Facebook Business Manager
To start with Facebook ads, you need to create a Facebook Business Manager account. To create a business manager account, go to Facebook.com/business and click on Create Business Manager Account at the top right of the screen.
This will take you through a process where you fill in your personal information as well as your business details (including legal name, address, phone number). You’ll also be asked what type of account this is- whether it’s an individual or company profile page. If this is for a company profile page then you’ll need to provide contact information for someone associated with that company who can help answer any questions from Facebook about your ad campaign.
Within the business manager account, it will hold critical elements to advertise, such as your:
- Facebook Ad Account: the Facebook Ad account is where you create and manage your ads.
- Facebook Page: a Facebook page is a public “wall” for people who are interested in your business.
- Facebook Pixel: The Facebook Pixel is a code that tracks the actions and information of people who visit your Facebook page.
- Instagram Account: This will allow you to advertise on Instagram as well.
Facebook Ad Account
The Facebook Ad Account is where you create and manage your Facebook Ads. In this article I’m going to break down audiences you can target, ads, and how you can track the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Facebook Ads Targeting:
- Remarketing: Remarketing is reaching out to people who have already visited your site and engaging them with ads on Facebook.
- Custom Audiences: Custom Audiences are created by uploading a list of email addresses, phone numbers, or customer names into Facebook’s Ads Manager tool. You can create custom audiences based off of an uploaded list of emails from customers you want to target specifically.
- Lookalike Audience: A Lookalike audience is when Facebook takes the data it has about users that fit a certain criteria and uses those same parameters for creating new “look-a-like” profiles so they too will be shown your ad content. In my opinion, this is one of Facebook’s best type of campaigns as it’s very good at identifying users who are similar to the users you uploaded. I recommend to start off with a lookalike off of your customer email list, or site visitors. The larger the seed list, the better and more information Facebook has to work from.
- Manual Targeting within the Ad Platform: This can include targeting such as: age, gender, location, user interests, or if you’re a BtoB, targeting job titles.
Facebook Ad Formats
There are many different type of Facebook Ad formats. The most common form of Facebook Ads is the “image” format, which features a photo or video and text overlay with a call-to-action button.
The best type of ad to use depends on your goals: sales people for example might find that lead ads are better at driving engagement while non-profit organizations may be more successful using video ads as they’re able to communicate their story in an emotional way
Image ads are ads with the following criteria:
Headline: The text that appears above the image or video.
Image/Video: This is what your ad looks like and includes a short caption underneath it to describe it further.
Description: Short description of the offer you’re promoting, make sure this offers value to people because Facebook doesn’t allow links in ads for security reasons! It’s best to be brief so your audience will get interested enough to click on your link in order to find out more information about what you want them too know about.
Image Ads are the standard ad format on Facebook and Instagram.
Video ads can also be used and have the same benefits as Image ads but also have the added bonus of being able to show a short video or animation which can give your audience more information about what you’re advertising and may be more fun for people viewing it
Lead generation ads on Facebook can be used to grow your email list by encouraging people to subscribe or pass their email. This is great for any lead generation efforts.
Best practices for Facebook Ads include
- Sizing your images correctly so they take up the full available space on Facebook
- Writing ad copy to make it obvious what benefits there are and how people will benefit from viewing or clicking on the advertisement
- Testing multiple ads against each other to find the best performing ads
For more options on Facebook ads, go to Facebooks ad format page.
Facebook Pixel
The Facebook Pixel is setup in the business manager and is critical to a campaigns success. The Facebook Pixel is designed to track the actions of people as they interact with your website. Through this pixel you can track specific events such as purchases, email sign ups, landing page views, etc.
To have a successful campaign it’s critical to setup proper measurement with the pixel, this will share how successful your campaign is, and also pass critical information to Facebook to optimize towards.
To setup the Facebook Pixel, you simply login to the Facebook Business Manager, and go to “Settings” then select “Pixels”.
Then click on “+ Create a pixel”, this will bring up an option for what type of event you want to track.
Instagram Advertising
Through the Facebook ads manager you can advertise on Instagram. Generally speaking, Instagram has a younger audience, but don’t let that deter you. It still has a large audience and can be very effective if used correctly.
This could work great for example, as an eCommerce company who sells products to all ages of people. Facebook ads on Instagram allow your message to go further with the younger demographic through posts in their feed rather than it just being seen on Facebook.
Ads Manager Dashboard
This dashboard will show you a summary of all the latest activity on your account in one place including: daily budgets, clicks, amount spent, social reactions/likes/comments, and conversion events you created through the pixel including (purchases, add to cart, checkout initiated, etc.).
Helpful Tips when Advertising on Facebook
- Have a clear call-to-action in order for the prospective customer to take action and make it easy for them. This can be as simple as saying “Shop Now” or “Learn More”. Even better is having a compelling offer to try and close the sale.
- Test, test and then retest Ads to see which one works the best for your business.
- Use the Facebook pixel to optimize towards specific events.
- Know your audience. Knowing what kind of people and when they interact with Facebook can help you customize content for that specific demographic.
- Create a plan before starting to advertise on Facebook so that you have an idea of how much money is going in, where it’s all being spent and how you’ll determine success.
- Don’t spend too much on Ads. It’s easy to get excited and spend a lot of money quickly, but make sure you’re not spending more than what your budget allows.
- Setup Google Analytics so you can see how long your paid audience is is on your website.
- Look at your performance daily, this will save you a ton of money by really studying what is working and what isn’t.
- Review your Frequency. Frequency on ads are Facebook setting that allows you to control how many ads will be shown per person.
In conclusion, Facebook ads can work very well but it’s super important that you don’t rush into it, test different audiences and ads against each other, make sure the pixel is setup correctly on your site, etc.
Also, it’s important that Facebook Ads is just one advertising platform. There are many other platforms that you can use to test. For some of our clients at Rise Marketing Group, Facebook ads work the best, for others, other platforms such as Google Ads will work better. I say that if FB ads don’t work very well, it could be the platform and we often recommend to test several platforms against each other.
For Facebook Ads support, please visit:
Facebook Ads Help Center
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at Rise Marketing Group for a consultation. We can review your campaign goals and objectives to see if we can be of assistance in helping you reach the desired result on Facebook ads or other platforms.
