4 Steps For Successful Facebook Advertising (Must Read)

Thinking about starting a Facebook Advertising?

You need to know, many people fail. Why? They don’t understand the subtleties of the platform.

Don’t worry, we will cover everything you need to know for successful Facebook advertising in this post.

But Facebook has its own set of rules and steps to follow to ensure your ad’s success, and if you’re not familiar with the platform, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

That’s why in this guide I cover all the in’s and out’s of Facebook advertising: why you need it, how to set it up, and how to make sure it’s the right move for your brand.

Why Advertise on Facebook?

Advertising on Facebook is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. The channel boasts 1.13 billion daily active users, which means more than likely, your audience is using it as well.

While that’s great news for brands, the problem is that Facebook has made it increasingly difficult for brands to reach that audience through organic posts.

New algorithm updates on the platform have been designed specifically to focus on more meaningful interactions and engagement in user’s newsfeeds – in a nutshell, it means users will be seeing fewer posts from brands and businesses.

In 2016 alone, publishers saw a 52% decline in organic reach on Facebook. Whomp whomp.

The silver lining? Facebook advertising is more alive and effective than ever.

Benefits of Facebook Advertising

Advertising of any kind is a commitment, no question there.

So before diving in, brands understandably need to know: is it worth it?

Absolutely.

Facebook advertising can help you grow your business and customer loyalty and effectively pinpoint quality leads.

Here are a few of the (many) benefits:

1. First of all, it works for businesses across the board. Facebook is the top ad channel for both B2C and B2B marketers; it’s the #1 choice for 72% of B2C’s, and 43% of B2B’s – surpassing even LinkedIn.
2. Your customers are willing to support you on the platform – 49% of users like a Facebook page to support their favorite brands.
3. It’s incredible targeting options make it easier for your ad to reach your target audience
4. Facebook ads are some of the most (if not the most) effective on the web. On Facebook, desktop ads have 8.1x higher click-through rates and mobile ads have 9.1x higher click-through rates than normal web ads
5. Campaigns are easy to track

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I think you get the idea.

Before you Begin Your First Facebook Ad

By now, you’re probably eager to get the ball rolling on your first Facebook ad.

But before you jump in, there are a few things you need to consider:

• Your business goal – what are you trying to achieve with your goal?
• Your target audience – who are you trying to reach with your ad?
• A campaign budget for your ad – how much are you willing to spend over the duration of your ad campaign?
• Your ad creative – what photos, videos or text will you use in your ad?

To better decide on the above, you need to be familiar with all the options available to you regarding objectives, audiences, and ad types.

So let’s dig in.

Step 1: First, Choose a Facebook Advertising Objective

This is the first step of running your campaign – as well as the first step in the set-up process.

Facebook requires that you choose a campaign objective to better clarify your goals for each campaign, which fall under three overarching themes:

Awareness

• Brand Awareness – Your ad will be shown to those most likely to be receptive to it in order to increase awareness
  • Most Useful For: larger companies who want to put their brand in front of their target audience
• Reach – This will maximize the number of people that see your ad

• • Most Useful For: Those with a smaller audience looking to reach as many people as possible

Consideration

• Traffic – This helps send people to your website or landing page
  • Most useful For: Brands promoting a blog post, landing page, or app
• Engagement – This option promotes engagement in the form of page likes, shares, comments, etc.  
  • Most useful For: Brands who want to create engagement with their followers
• App Installs – This option sends to traffic to the app store where they can download your app
  • Most Useful For: Brands looking to increase their app downloads
• Video Views – This promotes a selected video
  • Most Useful For: Brands whose objective is to get more video views to create engagement (note: just because you use a video in your ad creative doesn’t mean you have to choose this option if you’re looking for conversions, clicks, etc.)
• Lead Generation – This is meant to generate qualified leads, and have them fill out a lead generation form through Facebook (Facebook can auto-populate form fields through user’s profile information)
  • Most Useful For: Brands who are looking for more leads, but not necessarily website traffic

Conversion

• Conversions – This prompts people to take action, either through your website or app; to optimize for conversions, you must have a minimum of 15-25 conversions per week
  • Most Useful For: Brands who want website visitors to download, opt-in or purchase something
• Store visits – This encourages users to come to your store
  • Most Useful For: Brick and mortar, local stores who want to promote more foot traffic
• Catalog Sales – This promotes particular products
  • Most Useful For: Brands with an e-commerce store

Step 2: Next, Choose a Facebook Advertising Target and Audience

Once you’ve established your overall objective, your next job is to consider your audience.

