Facebook Ads Broken Down in Steps

1. Select your target audience

With Facebook advertising, you can choose for your ads to be shown to people in a certain area, people of a certain age or educational level, people with specific interests, people who participate in specific activities, or practically any other parameters you want to set. Narrowing your target audience can help increase clicks and conversion rates, since your ads will only be shown to people who are already interested.

Be careful about over-narrowing your audience, though. If you have not already done extensive market research, you should be prepared to be surprised about who might actually be interested in your product. You should run multiple Facebook ads with slightly different parameters set on your audience. Test and see which audience groups are most responsive to your ads.

2. Get your ad design perfect

On Facebook ads, you have a very small amount of graphic design space to catch your reader’s eye and convince them to click. Make sure your graphic is eye-catching and unique. Represent your product and stay away from generic stock images. Remember, you need to show viewers what you have to offer that they can’t get anywhere else.

Make your text punchy, short, and to the point. You have limited space and this is not the time to be vague. Your viewers are flooded with ads all the time, and they will only click if they have a specific reason. Stay away from general statements like “Huge savings on great gifts.” Catch their interest with a specific promise: “Brand names for $49.99” next to a picture of a pair of boots, for example.

3. Match your ad to your site

As with all other ad recommendations, you must advertise what you are offering and only what you are offering. Do not exaggerate on your ads. Remember, you’re paying for clicks, so you want the clicks to turn into sales.

If your Facebook ads are yielding bounces, don’t be shy – ask why. You can easily set up a quick survey on your site. Questions like “What were you looking for? Did you find it?” can give you a lot of insight into what people expect from your site based on your advertisements.

4. Test, test, test

Run several iterations of your ads and change different variables in each. Sign up for a decent analytics service on your site so you can keep track of which clicks are coming from which ads. (This will also let you keep track of conversion rates on each ad.) When testing the Conversion Rates on your Facebook marketing campaign, it helps to have an in-house marketing company in El Dorado Hills to help, that’s where Front Street Media comes in.

Facebook does not let you track your ad results individually, so you will have to use an outside analytics service to gather your ad results data. It is well worth the extra effort, though. Testing different variables allows you to find out what works and what doesn’t, where your ideal audience is, what phrases bring in the customers and what phrases turn them off, and much more.

Advertising should always be done in conjunction with market research. If you are a small business owner, chances are you do not have the resources to create an entire market research team to keep track of how all your ads are performing. It’s easy to keep track of with Facebook ads combined with an analytics tracker on your website.

5. Schedule your ads

Facebook gives you the option to schedule your ads to best hit your target audience. Think about who will be buying your product and when they are going to be on Facebook. Are they high-power execs who focus hard core on their work and then relax on Facebook when they get off work? Are they lower-level office workers who check their Facebook while they’re logging into their office email? Are they students who use Facebook to distract themselves from writing papers late at night?

This is also an area where you want to do testing. Set your ads to appear at different times, and keep track of how many clicks and conversions you are getting in each time slot.

6. Set your budget

Facebook lets you set your budget for how much you want to bid per click. This is one of the most misunderstood features of Facebook ads. At Front Street Media, we’re here to disambiguate this voluntary pay per click feature.

You pay for targeting your audience. The narrower the audience you want to advertise to, the more you pay per click. Facebook is up front about how much this costs, and the price scale is easy to understand. The better quality the advertising, the more you pay for it.

The max bid per click works similarly, but it is less cut and dried. See, lots of people are trying to advertise on Facebook, and there are a limited number of spots per page view. The higher the demand for a particular time/audience/etc. the higher the price you are going to have to pay. This is where your max bid per click comes in: if you want a very high-demand audience at a very high-demand time, there will be a lot of competition. A high max bid per click will help you reach your audience better, while if you put a low max bid per click you will be shunted below those who bid higher.

Within your target audience, there are also different levels of quality views. People who are on Facebook all the time are considered to be low quality views because they see ads all the time. People who are on Facebook for less time per day are considered to be higher quality views, because it is expected that they may be less desensitized and therefore more receptive to the advertisements they see. If you put a high bid per click, you will get higher quality views that might yield higher conversion. If you put a low bid per click, you will get lower quality views.

The Facebook ad budget is clearly a place where you get what you pay for. Don’t overbid yourself, though. Only bid what you are actually able and willing to pay per click. You will likely not be paying as much as you bid per click, but in case you do end up paying it, you do not want your Facebook advertising to be too high for your budget.

Let Front Street Media help

At Front Street Media, we are experts in social media marketing, especially Facebook ads. Let us help you manage your Facebook advertising campaign. We give results, so you can focus on running your business. Give us a call today!