How to navigate your way around Facebook advertising

A process we use with our clients when setting up their Facebook advertising campaigns is to work out their strategy and objective. We get an understanding of the targeting, then gather the required imagery and work out the ad text. This is all done prior to even starting to set up the campaign in Facebook.

We’ve detailed some handy tips for you to work through when you are setting up your advertising campaign.

Strategy

What is your strategy? Why are doing this Facebook ad campaign? What do you hope to achieve? These are the most important things to think about when conducting a Facebook ad campaign

Objective

What will be your objective? There are 12 objectives to choose from. Selecting the proper objective is critical to your campaign’s overall success. An overwhelming majority of Facebook Ads use one of the top 4 objectives: “Boost Your Posts”, “Promote Your Page”, “Send People to Your Website” or “Increase Conversions on Your Website”.

For example if you wanted to use one of the most common objectives you need to think about...

• Clicks to website – Are you driving people to your website, if so, which page and what do you want them to do when they get there? Do you need to consider a landing page to capture leads or have a specific call to action?
• Page likes - Are you wanting to increase your audience? (promote your Facebook page)
• Boost Engagement – this is a post that you want to drive attention too and encourage engagement

Ad structure

Understand the ad structure – “Ad Sets” are used to sort ads with different audiences, start and stop dates, bidding and budget.” Under each ad set, you can have multiple ads.

Targeting

Who will you be targeting? You have several choices to make regarding location, age, gender, language, interests, behaviours and connection type. These selections are made easier by first creating a customer avatar, also known as an “ideal client profile”.

Here is a step by step through an exercise using a Customer Snapshot to help you know and get a deep understanding of your target customers and where to find them online. Read more here.

Be mindful that you can only use one targeting per ad campaign (ad set).

Campaign budget and timing

In most instances you must spend minimum of $5 per day.

Ad Graphics or Video

The best performing graphics are ones that:

• Show interesting parts of a business; people, products and environment
• Match the image with the message in the ad
• Incite positive emotion
• Include brand elements, especially colors
• Are high-quality/resolution

If we are looking at ads such as Clicks to Website, Page Likes, it pays to have at least 4-6 captivating images on hand that can be used in the ad campaign (which relate to your objective) – please note that Facebook now allows images with more than 20% text, however be mindful that when your ad is reduced down on mobile, often a lot of wording will be lost – it actually pays to have no text on the image or if text on there, we’d suggest it was minimal, large and of course… compelling.

You can show either one image in each add or up to 5 images in a “Carousel Ad”. We recommend starting with the single graphic display but uploading multiple versions of your ad graphic (you can have up to 6). Facebook will test run all 6 graphics for you and, after 24-36 hours, it will be very easy to see which one is performing best.

The normal graphic size is 1200 x 628 pixels with some variations depending on the type of ad:

Call to action text

For single image ads you only have:

• Headline (25 characters)
• Text (90 characters)
• News Feed Description (up to 200 characters)

That’s not a lot of characters, so you will have to be very concise. We suggest you use an online character counter such as this one to help you keep to the required character count.

Additionally, we recommend that you do use the optional “Call-to-Action” button and that you run ads on the Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, Desktop Right Column and Audience Network.

Place your order

Lastly you’ll need to place your order. You’ll need a credit card which will be used for your Facebook advertising account – once the account is set up, you won’t need to use the card again.

Choose where you work

Once you have everything ready to go… you then need to choose where to work your Facebooks ads (Facebook fan page, Ad Manager or Power Editor) – for new or intermediate users to Facebook ads, we suggest you set up your Facebook advertising campaigns through Ad Manager

If you would like training or assistance with your Facebook advertising endeavours please don’t hesitate to contact us.