Split testing lets you test different versions of your ads so you can see what works best and improve future campaigns...
Facebook has seriously invested in presenting a large number of options for marketers and business owners who want to promote their content to reach the right audience. It’s a highly effective tool for reaching out to audiences, as long as you’re willing to part with some funds.
So if you’ve been considering making the leap over to paid Facebook promotion, here’s how to get set up with your first Facebook Ad.
Choose Your Campaign Objective
Before you jump in and create any adverts, it’s important to first think about why you’re advertising and what you’re aiming to achieve. By setting yourself a few goals ahead of going live with ads, you also have something to measure your success against.
The rule is simple: To select the right campaign objective, choose the one that’s closest to your current advertising goal:
Awareness: Objectives that generate interest in your product or service
Consideration: Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it
Conversions: Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service
You’ll find the complete list of Facebook campaign objectives,
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Product catalog sales
Before you set up your first Facebook ad campaign, think what your ultimate goal is: do you want to grow sales? Or are you more focused on increasing brand awareness? Are messages your thing? Or something else?
Set your budget
The first thing you need to know is what percentage of your budget you are spending on marketing and advertising. The Small Business Administration suggests that for small businesses (under $5 Million in revenue) you allocate 7-8 % of their revenues to marketing.
So let’s look at the example of a small business making $500,00 in revenue. I work with a lot of solo-preneurs and the budget question is often coming from them.
Revenue = $500,00
Total Marketing Budget: 8% = $4000
Advertising Budget: 50% of total Marketing = $2000
Facebook Advertising: 25% of total Advertising = $500
The Facebook split test feature lets you quickly and easily test different versions of your ad campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t, so you can make data-backed decisions to improve future ad campaigns
Create your advert
If you’d like to create your advert from a blank canvas, the first task is to select the format you’d like to use for your advert. Facebook Adverts look slightly different depending on the results you want. Facebook currently offers 5 various formats for Carousel, Single image, Single video, Slideshow, Canvas
What your Facebook ad will look like depends on your advertising strategy , campaign objective, and ad format. Some objectives constrain which ad formats you can use. For example, the Video Views objective allows you to choose only video ad formats and the Local Awareness objective doesn’t allow canvas ads
Once you decide between these, you'll need to upload your creative assets. It's important to note that for each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design criteria.
Choose your ad placements
Your Facebook placements will designate, of course, where your ad actually shows up and on which platforms. This, in turn, will affect several other factors, like the format your ad can take on different platforms, how much text you can have, and even ad cost.
Facebook recommend using the default placements for the objective you chose, which enables Facebook to optimize placements for you in order to get the best possible results at the cheapest overall average cost.
Here are the ad placements recommended by Facebook for every campaign objective:
- Increase brand awareness campaigns
- Boost your posts
- Get video views
- Increase engagement in your app
- Promote a product catalog
- Increase conversions on your website
- Send people to your website:
Place your order
Now, your advert is ready to go. To submit your ad click the ‘Place Order’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live
Before creating your Facebook campaigns, take the time to define your campaign strategy and where in your sales funnel you can use Facebook ads to grow your business .
I hope you find to be a useful guide for getting set up with Facebook Ads and I hope our benchmarks also prove to be a handy measuring stick for what can be achieved on a limited budget.