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Facebook advertising can seem overwhelming if you haven’t used it before, but I promise you--it’s worth getting a handle on! Businesses large and small can see huge impacts by allocating some budget here. With its effective and easy-to-use targeting, creative tools and immediate results, it’s one of my favourite places to help my clients invest when they’re looking to go beyond organic results. (And let me tell you--if you’re relying solely on organic social to bring you results this day and age, you are missing out!) So let’s get you started here. There are three levels within the advertising structure, and it’s important to understand each one and what you control within each before you start building. Let’s take a look.

Campaigns

Campaigns are the “big buckets.” A campaign contains multiple ad sets, which each contain multiple ads. (If you just went cross-eyed, take a peek at the helpful visual I’ve included here.) At the campaign level, you are choosing your advertising objective.

As you can see, there are a lot of different options here, so you really need to think about what your goal is. Some of the common objectives we choose all the time:

Traffic - drive link clicks getting more people to your website… and from there, it’s the website’s job to work it’s magic and move them further down the funnel

Page likes - continue to grow your organic audience with a bit of spend here (we suggest $100/month ongoing) so that when you are putting up those organic posts, they’ll hit more people!

Event responses - get your event in front of more people who may want to attend, driving them to respond as interested or going which means they get notified when you update it, or as the event nears closer AND their networks see this event response in their feeds as well

Post engagement - drive more interactions on a post that educates people about your brand in some way, which works particularly well for contests and giveaways

Ad Sets

Now we’re down a level! You can create one or multiple ad sets within each campaign. In each ad set you will specify:

• Targeting (who are you trying to reach?)
• Budget (how much are you going to spend?)
• Schedule (when and how long will this ad run?)
• Bidding (how much are you willing to pay for each result?)
• Placement (where will your ads be shown?)

Facebook tells us to “organize ad sets by audience” which means, they recommend you create a different ad set for each audience you want to serve. I love breaking out my audiences by stage of the funnel. For example, an audience of past website visitors would be more mid-funnel meaning they’re already familiar with our brand, likely our products/services on some level and are likely in “consideration”. If I were to create a “lookalike” of that site visitors audience, it’s going to consist of people who have never been to our website, but have similar characteristics to people who have making them hopefully likely to behave similarly. They’re new to us, considered “top of funnel” and are in “awareness” phase.

If all of this funnel lingo is confusing you, check out this blog by Aweber. They break it down really clearly!

Aaaand if you want to learn more about all the different audiences you can create and target, check out this blog here that lists them out.

And one quick tip before we move on: I always recommend automatic placements! Let Facebook do the hard work for you and figure out what platform has people most likely to give you the results you’re looking for. Don’t try and guess and potentially waste budget!

Ads

This is where the magic happens and advertising gets fun! Stir yourself up an old fashioned and channel your inner Don Draper--it’s time to get creative! Now, each Ad Set can have multiple Ads within them and each should contain a variation of creative. Creative speaks to the copy, the link, the headlines, the buttons, the call-to-action and the visual included in the ad. Change up any one of those in each ad and as you watch your results roll in, you can easily see which version of your creative was most effective.

Try to change just one variable (ok two if you’re lazy and don’t want to run a gazillion ads) in each ad so that it’s easier to understand what resonated best with your audience. If you change the image, the copy and the headline, how will you know which piece of that combination really drove people to act?

Video is almost always the most effective type of creative to go with. But what if you’re not a video whiz with Final Cut Pro and animation skills, you might say? Take a breath. Facebook has your back! They’ve recently rolled out video templates that allow you to upload some images, logos and add some text overlay and voila--you’ve got engaging, moving content! Now, there are some limitations here, and whenever possible, I do recommend finding someone with those mad Final Cut Pro skills to make you a video that really dazzles (hint: we offer that!) but if you’re in a pinch--at least you know you can get in the video game!

Facebook advertising can do A LOT, so this blog could go on forever. It does take some time to get a handle on, and takes some time to execute and measure your results and really get the hang of, but it’s soooooo worth it! We’ve been working on a huge campaign this quarter with a client, investing mad cash into Facebook advertising and the results are hugely impressive! We’re talking numbers like… 223% increases in traffic and, best yet--revenue! (We’ll share more about this project in a case study next year… promise!)

If this all sounds exciting to you, and you’re game to put some budget into Facebook advertising, but don’t have the time to learn it, build it and optimize it… let us take it off your hands. We currently have a few openings to bring on new clients in early 2019. If you’re interested in joining the Mad Media family, contact us and set up a complimentary consultation!