Getting Started with Facebook Advertising
Placing ads on Facebook and Instagram is easy, they said! You can do it yourself, they said! Then why the hell aren’t they working?
Advertising on Facebook and Instagram is self-serve. Anyone with a Facebook account and a credit card can do it. That doesn’t mean that anyone with a Facebook account and credit card should do it. It is super easy and Facebook gives you all the tools and guidance you need to do it right. Which means it is super easy to spend money without getting the results you want. There is some strategy involved in the type of ads to place, building the right audience, and using the best creative messaging.
The other thing to consider when doing advertising on Facebook and Instagram (or any self-serve online channel like Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest), is that it takes TIME. Not just a little bit of time either. So before you waste time or money, learn a bit about what it involves and decide whether it is better to do it yourself or hire it out.
Just a note: I am breaking this down into digestible chunks. There are a lot of nitty-gritty details when it comes to placing ads on Facebook and Instagram like the amount of text on images, what kinds of messages get “rejected,” the different versions of ads that you can create. The list goes on. There is a reason the title of this post is “Getting Started” and not “Mastering” — it takes time to master something!
When I first meet with clients about Facebook and Instagram advertising, their knowledge is typically around “Boosted Posts.” And boosting posts is pretty easy. It is also probably a waste of money. When it comes to boosting, your targeting options are limited. The entire premise of Facebook Advertising is to be extremely strategic and precise, which you can’t do with a boosted post.
If you read no further or remember nothing else from the advice detailed below, remember to do these things:
Set up your Facebook Business account.
Install the Facebook pixel on your website.
Place your ads through the Ad Manager.
Build a custom audience.
Give the ads time to do their jobs.
Make adjustments to the ads based on performance (after giving them a decent amount of time to work).
Plan
Before you even open the Facebook tab on your computer, know what you are trying to achieve. Write down your goals and objectives for running the campaign. Once you open the Facebook Ads Manager and see the options, you will be able to identify which one you need if you’ve already written down what you want to achieve. If you open Facebook Ads before you know what you specifically need to make happen with your ads, I promise that you will think that you need all the things and it will get very overwhelming.
Figure out your budget next. Rather than asking how much you should spend, figure out how much you *can* spend. When you do log into Facebook Ads Manager and start to set up your campaign, plug in the budget you determined that you can afford and see what Facebook’s projected results are for that budget, for your defined objectives and for the audience that you built. If the projected results are overkill for what you are trying to achieve, then pull back on the spend. Don’t let other people define your budget. You decide what you can afford.
Next, define your audience. Again because it can get overwhelming, I recommend writing this out before you get into the Facebook ad manager. Be as specific as possible: geography, age, gender, income, job titles, interests. You’ve heard me say it before, but it can’t be said enough: “everyone” is not a target audience. You should have your pixel installed. You should be building custom audiences based on your website traffic, your Facebook page and post engagement, your Instagram traffic, and your email lists.
And you should be creating Lookalike Audiences. And you can’t do any of that with “boosted posts.”
The last part of the “Plan” phase is to outline your ad messages and the visual that will accompany the text. Take an inventory of the photos, videos and graphics you have available. Do you need more or different ones to effectively tell your brand story and drive action from your ads? Then make a list and start gathering those materials. Outline the messages and start to draft the ad text. Keep in mind that you need to be succinct in order to be effective: the optimal lengths are 5 words in headline and 14 words in ad, which is not very much. You can make it longer, but if you are wanting the audience to take action, then put that message up top. And know that you can create a bunch of different ad versions then monitor what is working best. We will talk more about that in the “Track” phase.
Build
Now you can open the Facebook Ads Manager and start building your campaign! Since you did the work in the planning phase, this should be easy. The first thing you do is set your campaign objective. Facebook does a good job of writing descriptions for each of the available objectives. Choose the one that matches most closely what you wrote out at the beginning of this process. Because you are just starting out, I don’t recommend turning on the A/B testing option at this point. But I do recommend turning on the Campaign Budget Optimization. When you do this, you will set your budget at the campaign level to be optimized across ad sets and audiences.
Next, you create your audience sets. You may have multiple audiences or just one audience. The way to determine whether you should have one audience or multiple audiences is whether the messaging will be different for the different audiences (and it should).
Last, create the ads. I strongly recommend creating multiple ad versions, varying the copy, images, and formats (single photo, carousel photos, video). The reason for doing this is because marketing and advertising is an experiment. You will want to see what resonates most with your audiences and performs the best for your campaign. The only way to figure this out is to test and learn. Which brings us to the next phase, “Track.”
Track
Unfortunately, nothing that you do in marketing is a “set it and forget it” execution. On the flip side, you do need to give your ads time to find their groove before you make changes. Once you get your ads up and running, you’ll need to let them run for a couple of weeks without touching them. But then dive into the analytics and see what is happening with your ads. Where are you getting traction? Which ads are being served more? Turn off the ads that aren’t working. Or tweak those using what you learn from the ones that are working. Continue to make these observations and tweaks weekly throughout the campaign until you find the right combination.
Repeat
Make notes about what you learned during the campaign so you can get more and more efficient with each campaign that you run. Make sure you are tracking sales as a result of the campaign so you can calculate ROI and understand whether advertising is even right for your brand and products.
As you can see, while Facebook advertising is easy, there is a lot to consider and doing it well takes time. Spend the time to do it right and you will see the results.
