Facebook Advertising – The Beginner’s Guide

Let’s talk about Facebook ads today and you may ask, what’s the big deal about Facebook ads anyway? 

Facebook ads are great because there are many people on Facebook, I am sure you are also on Facebook. You can see how important it is to leverage ads to reach these potential customers or clients to drive revenue for your business.

With over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide.

Don’t Leave Money On The Table

If you haven’t used Facebook ads, you’re missing out. It’s bigger than any TV company and has unique access to your potential customer because people love to be on this platform, their phones, and social media in general. 

Google ads and Facebook ads are super effective and I highly recommend that you use them. 

How It Works

The advertising platform works like this. 

It has an auction system where people bid, and if whoever ends up bidding the most and assuming that generates Facebook the most money and the reason I say that is just because 

If you bid more than the competition it doesn’t mean Facebook will make more from you. 

This is because if you bid $2 and your competition bids $1 but they generate 10 times more clicks than you, Facebook will your competitors stuff more than yours. 

The reason is depending on how the ad is set up they tend to generate more money from the ads that get more clicks and have a much higher Click-through rate (CTR) than the ones that have a lower CTR.

They also look at ad quality and action rates. That is how many people actually click, buy, purchase? Because Facebook knows that if you win and your ad is successful, you’ll keep spending more. 

Relevant ads often cost less and see more results. 

Ad Managers

To manage your ads Facebook provides a free tool… called the Ad Managers within Facebook and that allows you to manage your ads, not just on Facebook, but also through Messenger, Instagram and any other future platforms that they either end up acquiring, or they end up integrating within the whole Facebook ad ecosystem.

Ad Manager is amazing, it has a lot of great analytics. If you haven’t, make sure you check it out. When you’re setting all this up choose the right bidding strategy, there’s so many options.

Competitor Analysis & Bidding Strategy

Before you tell yourself, hey, I want to go create an ad and spend a lot of money to get more traffic, I will suggest you do a few things. 

To be successful in advertising on Facebook, you need to also understand the Facebook Auction system.

I would first recommend that you check out the Facebook Ad Library where you can put in any of your competitor’s names or pages and you can see the ads that are working for them. This will give you ideas of where to start. 

When you’re setting all this up choose the right bidding strategy, there are so many options. You can automate it, you can do it manually. 

Manual bidding is selecting what you are willing to pay for an impression, a click, and conversion.

Manual bidding is really simple because it has a lot of variables for eg, if you want to bid for the highest value, you can control your return on ad spend.

You can also do things like have a target cost. There’s also the lowest cost. 

Lowest cost bid strategy

Using the lowest cost bid strategy is recommended if you care more about spending your entire budget and to spend your budget as effectively as possible, this bidding strategy tends to be the best.

In other words, what it does is it tells Facebook to bid with the objective of getting you the lowest possible cost per event. 

I use this a lot on some of my campaigns for brand awareness using my ideal segment and get as many impressions within my segment at the lowest cost. 

There is also bid caps, as the name implies puts a cap on your bid when you want to make sure that you don’t spend too much.

Cost cap is something similar but for costs as well in which you want to make sure you’re getting the lowest cost per event. 

The Facebook Auction formula is total value equals advertiser bid times estimated action rates plus relevancy and quality.

Facebook Pixel

Whatever you do, make sure you have conversion tracking set in place because if you don’t have conversion tracking set in place you won’t be able to optimize your bidding.

Instead, you’ll only be playing a guessing game but having that conversion tracking set in place on your site will allow you to control your bidding. 

If you haven’t used the Facebook Pixel, you need to start using this. It helps Facebook determine when you have conversions and when you don’t.

If Facebook can track a conversion, whether it’s an email, purchases, a lead, or any other thing that you want to track, it will allow Facebook to better optimize who they show the ads to. 

This is because they can find similar people which will then help you generate more conversions and spend less money.

It’ll ensure that you can be profitable and it can ensure that when it’s time and when you’re ready, you can scale up your ads so you can spend 50, 100, 200, $300,000, or whatever it may be, even a million dollars a month if you have the budget.

And that’s why it’s super important to have conversion tracking or pixel because I’ve seen so many businesses not knowing their metrics and they just start bidding blindly. 

Next thing you know they spend all their budget, literally hundreds and thousands thinking they’re doing well and all of a sudden it hits them that they’re starting to lose money.

