If you’ve done a bit of research, you may have come across numerous articles scattered throughout the web offering advice on the “10 best ways” to create and optimize ads on Facebook or Instagram. However, we feel that there are rarely any pieces providing a breakdown of terms with easy-to-follow, actionable strategies for Facebook Ad Manager beginners. In this article, we explain pertinent information you need to get started and give you the confidence to execute on your own, through simple language. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s a quick guide designed for those who are just getting started!
Why You Should Pay for Ads
If you’re hesitant about paying for ads, we completely understand. It may seem daunting to jump headfirst into adding another business cost, but let’s talk about why you should consider investing in ads. Although organic growth is still possible on Facebook and Instagram, paying for ads not only helps you reach your goals faster, but it also ensures the right people are seeing your content.
Advertisements give you the capability to target the right audience who are more likely to be interested in your brand from the start. From our experience, clients that have paid for ads had a direct correlation to account growth in ways that we cannot replicate organically. Additionally, those who follow because of paid ads are more likely to continue to follow, especially when compared to other methods of growth-focused advertising, such as giveaways.
Basic Definitions to Know
But what is the difference between organic and paid? Organic traffic is defined as any action done on social media, including following, engaging, sharing, etc., without any paid spend behind it. For example, if a user came across and shared your newest Instagram post by spontaneously browsing through hashtags, it would be considered organic traffic. On the contrary, any paid traffic is defined as any direct action done in response to an ad. That same share would then be considered paid if the post was directly delivered to that user’s feed.
Any ad can also be categorized into two different types – dark and boosted. A dark ad, or dark post, is a targeted ad on social media that doesn’t appear directly on your company’s feed. Instead, it shows up in your target audience’s feed as a sponsored post. The idea is to seamlessly integrate your ad with their social feed to make it feel more organic and reach new potential customers who might connect with your brand. A boosted ad is a regular Facebook post that you pay to reach a wider audience. Buying boosted posts ensures that specific posts are seen by a larger number of users, or viewed more often by those who are more likely to engage.
What is Facebook Ads Manager?
Facebook Ads Manager is the main platform to create, view, edit, and monitor all of your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, ad sets, and ads. It’s a comprehensive system that can feel overwhelming in the beginning. To keep it simple, we’ll focus on the aforementioned ad types: dark and boosted. Boosted posts stem from your pre-existing Facebook posts living on your Business Page’s timeline or feed. You can choose to apply money to any piece of content your brand may have posted to “boost” it to a larger target audience. Boosted posts differ from normal/dark ads because they are not created directly within Facebook Ads Manager and lack the same set of customization features. Dark ads don’t live or come from your brand’s timeline or feed. Thus, any ad created outside of your Facebook timeline content, i.e. through Facebook Ads Manager, is then considered a dark ad.
The following three steps will guide you through setting up Pixels, creating the right target audience, and analyzing metrics for your new ads.
Step One: Creating a Facebook Pixel
Before you design your ad, we recommend making sure your Facebook Pixel is set up properly. A Facebook Pixel is a set of code that you embed within your website to ensure your advertising metrics are accurately reported back to you. It helps you collect data that tracks conversions via Facebook ads, gives you data to optimize your ads, allows you to refine your target audiences, and remarkets to people who have interacted with your site. To set up your Facebook Pixel, simply follow the instructions provided by Facebook. They have made the set-up process easy to follow.
Step Two: Build the Right Ad For You
Creating a great ad for your brand comes down to focus on three key building blocks: target audience, objective, and format.
While it sounds obvious, choosing the right target audience to see your ad is quite important. You want to ensure your money isn’t spent on people who are uninterested in your product. We recommend choosing to target people who have interacted with your business in the past. This is a great way to re-engage people who are already interested in what your brand has to offer and to continue generating interest and creating sales.
One feature we also recommend is choosing a “Lookalike Audience” from Facebook’s Ad Manager. Lookalike audiences are pre-generated audiences that groups people together who are similar to your most valuable audiences. Utilizing the knowledge you have about your audience, select the correct demographics, interests, and behaviors that best represent them to build the right target group. Facebook will guide you through this selection process when creating a new ad.
From there you can choose what you want your ad to focus on, or its objective. An easy way to determine the goal is to ask yourself, “What is the important outcome I want for this ad?” Facebook’s available objectives are as follows:
- Awareness: Increase overall awareness for your brand by showing ads to people who are more likely to pay attention to them.
- Reach: Show ads to the maximum number of people in your audience while staying within your budget.
- App installs: Drive more installs of your app by linking directly to the App Store and Google Play store.
- Traffic: Grow the number of people who are visiting your site or app and increase the likelihood they’ll take a valuable action when they get there.
- Lead generation: Make it easy for interested people to learn more about your business. Encourage them to sign up for more info or spend time on your app or website.
- Messages: Prompt people to open more Messenger interaction and engage in conversation with your brand.
- Engagement: Get more people to follow your Page or engage with your posts through comments, shares and likes.
- Video views: Show your videos to people who are most likely to be interested in them and watch them to completion.
After selecting the right goals, you can select the appearance of your ad, if you are planning on creating a dark ad. If you are boosting an ad, you would select the post you wish you to boost from this screen as well. However, you will not be able to change the post from its original format. There are eight different ways to format your ad:
- Photo: A single photo with a caption
- Video: Video with caption
- Stories: Appear in Facebook and/or Instagram stories as your targeted audience is scrolling through
- Messenger: Messenger ads help people start conversations with your business.
- Carousel: Several images users can scroll through that also allow you to link to multiple pages
- Slideshow: Scrolls through several images or one video automatically
- Collection: Collection ads let people discover, browse and buy what you offer. People can tap an ad to learn more about a specific product.
- Playables: Playable ads offer people an interactive preview before they download an app.
Step Three: Measure, Analyze, and Refine Your Ads
A crucial step in running ads is to analyze and measure your ads. To know if your ads are working, it’s helpful to understand the underlying metrics. Both boosted content and ad metrics can be monitored through Facebook Ads Manager. These metrics help gauge the success of your ads and can change based on your ad’s objective. You can always refine your ads if you find that they’re not reaching your goals. Here is a short glossary of important metrics to know:
- Reach: How many unique users the ad was delivered to
- Impressions: How many times the ad was delivered overall
- Frequency: Estimates how many times a single user is delivered the ad content
- Cost per Result: How much each desired action (i.e. clicks, shares, likes) cost the campaign
- Unique Link Clicks: How many times the link included in your ad was clicked
Metrics are personal to you and your brand. Depending on your brand’s needs, one metric may be more important than another. But keeping track of daily changes and overall results are important to improving the success of your ads.
Facebook Advertising Doesn’t Need to be Intimidating!
With these three steps, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a seasoned Facebook advertiser. An important rule of advertising is to know who you are marketing to, what they like, and what they need. Measuring your ad data will allow you to adjust and optimize to create the perfect ad for your target audience. When you find the perfect balance, you’ll find success with your ad campaigns!
If you want even more information into how to create successful ads on Facebook and Instagram, check out our two part podcast, all about Digital Ads. There you will hear our two CEOs, Kelli Frazier and Tim Lambertson, not only give advice but also their insights into why ads are worth the investment! You listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud – or just listen below!