This is where Facebook really shines. For each campaign, you’ll be prompted to target a specific audience.

The options here are pretty incredible. You can choose between:

1. Core Audience
2. Custom Audience
3. Lookalike Audience

Let’s take a look at each.

Core Audience

Your core audience is one you build based on Facebook’s powerful targeting options. Those options include:

1. Location

Location lets you include or exclude people based on their location. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that.

Within the location option, you get to choose how to define your location based on:

• Everyone in this location – reaches everyone location is in the area
• People who live in this location – reaches everyone whose home is in that area
• People recently in this location – reaches everyone whose most recent location is in that area
• People traveling in this location – reaches people who were recently in the location, but may not live there

Then you’ll add your location, and specify the exact radius you’d like to reach.

You’re not limited to just one location; choose as many as you’d like and repeat the process.

2. Demographics – age, gender, language

For age, you specify a minimum and maximum age to show your ads to.

For gender, you select between Men, Women, and All.

For language, you can specify a language or leave it blank.

Pretty painless, right?

3. Interests

This one allows you target your audience based on their interests and hobbies. These could be anything from horror movies and video games to sports and outdoor activities.

4. Behaviors

This option digs into specific behaviors and lets you target users by activities like previous purchase behavior, device usage, homeowner status, etc.

5. Connections

The last option is to target people based on their interactions with your Page or app. You can choose to target people who like your page or friends of people who like your page, as well as people who use your app and friends of people who use your app.

You can also choose to exclude people who like your page or use your app to target an entirely new audience.

Custom Audiences

This is where things get really interesting.

In addition to creating your own core audience, Facebook gives you the option to target an audience you’re already connected to.

These custom audiences can be built from:

• Contact lists – current customers and prospects on Facebook
• Site visitors – users who have previously visited your website
• Mobile app users – users who already use your mobile app

If you’re using a contact list for your custom audience, you can upload your existing list to Facebook.

To build an audience based on your website visitors, you’ll first need to install the Facebook pixel. The pixel is a snippet of code that you will create in Facebook and add to your website.

Once installed, you can specify who the Pixel should track:

• All website visitors – includes or excludes everyone who visits the website your Pixel is installed on
• People who visited specific web pages – includes or excludes people who visit specific web pages on your site
• Visitors by time spent – includes or excludes the people who have spent the most time on your website

To target based on your mobile app users, you can select one of your connected apps and install the Facebook SDK on the app. Much like the Facebook pixel, you can then choose segments of your app audience to track.  

Custom Audiences allow you to use Facebook retargeting tools, a particularly powerful way to target customers and connect with those who have already shown interest in your brand.

Facebook Advertising Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences allow you to target people on Facebook who are similar to an audience you’ve already created.

Using this option will increase the likelihood that your ad will reach people interested in your business, based on their similarities to your existing customer and prospect base.

You can create a Lookalike Audience in three different ways:

• From a custom audience – Facebook will look for users who resemble those in your custom audience
• From website visitors – using the Facebook pixel, Facebook will build an audience out of your site visitors and then use that list to build a lookalike audience
• From page fans – Facebook will look for users like those who have liked your Facebook page

As you get more familiar with Facebook advertising, you’ll be able to experiment with the different types of audiences and find which produces the best results for your brand.

When creating your audience, remember to keep an eye on the meter just to the right side of the screen. This will gauge the size of the audience you plan to target, and how many people you can expect to reach on a daily basis.

Step 3: Select Your Budget for Facebook Advertising

The next step is deciding how much you’re willing to spend on your campaign.

Here, you’ll the option to choose between a daily budget and a lifetime budget.

If you choose the daily budget, you’ll enter the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per day.

If you choose the daily budget, you’ll enter the maximum amount you’re willing to spend over the duration of your campaign. This also requires that you select and start and end date for your campaign.

