Facebook ads are one of the most cost-effective tools for businesses looking to reach out to targeted audiences and dramatically increase their sales. Thanks to Facebook Ad Manager’s easy-to-use features, businesses have an easier time reaching out to their customers on Facebook than ever before. Whether you are completely new to Facebook ads or you have already run a few campaigns, these 6 simple steps by UXAX for setting up your Facebook ad campaigns will help you get the most conversions for your website.
This is basically Facebook’s version of the Google Analytics code. Simply put this code everywhere on your site so that you can start gathering analytic data that will help you optimize your ads. You must set this up because Facebook will not do it automatically. While it is possible to make money from your Facebook ads without the Pixel, you won’t get very far without it.
You will want to place the Base Pixel code throughout your entire website. Once it’s set up, choose from 9 different standard conversion events that you want the Pixel to track. This will depend on what you want to optimize. For instance, if you want to know exactly how many purchases your customers made from a Facebook Ad, use the “purchase” event so that the pixel will count a purchase as a conversion. Make sure the settings are set to track conversions from the pixel. Sometimes this feature is not automatically set.
You can also create custom conversions for tracking specific events like a particular whitepaper download for a special holiday giveaway.
Pro Tip: Use Audience Insights to track audience demographics and behaviors with Facebook pixel and get a better idea of who your audience actually is.
With so many different campaign objectives to choose from, it can be really hard to know exactly what to choose for your business. It all depends on your type of business. Here’s what you should choose depending on your business type and goals.
Use “store visits” and “brand awareness.”
Although there isn’t a way to directly keep track of store visits through Facebook, the “store visits” option provides a map location directly on the ad so your customers can find your store easily. The “brand awareness” campaign is great for getting your name out there in your area. This works well for both small, local businesses and new businesses trying to get more eyeballs.
You can also run a “promote business locally” campaign, which is through the page manager, not ads manager. With this campaign, you can set up “click to call” for mobile ads. Having the click to call option makes it incredibly easy for your audience to get a hold of your business.
Use “product catalog sales”, “conversions”, or “traffic” if you have an e-commerce site.
Similar to an AdWords shopping campaign, “product catalog sales” displays different products from your catalog depending on who you’re targeting. The “conversions” campaign is perfect for promoting a particular product. If you have a special deal on a specific product, this campaign is perfect for it. Use “traffic” campaigns for times when you need to get as much traffic to your site as possible, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Since this type targets a broader audience compared to a “conversions” campaign, the cost per click is lower than a targeted “conversions” campaign.
Use “app installs” if you are marketing an app. This one’s self-explanatory. The “app installs” campaign lets customers purchase or download your app right on the spot.
Use “brand awareness”, “traffic”, or “conversions” for B2C or B2B companies.
The “brand awareness” campaign is perfect for newer companies trying to get their name out there. But most of the time, you’ll be using either a “traffic” or “conversions” campaign. As you already know, “conversions” campaigns are designed to persuade a customer to perform a specific action. They usually have a higher cost per click.
If you’re just looking to increase general traffic and optimize the number of clicks to your website, use a “traffic” campaign and keep the cost per click lower. If you’re not sure which to use, test both and see which one works best for you
For capturing leads and getting information from your customers, use “lead generation” campaigns. These campaigns use Facebook Lead Ads, which captures information right inside Facebook without taking them to a separate landing page. You don’t have to make a separate landing page, which makes it easier for a customer to fill out a form’s fields. Customers can even autofill these forms using their Facebook profile!
You can also create custom drop downs for more qualified leads or for a different required form field, but this may lower conversion rate since users will have to fill out more information. I wouldn’t worry too much about this lowering your conversion rate though because most of the form fields they need to complete will already be automatically filled out for them.
You may be wondering, where do the leads go for Facebook Lead Ads? Great question! You can download a csv file from the ad dashboard of all the leads that the ad populated, or you can integrate them with your CRM so you don’t have to keep downloading reports all the time.
Different types of visitors need different types of offers and ads that will appeal to them. Let’s break them down into three simple types of visitors: cold, warm, and hot.
Cold visitors are the people who have no idea who you are or what your business offers. They usually aren’t looking for what you’re offering. Warm visitors are the people who know who you are and are interested in your offers. They’re just not totally sure if your business will provide the solution they are looking for. Hot visitors are the ones actively searching for your brand and are interested in buying from you.
It makes sense that hot visitors are using Google and searching for you, while cold visitors are just browsing on Facebook or online and are more likely to give attention to aesthetically pleasing display ads. This is important to understand because it affects how you set up your audiences on Facebook.
Your custom audiences are composed of people who know who you are and have interacted with your business in some way. Building a custom audience is great for remarketing, targeting new customers who have similar interests to your existing customers, or closing the customers you lost somewhere in your sales funnel.
You want to start at the end of your funnel and work your way up. Set up a custom audience of your existing customers. This is the audience that you will retarget to either upsell or encourage another purchase. For example, you can create an ad designed just for this audience that will give them a deal for upgrading their subscription package or buying another pair of shoes because they have purchased from you in the past.
