Rather than interrupting people’s experience like traditional ads, Facebook ads engage potential customers where they’re already spending time online. And with over 3.07 billion monthly active users, the sheer size of Facebooks audience network is unmatched.
What is Facebook Advertising?
Facebook advertising or facebook ad, gives businesses of all sizes a powerful way to reach their target audience and achieve marketing objectives through social media marketing. By setting up Facebook ad campaigns, you can create and publish paid advertisements that appear seamlessly across Facebook’s platforms including the Facebook news feed, Instagram feed, Facebook Messenger app (messenger ads), and Facebook’s Audience Network of third-party apps and websites.
Benefits of Facebook Advertising for Businesses
So why should you advertise on Facebook? and how to advertise on facebook? With advanced targeting capabilities based on rich user data, Facebook enables you to serve hyper-relevant ads to very specific custom audiences and lookalike audiences. This precision helps drive much higher engagement and conversion rates compared to broad, untargeted marketing channels.
Facebook advertising is also incredibly cost-effective. Setting a Facebook ad budget and optimising your ad spend delivers efficient cost per acquisition compared to traditional advertising methods. You only pay for ad impressions or link clicks that actually reach your intended target audience.
Plus, Facebooks ad reporting tools provide granular data to continuously optimise your campaigns and identify your best-performing ad content, targeting, placements and more.
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How to Advertise On Facebook?
Facebook Ad Ecosystem
Facebook Algorithm Basics
To understand how to best leverage Facebook advertising, it’s important to recognise how Facebooks news feed algorithm works. Whenever you visit Facebook or Instagram, the posts and ads you see aren’t displayed randomly – they’re curated and ranked by a constantly evolving algorithm.
This algorithm aims to keep users engaged and satisfied by prioritising the most relevant, highest quality content for each individual based on thousands of weighted factors like interests, engagement rates, relationships, predicted performance and more. The Facebook ad ecosystem is set up to reward ads that are well-targeted, visually appealing and drive meaningful engagement.
User Data and Targeting
The key advantage Facebook advertising has over other channels is the immense amount of user data it collects to enable precise ad targeting. When setting up your Facebook ad account and campaign, you’ll have access to incredibly detailed targeting parameters to define your audience, including:
- Demographics like age, gender, location, language, income, and more
- Interests and behaviors derived from users’ activities on and off Facebook
- In-depth psychographics around values, personalities, lifestyles
- Connections to your page, app, or event
- Custom audiences and lookalike audiences based on your own data
By leveraging Facebook’s sophisticated data and machine learning models, your ads can get in front of the right people at exactly the right time for maximum relevance and impact.
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Types of Facebook Ad Campaigns
Within the Facebook ads manager, you’ll choose specific campaign objectives based on your overarching marketing goals. Facebook ad campaigns generally fall into three main categories:
Awareness Campaigns
When aiming to increase brand awareness and visibility, Facebooks campaign objectives like brand awareness, reach, traffic, and engagement are optimal choices. Highly visual ad formats like Facebook video ads, image ads, slideshow ads, Instagram ads and collection ad work well to introduce your brand and offerings to cold audiences.
Conversion Campaigns
For bottom-of-funnel goals oriented around driving valuable actions and sales, conversion campaign objectives like conversions, catalog sales, store traffic and leads are what you’ll choose. Facebook pixel and app event tracking enables you to retarget warm custom audiences of people who have engaged with your content or taken certain desired actions.
Engagement Campaigns
Focused on encouraging interactions like comments, shares, likes, event responses and more, an engagement campaign leverages ad formats like polls, slides, and giveaways/contests. By boosting engagement on your content, you increase brand affinity and expand your social reach through shares and audience building.
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Setting Up Your Facebook Ad Account
Creating an Ad Account
The first step to start advertising on Facebook is to create a Facebook Business Manager account at business.facebook.com. Business Manager serves as a centralised workspace to manage all your Facebook business assets like Pages, ad accounts, product catalogs, pixels and more.
From your Business Manager, you’ll go to the Ads Manager section and click to create a new ad account specifically for your business. You’ll enter details like your business name, account time zone, currency and other settings.
Next, you’ll need to claim ownership of your existing Facebook business page (facebook page) or create a new one that will house your ads. You’ll then link your Facebook page and optionally an Instagram account to your new ad account.
Navigating Ads Manager
With your Facebook ad account all set up, the Facebook ads manager is where you’ll go to execute all stages of the ad campaign process from creation to optimisation and reporting. Get familiar with the layout and functionality including:
- Campaign dashboard to view all existing campaigns
- Tools to create new campaigns, ad sets and ads
- Audience manager for building custom and lookalike audiences
- Ad reports and breakdown insights
- Account settings like payment methods, spending limits and permissions
Having this central ads manager enables you to easily run campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network from one cohesive interface.
