns which target custom audiences get rewarded by
Facebook’s own Relevance Score. This is a measurement they use to determine how
well your ad is going to fit those people.

The higher the Relevance Score, the better click-through rates you can expect, and
the lower cost per clicks, too.
(image source)

AdEspresso found this out first-hand. They ran the same exact campaign and ad to
two different audiences.

The first was ‘poorly’ targeted, while the other used a custom audience. And the
results weren’t even close:

‘Poor’ Audience: 278 clicks at $0.142 CPC

Custom Audience: 1,103 clicks at only a $0.03 CPC

At the very beginning, you won’t have access to creating a custom audience. You’ll
have to use interest targeting, instead, to find new people. You plug in a few brand
names, names of publications/magazines or big blogs and it will target everyone
else who follows those, too.

But once you start getting decent website traffic or Facebook engagement, you
can switch over to fire up a new custom audience, instead.

Start by going back into the Facebook Ads Manager and looking for
the Audiences section. (You should be able to find it under Assets toward the right-
hand side).Here you’ll see a few different custom audience options to get started
with:

The Customer File allows you to upload a list of customer email addresses or phone
numbers from your newsletter, for example, and Facebook will ‘match’ those
records with user accounts.

This option is great for driving conversions because you should know about these
people if you already have their phone number or email address.

If they’re on your newsletter, for example, you can segment the entire list into groups
based on what kind of business they are, what problems they want to solve, or even
what blog post topics they’re most interested in etc.

That way you can laser-target ads to them on Facebook that match these exact
preferences.

The Website Traffic option should be one of the first you’ll use to capture everyone
who now knows you by name.

Chances are, you promoted some content to them to get them to click to your
website. They browsed your site and left before buying anything. But now you can
use a custom audience to hopefully get them to come back one day.

You can even take this a step further by creating different custom audiences for
different types of web traffic. For example, Facebook ad pro Jon Loomer uses
different audiences based on the blog post topic that person was reading about.

Jon has one audience for Facebook Ads and another for Entrepreneur (because
those words show up in the URL).
Jon easily knows what content to send each audience in order to get them to come
back.

Quite recently Facebook released Facebook Engagement. And it’s a game

changer. Here’s why.

Let’s say you have a B2B website, and you typically don’t need a many leads or
conversions, then custom audiences are unlikely to work. It just isn’t practical, and
you would have to spend a lot of money to have an audience big enough to be
worthwhile.

The Facebook Engagement custom audience option changes that, though. You can
easily build up engagement directly on your Facebook page, or by getting people
to interact with your posts.

Your ‘engagement’ options include everything from:

 Page visits, to
 Liking, commenting, or sharing your page posts
 Clicking on your CTA buttons
 Sending a message to your page
 Saving any of the posts you make to your page
For example, one of the best ways to build an audience right now on Facebook is
by putting up a video and driving video views. Facebook expert, Andrea Vahl, says
you can build up audiences for literally pennies per view.
One final engagement criteria are for their Lead Ads.

Facebook Lead Ads are designed to help you generate opt-ins directly from
Facebook, without the person ever having to leave the site. So instead of getting
sent to a landing page, having to fill out a form, etc., they can just click a single
button to submit their Facebook profile information.

But not everyone who opens one of these lead ads will convert. The conversion rate
should be higher than you’d see from redirecting them to a landing page. Even
better on mobile devices when you don’t make someone click through to fill out lots
of form fields on their tiny screens.

However, there will see be a certain number of people to drop off.

These new options now allow you to create a custom audience for all those people
who opened the lead ad in the first place, but didn’t end up converting.
You know these people are potentially interested (because they clicked on the form
to check out the offer). So now you can create follow-up messages to build on the
intent they’ve shown.

Finally, Facebook’s Lookalike audiences can be used to expand your reach from an
existing audience.

For example, let’s say one of your audiences (out of three or four) is converting
significantly higher than the others. You can’t explain why, but you can’t argue with
the results, either.

A lookalike audience will let you ‘clone’ that a selected audience so that Facebook
will try to find more people just like them. You can select a country and percentage
(like 1%, 5%, or 10%) to control how tightly defined you want that audience to be.

Conclusion

As you can see, Facebook ads aren’t rocket science.

This guide gives you everything that you need to get started today.

You’ve seen the various uses and ways to make Facebook ads work.

You know all the basic terms and how to set up your first campaign.

How will you use this new knowledge?