Facebook Advertising: The Basics

As a disclaimer, you will need to have your Facebook Business Manager set up for your business page in order to access Ad Manager and follow along with our tips. 

Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options, objectives, and placements, but all ad campaigns are broken down to three major buckets:

Once you log into your Facebook Ad Manager, you’ll see a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns and their results will live. This is also where you’ll create your ads. The first step to creating your ad is setting your objective. There are 11 different objectives to choose from: When selecting an objective, think back to your goals. If your goals are exposure-based, then setting your campaign objective to traffic, views, or brand awareness would be beneficial. If you are looking to increase sales, then you’ll want to select a conversion-oriented objective like lead generation, conversions or catalog sales

The next step is to target your audience. You can set an audience for each ad set that belongs in the same campaign. If this is the first time you’re running a Facebook advertising campaign, you’ll likely need to do a bit of testing with several different targeting options until you find the audience that fits just right. Start by selecting your target location, your audience age range, gender, and language. As you make your selections, be sure to keep an eye on the audience size indicator at the bottom. This tool gives you a sense of your potential ad reach. Effective targeting is key to maximizing your ROI; this is one reason Facebook Campaigns can be so powerful. In the detailed targeting section, you’ll be able to target your audience based on their education level, financial status, life events (like getting engaged or being a new parent), interests, and behaviors. For example, if you are the owner of a music venue and need to run a campaign to increase ticket sales for an upcoming show, you may want to target your audience using their interest in live music, the genre of the music, and forthcoming events. Once you find an audience that responds well to your ads, you can save this audience and use it again later.

Facebook advertising gives you the ability to select where your ad is displayed. If you are new to advertising on Facebook, you may want to choose the Automatic Placement option. Facebook will automatically place your ads across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger where they are likely to get the best results. Once you have more experience, you may wish to place your Facebook Ads in a specific location. You have the option to choose from

When you are first starting with Facebook Advertising, you may want to start with a narrow audience and broaden slowly by adding one category at a time. For example, if you are a local winery looking to increase traffic to your tasting room, you may want to start with an audience interested in wine tours. Then after a few weeks, you can add interest in “wine tasting” then” food and wine”  and so on. This will give you a good idea of how broadening your audience affects your results. You can always remove and add in specific targeting as needed. You can also use audience targeting to create different ads for groups related to various business goals. You should speak differently to current customers than you would to potential customers, and your ads should reflect that. As a tip, be careful not to make assumptions about your audience when choosing your targeting options. Always start with market research

Don’t accidentally rub your audience the wrong way with blurry photos or shaky videos. Your visuals are what make your audience pause their scroll and read your copy. They are the first thing your audience sees and need to be high quality. Considering all the competition in the market. Attention-grabbing, you’ll want your visuals to be attention-grabbing. Invest in professional photography and videography as needed.

There are several moving parts to a successful facebook advertising campaign, but don’t let that intimidate you. Dive in and get to testing! If you need any help, we’re only anemail and complimentary consultation awayn.