The Basics of Advertising on Facebook

When it began, Facebook advertising was so sweet... cheap to run, high engagement rates and high conversion rates. Now all that is changing, but you can still achieve good results if you take the time to plan your campaigns and analyse the results you see.

Here is my quick guide to setting up your Facebook ads via the 'Guided Creation' feature.

Take time to plan your advertising

• First and foremost, having a plan for your ads will help you make the most of that advertising spend. Think about different audience variations you want to try, as well as different ad content and formats. This could become complicated very quickly, so remember what works best for your organic content and start there.

Choose your campaign objective

• This is what the Facebook algorithm will optimise your activity towards, i.e. if you choose traffic, the ad that is getting the most click throughs will win. The standard objective here is generating traffic to your website.

Create an ad set

• Each Facebook ad set allows you to target ads in different ways within the same campaign. What you need to be aware of here is that the ad sets compete against each other, so if, for example, you want to target 2 different audiences equally, then you would be better to create a different campaign for each audience.
• If you use ad sets to split test your campaigns make sure that all variables aside from what is being tested stay the same. It's just like GCSE chemistry experiments!

Choose your target audience

• Select the people you want to show your Facebook ad to, narrowing down the field first by basic demographics and then by looking through the detailed demographic options.
• As you add in filters you'll be able to see the audience size you're targeting. You want this to sit about halfway on Facebook's specific to broad barometer, unless you are using some custom audiences (i.e. for retargeting or lookalike campaigns), when the audience is likely to be more specific.
• I would recommend not selecting a language if you are targeting that country's mother tongue - i.e. don't select 'English' for the UK - because not everyone sets their language and this could limit your audience in a needless way.

Choose where your ads will be shown

• I would recommend editing this to just feeds or stories, depending on the ad format you want to try. Each placement type will effect your ad content, so it is better to be specific and tailor your ad to that format. 

Create your ad

• Again, you can choose to have one or more advert to test and these compete against each other within the ad set. It's a good idea to test different formats, messaging and imagery to the same audience in order to find out what they respond to best. You could trial your most popular posts to start with, perhaps adding a more explicit call to action then you would have used for your organic content.
  
• As you design your ads make sure to check how they appear in the different placements and amend the design if necessary.
  
• Make sure you add tracking to your links, this is vital to be able to track the traffic effectively in your analytics platform. At the end of the ad campaign you want to compare how the ads performed on facebook and compare that to the quality of traffic the ads drove to your website. I would also highly recommend adding the facebook pixel to your site so that you can see conversion data, it's really easy to do and definitely worthwhile.

There are lots of different options that Facebook offers you along the path of this journey, which can make the ad platform seem daunting and overly complicated. Don't feel like you have to take every option and try and stick to the basic principles outlined above. Once you have done it a few times you'll get the hang of it.

Of course, if you need help building out your campaigns then I am always here to help. Please do get in touch with any questions or cries for help!