And even when you set things up correctly and things could be working, you also find that as you scale, sometimes the metrics just get out of whack and they’re not profitable anymore. 

This is why you need to keep optimizing your budget, optimizing your spend, optimizing your ad, making sure you don’t have fatigue.

If the frequency of your ads starts getting well above one, two, three, that means people are seeing your ads too frequently. And your cost is just going to skyrocket through the roof. Again, I can’t emphasize this enough, it’s one of the biggest mistakes we see at our ad agency division of Investments Mastery.

Unfortunately, too many people aren’t tracking conversions. It is critical to have tracking in place because it will help with the much-needed information required by Facebook and make things much better in the long run. 

Targeting

To be successful in advertising on Facebook, you need to also understand the Facebook targeting very well. 

When it comes to targeting, you have options like location, age, gender, languages, interests, behavior, connections. 

Using this feature means you are going to end up being able to target fewer people, but that’s a good thing because you only want to spend money on the people that have a really high probability of converting.

That’s also why I do custom audiences where you can upload your existing customer list and they will find other people who match those users or lookalike audiences.

Here is how lookalike audiences work. It tells the algorithm “Hey, here are all my customers, go find me other customers who are identical to this from an aspect of 2%, 3%, 4%.” And the more leniency you give Facebook, the more people they’ll be able to target.

Layer Targeting and Narrowing Your Targeting 

I recommend that you layer targeting. You don’t have to just use one target type, remember you can use as many as possible. By doing this, you are much more likely to generate the conversions you’re looking for.

Don’t have broad targeting. For example, if a lot of people who visit your site are interested in shoes for ladies, even though you have a business that sells predominantly dresses. 

It doesn’t mean that if you just target people seeking shoes you’re going to do well. You probably would spend a lot of money, get very few conversions. 

You need to layer all these things on top of each other to maximize your sales. You should use images or videos to get these sales through.

Good House Keeping.

Here are some best practices for you for aspect ratios for image ads on Facebook. 

Most our your clients or customers may be using smartphones. According to GSMA real-time intelligence data, there are now over 5.15 Billion people with mobile devices worldwide. 

This means that 66.60% of the world’s population have a mobile device

Think of it this way, Facebook generates more revenue from smartphones and mobile phones than they do from desktop computers. 

To be successful you need to pick formats that fit both desktop and mobile devices and that’s very important.

Recommendations

That is why I recommend the following:

• Images must not consist of more than 20% text, it reduces deliverability. So, try to keep your text max of 125 characters. Facebook will even warn you if there is too much text and give you a notice on Facebook saying, “It may not perform as well.”
  
• The ideal ratios are 1.91:1, to 4:5 and always upload the highest resolution images available because people don’t want to see blurry ones.
  
• For feed placements, use a square i.e 1:1 image(s) and for vertical videos go for 4:5.
  
• For story placements, use 9:16 because people tend to hold up their phone vertically instead of sideways.
  
• For carousels with videos, I recommend the 1:1 ratio.
  
• For in-stream video, use 16:9 because a lot of these people end up holding up their phone sideways.
  
• For Audience Network Placements, I recommend going vertical at 9:16.

Instant Experience.

Instant Experience is a full-screen, post-click experience. People can see entertaining videos and photographs in an Instant Experience. 

They swipe through carousels, complete a form, access items easily, and it’s just an easy way to convert people.

With Instant Experiences, you may find that the conversion rates may not always be as great as you want but it’s worth testing. 

Try Using a Collection. 

A Collection is an experience that involves a cover image or a video followed by several images of a product.

When someone clicks on a Collection ad, a full-screen experience drives engagement and nurtures interests and intent. The image or video may be a max of 1:1. 

Your headline should be about 25 characters and text 90 characters for your ad’s. 

Relevant Scores

Similar to Google, Facebook has relevant scores for ads. From the quality, of the engagement to conversion rates. This all gives Facebook the information they need to inform them if they should show your ad more or less.

They don’t just look at how much are you spending, because if you spend $100 a click and no one wants to click on your ads and someone spends a dollar but they’re going to get tons of clicks, they’re going to go with the one that is a dollar because it has a much better relevance score.

I have free templates for you. These templates work for any type of industry. This will help you get started.

If you need help with your Facebook advertising you can also check out our Digital Marketing  Investments Mastery where we help people scale and grow their campaigns or if you just have any questions or comments, you can leave a comment below I’ll answer and help you out.