To drill down even further, Facebook offers a number of advanced options such as:

• Bid amount – you choose whether you want Facebook to set a bid for you or if you’ll do it manually
• When you get charged – either by CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impressions)
• Ad scheduling – choose if you want your ad to run all the time or on a schedule (only available with lifetime budgets)
• Delivery – choose between standard delivery (ads are shown throughout the day – recommended by Facebook) or accelerated delivery (ads are shown as quickly as possible)

How Facebook Advertising Bidding Works

Before we move on to the next step, let’s take a deeper look at Facebook’s bidding system.

Like many other advertising platforms, Facebook ads are subjected to an ad auction. The purpose of the auction is to match the interests of both the advertiser and Facebook user, and “reach the right person at the right time.”

To determine which ad wins the auction, Facebook considers three factors:

1. Your campaign bid – the more you pay, the more your ad will show
2. Relevance score – relevance score is calculated based on negative and positive feedback received from its target audience. More positive reactions = higher relevance score. High relevance scores can:
   1. Lower the cost of reaching people – the higher your relevance score, the less it will cost
   2. Help advertisers test ad creatives – you can test different combinations of images, text, etc. to see which ultimately offer the highest relevance score
   3. Help optimize in-progress campaigns – you can monitor your relevance score as your ad runs, and tweak it if you notice any drops
3. Estimated action rates – These are determined by Facebook, and represents how likely they think a person is to take a given action

The ad with the highest total value ultimately wins the auction.

The takeaway here is that your ad’s ability to win an auction isn’t tied exclusively to the amount you’re willing to spend, but to the overall quality of your ad.

Step 4: Choose Your Facebook Advertising Format

Finally, you’re able to choose the format of your ad.

The format you choose will ultimately be tied to the campaign objective you chose, and you’ll notice that some formats aren’t compatible with certain objectives.

The following formats are available to you:

Photo Ad

Just like it sounds, photo ads feature a single image and with a small amount of text.

When creating a photo ad, you’ll have the option of uploading your own image or choosing from Facebook’s stock images.

Image Guidelines:

• Minimum Image size: 400×150
• Text overlays should be kept to less than 20% of the image

Text Guidelines:

• Text length: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• All but video views

Best Practices:

• Choose your image based on who you’re targeting
• Test a variety of images
• Show the product or service being advertised

Facebook Video Advertising

Video ads are one of the most popular options for advertising; after all, Facebook users on average watch 8 billion videos per day.

Not only that, but Facebook videos receive an average engagement rate of 6.3%, compared to YouTube’s 3.2% and Instagram’s .2%

With number’s like that, it’s easy to see why so many marketers are giving video ads a try.

Video Guidelines

• File size: 4GB max
• Minimum length: 1 second
• Maximum length: 240 minutes

Text Guidelines:

• Text length: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• All

Best Practices

• Include sound in your video
• Include captions in your video – captioning videos increases watch time by 12%
• Capture attention within the first 3 second
• Experiment with different video types

Carousel Ads

Carousel ads allow you to show up to 10 images or videos (called cards) within a single ad.

Facebook notes that “with more creative spae within an ad, you can highlight different products, showcase specific details about one product, service or promotion, or tell a story about your brand that develops across each carousel card.”

Card Guidelines:

• Minimum number of cards: 2
• Maximum number of cards: 10
• Maximum video file size: 4GB
• Maximum image file size: 30 MB

Text Guidelines:

• Text length: 125 characters
• Headline: 40 characters
• Link description: 20 characters

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• All but post engagement and product catalog sales

Best Practices:

• Try dynamic ads
• Use engaging images
• Show the best performing carousel cards first
• Decide how to best associate each card with a landing page

Slideshow Ads

Slideshow ads are much like video ads, but created from up to 10 still images.

Facebook created slideshow ads to allow advertisers to capture the power of a video ad –  without the time and expense associated with it. To make things even easier, you can pull images from Facebook’s stock library or existing videos.

Image Guidelines:

• Recommended size: 1280×720 pixels
• Each image should be of the same size and ration
• Slideshow length: 5 to 15 seconds

Text Guidelines:

• Text length: 125 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link description: 30 characters

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• All but post engagement and product catalog sales

Best Practices:

• Include as little text as possible
• Be conscious of how long each image shows: make sure it’s long enough to catch their attention, but short enough not to lose it – about 2 seconds

Collection Ads

A collection ad lets you combine an image, video, or slideshow ad with a row of 4 thumbnails underneath it.