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Crafting Your First Ad: A Step-by-Step Guide
Designing Your Ad Creative
When creating a new campaign in ads manager, one of the first things you’ll do is upload and design ad creative assets like images, videos, slideshows and more. These visuals are the first impression that will capture a viewer’s attention in the Facebook news feed, so it’s critical they are eye-catching, high-quality and on-brand.
Beyond just uploading an image or video, Facebook offers tools to further optimise your ad visual design using overlays, cropping utilities and simple animation. You’ll also write a concise yet engaging ad headline and text description to complement your visual creative.
Choosing Your Target Audience
Arguably the most powerful aspect of Facebook advertising is the ability to ad targeting or target audience, for your ads. Based on your specific campaign objective, you can layer various targeting parameters to focus in on the ideal customers for that goal.
For example, for a brand awareness video ad campaign promoting a new type of camping gear, you may target:
- Men and women aged 22-40
- Living in the United Kingdom
- With interests in camping, hiking, outdoors
- Who are part of your warm custom audience of website visitors
The more specific your audience parameters, the more relevant and cost-effective your ad delivery will be.
Setting Campaign Parameters
Next you’ll configure the optimisation method, budget, schedule and ad placement for your specific ad set within the campaign. For optimisation, you may choose to get charged per impression (CPM) or cost per click (CPC) based on your objective.
When setting your total campaign budget and schedule, be sure to strike a balance between allowing your ad set to run long enough to optimise performance while not overspending unnecessarily. You can test different budget amounts and schedules across multiple ad sets.
In addition to the core Facebook news feed, you can choose manual or automatic placements to have your ads run across Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook’s mobile Audience Network of apps.
Monitoring Performance
Once your ad campaign is running live, it’s important to actively monitor and assess performance rather than just letting it run indefinitely. Inside Ads Manager, you’ll find robust reporting dashboards and analytics to evaluate key metrics like:
- Impressions and reach
- Results and conversion rates
- Cost per result or acquisition
- Performance breakdowns by demographic, placement, device, etc.
Look for opportunities to adjust things like audience targeting, ad creative or budget allocation to optimise performance. Kill underperforming ad sets and reallocate budgets to scale the successful ad sets.
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Advanced Targeting Techniques
While Facebook’s basic demographic, interest and behavior targeting capabilities are powerful on their own, there are additional layers of advanced targeting (detailed targeting) you can implement for even more precise audience refinement:
Demographic Targeting
In addition to basic demographics like age, gender and location, Facebook provides much more specific demographic filters like:
- Ethnic Affinity: Reaching Hispanic, Asian, African American cultures
- Income Level: Target specific household income ranges
- Life Events: Major life milestones like new job, recent move, etc.
- Education Level: Associates degree, in college, alumni of school
- Job Titles: Filter based on specific roles, industries, seniority
- Home Ownership & Home Value Filters
Behavioral Targeting
In addition to stated interests, a huge advantage of Facebook is the ability to reach users based on their real-world behaviors exhibited both on and off Facebook’s platforms. Some examples of advanced behavioral filters include:
- Purchase behaviors like consumer purchase data from retail partners
- Mobile device usage and engagement tendencies
- Charitable donations and causes supported
- Jobseeker activities like pursuing career opportunities
- Reading, video game, and other entertainment habits
Using these sorts of behavioral insights enables you to get your ads in front of audiences exhibiting high purchase intent or affinity towards your products and services.
Retargeting Strategies
Another powerful application of Facebooks tracking capabilities is building retargeting audiences to re-engage warm leads who have already interacted with your business in some way. This could include:
- Website visitors tagged via the Facebook pixel
- People who engaged with your Facebook posts, videos or lead ads
- Previous customers or subscriber lists you upload as custom audiences
- Lookalike audience modeled off those engaged custom audiences
You can then create dedicated retargeting ad campaigns designed to nurture these audiences further down the conversion funnel with messaging and offers tailored to their level of connection with your brand.
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Creative Best Practices for Facebook Ads
While audience targeting is crucial for reaching the right people, your ad creative is what will actually capture attention and drive engagement in the Facebook news feed and Instagram feeds. Here are some tips for standout ad creative:
Visual Design Tips
Since humans process visuals much faster than text, creative focused on images and video tends to drive much higher engagement for Facebook ads than text-heavy posts. Design vibrant, high-contrast visuals that instantly communicate your core value proposition or story.
Infuse personality and emotion using elements like humor, people’s images and aspirational or motivational themes that resonate with your audience. Simple text overlays can also reinforce key messages while following Facebook’s 20% text rule.
Writing Engaging Ad Copy
Although visual creative draws users’ eyes first, compelling ad copy keeps them intrigued and compels them towards your desired conversion event. Focus on clearly communicating a strong value proposition and unique selling point right in the headline and body text.
Use conversational, benefit-driven language that paints a picture of how your product or service will make the viewer’s life better. Ask thought-provoking questions to pique curiosity. And always include a clear call-to-action statement so viewers know the next step to take.
