The Newbie’s Guide to Facebook Advertising

If you have a product or service to sell you want to reach a massive amount of your target audience while keeping costs as low as possible. Luckily, you can find over 900 million daily active consumers on Facebook, which makes Facebook one of the best advertising channels for e-commerce brands.

Actually, most ecommerce brands receive an average ROI of 152% from Facebook advertising (tweet this),  and one could only imagine the ROI of the brands doing exceptionally well.

So, ready to get started with Facebook Advertising? Here are the steps to help you get going and a few expert tips you’d see from a social media marketing agency or big ecommerce brand.

The Foundation

In order to get a good grasp on how to start advertising on Facebook, you must first understand Facebook’s advertising structure. The Facebook ad platform is broken into 3 levels: campaign, ad set and ad.

• Campaign: Campaigns contains your objective and the corresponding ad sets and ads.
• Ad set: Ad sets contain your ad(s). Here you will choose your schedule, budget, bidding, targeting and placement.
• Ad: The creative you use makes up an ad.

Pre Step: Power Editor vs. Manager

Facebook continues to make their advertising platform as easy to use as possible. There are two ways to start creating your ads on Facebook: Ads Manager and Power Editor. Facebook’s Ads Manager is the easiest of the two options. The design is more user friendly and most people can navigate their way to creating ads with little to no help. Though Ads Manager is the easiest option, it is not the most effective option. A number of features found in Power Editor are not found in Ads manager that could make a big difference in your campaign.

Here are a few features exclusive to Facebook’s Power Editor:

• Ability to use the same Facebook ads on Instagram
• Ability to use multiple tracking pixels to track website visitors on multiple pages
• Ability to change the display URL that people see on your Facebook Ads

If you are completely flustered by Power Editor, start with Ads Manager to get the hang of advertising on Facebook and make your way to Power Editor once you are more comfortable.

Step 1: Choose A Relevant Objective

When creating an ad, you must first select an objective. Choosing the right objective is important because Facebook will show your ad to the people most likely to complete your desired objective. While Facebook has 10 objectives to choose from, only 4 are relevant to selling products on Facebook:

• Clicks to Website: Increase the number of visitors to your site.
• Website Conversion: Send people to your website to take a specific action, like buying your product.
• Page Post Engagement: Get more people to see and engage with your Page posts to increase shares, likes, and comments.
• Page Likes: Build a community of fans by getting more people to like your page.

*Expert Tip: The objective for website conversions is an ecommerce brands’ best friend. It requires you to place a pixel code on the Thank You page of your site, which tracks not only how many sales you have received from Facebook, but which specific ad is getting you the most conversions (sales) – the most important analytic.

Step 2: Select a Budget and Ad Schedule

Facebook gives you two budgets to choose from: Daily Budget and Lifetime Budget.

Choose a Daily Budget if you would like to set a max budget per day for Facebook to spend. This is helpful to make certain of exactly how much you are spending each day.

Choose a Lifetime Budget if you would like to set a maximum lifetime budget for your campaign and want to let Facebook determine how much to spend each day to be most effective.

*Expert Tip: Begin advertising with a relatively small budget that will allow you to test and optimize your targeting and ad copy. Once you have the winning combination, invest more.

Step 3: Define Your Target Audience

With over 900 million daily active users, Facebook makes it entirely too easy to get your product in front of your target audience. While Facebook has a ton of great targeting options, it is imperative that you know how to narrow those options to your ideal potential customer.

Facebook targeting options include:

Custom Audiences: Email addresses, phone numbers, website visitors, Facebook users IDs or app user IDs you have collected over time.
Location: Countries, counties/regions, cities, ZIP/postal codes, addresses or Designated Market Areas ® to show or exclude your ad to people in those locations.
Age: Minimum and maximum age of those who you want to see your ad.
Gender: Choose whether men, woman, or both will see your ads.
Connections: People who have a specific kind of connection to your Page, app or event.
Language: Specific language(s) of your customers
Interest: People who have a specific kind of connection to your Page, app or event.
Behavior: People based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more.

*Expert Tip: Be as specific as possible when using Interest Targeting. If you would like to add multiple interests break them up by ad sets. Because Facebook views interest as “or” and not “and”, you want to be sure you can analyze which interest is bringing you the lowest costper conversion.

Step 4: Create Your Ad

But first- here are few things you should be aware of:

• 1200 x 628 is the suggested picture size for your Facebook ads.
• Text within images cannot cover more than 20 percent of the image. You can test your images with Facebook’s grid tool.
• Video with a text overlay cannot contain more than 20 percent text either.

Get started with your ad with these steps:

1. Choose a Facebook Page to represent your business in the News Feed.
2. Choose to create an ad with an image or video or use an existing post.
3. Enter the website URL you want to promote. Ex: http://www.example.com/page.
4. Enter a Display URL if you’d like.
5. Enter text that will let your potential customers know what the ad is about.
6. Enter a actionable and creative headline.
7. Enter additional text used to emphasize why someone might want to visit your website.
8. Choose an image, multiple images, or video to advertise.
9. Choose an optional call-to-action button.
10. Choose the proper conversion pixel that corresponds with the product you are selling.

*Expert Tip: When creating ads, take the time to create 2-3 different types of ads for each ad set that you have. This allows you to see which graphic and copy combination your audience responds the best to and is getting you the lowest cost per conversion.

Step 5: Track and Analyze Results

You should be checking your ads once a day, at the least, especially if you are still a beginner with Facebook ads. Facebook Ads Manager allows you to monitor the results of your Facebook ad campaigns. Amount spent, reach, cost per click, frequency, and costs per conversion are all metrics you should analyze for opportunities to optimize.

*Expert Tip: As soon as you can, pause all less-than desirable ads and ad sets and allow the best of the batch to continue to run. Don’t waste money by allowing higher cost ads to continue alongside the ads that can get you more results for less money. If website conversion is your objective, the ad(s) that have the lowest cost conversion is the winner, not the ad with the lowest cost.

Good sales and good luck!