It’s ideally suited to retail, as people can browse through multiple products in one ad.

Image Guidelines:

• Recommended size: 1200×628 pixels

Text Guidelines:

• Text length: 90 characters
• Headline: 25 characters

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• Traffic
• Conversions
• Store Visits

Best Practices:

• Make your best performing ad your lead image
• Make sure your thumbnails are related to the main image
• Keep text to a minimum
• Include links to relevant product pages

Canvas Ads

In Facebook’s own words, canvas ads are “a full-screen ad experience built for bringing brands and products to life on mobile.”

They first appear as regular photo ads, but when clicked on expand to a full-screen, fully-immersive experience that can include up to 20 images.

Image Guidelines:

• Image size: 66×882 pixels for the header image, 1080×1920 pixels for the full screen image

Text Guidelines:

• Text length: up to 500 character block text

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• Brand awareness
• Conversions
• Engagement

Best Practices:

• Use a bold header image to capture attention
• Deliver relevant information in your text about the products or services you’re advertising
• Use them with carousel ads to include thumbnail images

Lead Generation Ads

Lead generation ads are designed specifically to capture lead information. You can present the ad through image, video, or carousel format.

The ad will be followed by a lead form for the user to fill out. You create and choose which fields you would like filled out, and based on a user’s profile Facebook will auto-populate some of the fields for you.

The requirements are the same as with regular photo, video or carousel ads.

Compatible Campaign Objectives:

• Lead Generation

Best Practices:

• Consider including coupons or other incentives in the ad creative to encourage users to leave to share their information
• Make sure to include a clear value proposition – why should they share their information with you?
• Only ask for the information you need; too many fields may deter users from submitting the form
• Let users know what they can expect after submitting the form

So, What’s the Best Way to Advertise on Facebook For My Brand?

That all comes down to what your brand does, and what it’s trying to accomplish.

Run an e-commerce company? You’ll want to focus on promoting your products and driving leads to your product pages. That means you’ll want to focus on conversions and showcase your products through carousel and canvas ads.

Maybe your business is more service-oriented. You’ll likely want to advertise case studies and customer testimonials to promote social proof. You can do this effectively with video or slideshow ads and focus on broader objectives like reach and engagement.

The most important thing is to really analyze what kind of business you have and which ad types and campaigns will best suit what you have to offer.

How to Measure Success With Facebook Advertising

Of course, no ad campaign is complete without a way to measure its performance.

But Facebook has you covered there, and offers a comprehensive overview of each campaign’s analytics. Your analytics can be accessed through your dashboard, and can be measured by ad sets (a collection of ads in a particular campaign) or specific ads.

You’ll be able to access the stats for key metrics including delivery, reach, results, and relevance score.

To ensure the best results, Facebook also allows and encourages A/B testing. Also known as split testing, it allows you to test two or more version of an ad to a similar audience in order to see which performs best.

Common variables to test include your ad creative, placement, audience, and delivery.

I highly recommend running tests to ensure your ad is reaching and resonating with your target audience.

Facebook Advertising Averages

So you know what to look for, but how do you know what numbers to look for?

Especially for those just starting out, it can be extremely difficult to tell how well your ads are performing.

The truth is, the results will vary widely by industry, timing, and a number of other factors. The best way to truly interpret your ad’s performance is through time and practice.

But in the beginning, it’s good to have a point of reference. Here are a few benchmarks to check your ad’s performance against:

• The average CTR for Facebook ads is .9%
  • Apparel – 1.24%
  • Retail – 1.59%
  • B2B –  0.78%
  • Technology – 1.04%
  • Finance & Insurance – 0.56%
• The average conversion rate for Facebook ads is 9.21%
  • Fitness – 14.29%
  • Education – 13.58%
  • Technology – 2.31%
• The average CPC for Facebook ads is $.35. In the US, the average is $.26
• The average cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) is $7.19

Again, these are only averages, and the best way to truly know what works best for you is through performance over time. But these averages will give you an idea of the numbers you should be working towards – and hopefully, exceeding.

Get Started With Facebook Advertising

There’s a lot of ground to cover when it comes to advertising on Facebook.

The good news is, once you’ve mastered the factors like objective, audience, and ad format, setting up your ads in the future will be a cinch. If you need help, let us know.