Using Video Ads Effectively
Given their eye-catching nature and ability to convey lots of engaging content, video ads are among the most popular and effective ad format across Facebook and Instagram. Since videos autoplay without sound, you need to grab attention immediately through text overlays, animation and visuals within the first second or two.
Get to your main point quickly by front-loading your most compelling content since most viewers will drop off within 10-15 seconds if not hooked. Creative elements like subtitles, branding, persuasive benefits and directional cues can all boost view rates and engagement on your video ads.
Optimising and Scaling Your Ads
Even if you create a successful ad campaign, it’s critical that you have a process for continuously monitoring, optimising, and scaling top performers for maximum results over time.
A/B Testing
Rather than just launching a single ad variation and letting it run indefinitely, you should be methodically testing new variables through A/B split tests. Alternate creative elements like images vs video, tone of ad copy messaging, different audiences and more to identify what resonates best and drives your desired actions.
By always being in an optimisation mindset and updating underperforming ad sets with new variations, you can iteratively fine-tune your Facebook ad campaigns for efficient performance.
Analysing Ad Data
Unlock powerful performance insights by digging into the analytics and reporting capabilities within Facebook ads manager dashboard. Go beyond just looking at topline results and cost metrics. Analyse performance breakdowns by:
- Demographics like age, gender and location
- Placements like Instagram vs Facebook feed
- Devices types like mobile vs. desktop
- Different times and days of week
Identifying segments that overperform or underperform allows you to adjust budgets and targeting accordingly to boost overall ROI.
Scaling Strategies
Once you’ve identified your winning ad campaigns through optimisation, the next step is to scale those successful ads to maximise their reach and impact. Some effective scaling techniques include:
- Increasing budgets gradually to your top performers
- Expanding targeting to new relevant interests and behaviors
- Creating lookalike audiences to model and reach new prospective customers
- Utilising automated campaign budget optimisation tools
- Duplicating high-performing campaigns and testing new twists
Of course, you’ll need to continue monitoring performance as you scale to ensure you maintain performance and return on ad spend as volumes increase.
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Troubleshooting Common Facebook Ad Issues
Even seasoned Facebook advertisers can run into periodic issues, whether it’s ad delivery problems, technical snags, underperforming creative and more. Here are some common challenges and how to troubleshoot:
Ad Rejection Reasons
Facebook has strict policies in place around what types of ads they will accept and show users. Common reasons Facebook may reject or disable your ad from running include:
- Sensational, shocking or indecent ad content
- Making unrealistic claims or misleading offers
- Too much text overlay violating the 20% rule
- Discriminatory practices or hate speech
- Targeting issues like excluding audiences
- Landing page problems like a blocked domain
If your ad gets rejected, review the notification and appeal if you believe it was a mistake. Otherwise, you’ll have to revise the offending element before resubmitting.
Budgeting Issues
Problems related to ad budgets and bidding can be another major detriment to performance. Some budget-related pitfalls to watch out for include:
- Setting overly aggressive daily budgets or cost controls
- Audience sizes that are too narrow or too broad
- Not allocating enough total budget for learning/optimisation phase
- Systematic underspending causing ad delivery issues
Diagnosing and adjusting budgeting best practices for your specific goals and audience can help get your ads delivering properly.
Performance Fluctuations
While some ad metric fluctuations are normal, significant ongoing dips or unexplained volatility in key performance indicators likely warrants investigation. Potential root causes could include:
- Facebook pixel or conversion tracking issues
- Ad fatigue requiring creative refreshes
- Audience overlap between different campaigns
- Major Facebook algorithm updates disrupting delivery
- Technical bugs or errors at the ad account level
Audit tracking implementation, check for overlaps, reach out to Facebook support if needed, and have a measurement plan for diagnosing shifts.
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Privacy and Data Use
Regulators around the world are cracking down on consumer data privacy, forcing platforms like Facebook to reevaluate their collection and use of personal user data for advertising purposes. Restrictions are likely forthcoming around how Facebook can track logged-out user activity, use precise geo-location data, and build audiences based on sensitive demographics or interests.
This changing privacy landscape means Facebook and advertisers may have less robust consumer data to work with in the future. However, privacy-safe modeling using first-party data and machine learning could help fill the gaps.
How can we help you?
There’s no denying the immense power and potential of Facebook advertising to improve your business brand, engagement and revenue in today’s digital landscape. Its robust targeting, creative flexibility, and detailed measurement data provides marketing capabilities unmatched through traditional channels.
While Facebook advertising does require an investment of effort and budget to yield strong ROI, the potential payoff in terms of cost-effectively reaching and acquiring highly relevant customers makes it well worth it for most businesses.
So whether you’re ready to launch your first Facebook ad campaign or looking to improve your existing efforts, we encourage you to take action today using these effective tactics. And if you need support in developing and executing high-impact Facebook ad strategies tailored for your business, our full-service website development and advertising agency is here to help supercharge your results. Get in touch to schedule a free consultation.
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