Next, you’re going to want to set up a custom audience of subscribers who cancelled or customers you lost somewhere in the sales funnel. Many companies study conversion funnels to figure out where they are losing customers. They will then set up different custom audiences depending on exactly where you lost them in the funnel. For example, you should target the people who added to cart and didn’t check out differently than the people who just visited your site. The more custom audiences you have, the better it is because you can be more specific for each of your custom audiences.
This is where Facebook has a decent advantage over other platforms. Lookalike audiences include people who have the same likes, interests, income, browsing behavior, past purchasing behavior, demographics, etc as your current customers.
In Facebook, you set up lookalike audiences by choosing one of your custom audiences and then deciding on a percentage of people you want to target.
To create the most effective lookalike audiences, you want to start with an audience size of 1% from your existing customer custom audience, which is the lowest point in the funnel. A small audience size gives you the best lookalike results, but it doesn’t have as far of a reach. Next, move up your funnel and create lookalike audiences from essentially all of your custom audiences with a 1% audience size until you reach the highest part of your funnel — your Facebook page followers.
Once you have reached everyone in your lookalike audiences with your ads, you can increase the size to 2%, once again starting from the bottom of the funnel and working your way up. Keep repeating this until you’ve reached 5%. If you go any higher than 5%, the lookalikes will not be as accurate as you want them to be.
You can also layer different interests or audiences on top of your lookalike audiences to boost performance if needed.
Saved audiences are created by targeting people with specific information included in their Facebook profiles. This information should be relevant to your ideal customer, such as their interests, demographics, income, location, what pages they like, etc. You can start by using Audience Insight Reports to target users based on their demographics and interests.
If you have all of your audiences in one ad set, you will not be able to figure out where your conversions are coming from. When you keep them separate, it’s easier to figure out what ads are working for what audiences and what ads you need to fix. You can also decide whether or not you want to spend more of your budget on the ad sets that are converting to maximize your results.
Take note that your saved or lookalike audiences may not convert on the same ad or offer that you’re showing to your custom audience. A 15% off special may be more enticing to your current customers than it would be to your colder customers, who might just want a free trial or demo, for example.
You can tailor your ad copy for different audiences as well. For example, show an ad saying “we miss you” to past customers who unsubscribed. You don’t want that ad showing up for people who’ve never bought from you before.
Let Facebook optimize the best bid for you first so you can get a ballpark idea of how much money you should be spending. Once you have built up some traffic and received initial CPA data, then you can start playing around with manual bids.
The best way to lower your CPA after getting your initial data is by duplicating the ad and changing the bid to manual for that duplicate. With the manual bids, you can set the maximum bid in order to lower your CPA. The trick here is to be realistic with your bids. If Facebook set the automatic bid to be $150, don’t think that your ad will be seen if you set up a manual bid of $20. For this example, start with $140, see how that does, and keep going down gradually until you find the optimal CPA.
Dark posting is what Facebook calls an “Unpublished Page Post”. Basically, this is a sponsored ad that is created at the “Page Posts” level, rather than the Ads Manager. Dark posts are designed for social engagement such as likes and shares while ads in the Ads Manager are designed with a specific call to action for viewers.
Creating an ad at the Page Posts level instead of the Ads Manager allows you to build social engagement with your dark posts much easier. When you make an ad in Ads Manager and apply it to multiple ad sets, Facebook creates a separate ID for each of those ads, even if they are identical. As a result, you are essentially creating multiple ads that all look the same. When your different audiences engage with an ad, they are engaging with separate posts and spreading out the engagement among multiple posts.
If you create a dark post, you can share the ID for that single ad across multiple ad sets. This allows your social engagement to spread evenly across all of different ad sets.
After you’ve set up your dark post and shared the ID into your ad sets, you can build up social engagement on the post before you even launch the ad. Your ad will not be as effective if you launch it with zero likes, comments, and shares.
When you click the “Facebook Post with Comments” button as seen above, you will get a link for the post. Start sending that link to your friends, family, and colleagues so that they can start to give positive feedback, likes, and comments on your post before it’s even posted. It’s important to set the vibe of the engagement as positive so that once it’s live, the positive vibe will continue to grow on the post.
It’s important to try all three of these ad types so you can figure out which works best for you. The general rule of thumb is that the more different ads you have to test, the better. It’s no longer A/B testing, it’s more like A/B/C/D/E testing in today’s marketing world.
For instance, carousel ads are great for ecommerce companies wanting to show off multiple products, or for showing a step by step process like the hair curler shown above. If you use the video ads, which can be an incredibly powerful tool, make sure you keep them short and engaging at the same time. Most people on Facebook have short attention spans due to the endless feed of content to scroll through.
Your saved audiences are your colder traffic. If you’re a newer business trying to get your name out there, most of your traffic will be cold. For cold audiences, you should offer free value with easy CTAs and easily consumable content so people can learn who you are. Some examples include a free download, infographic, white paper, coupon, or guide. It’s important that you are giving them something they can download and not just linking them to another page. This makes the customer feel more like they are receiving a gift and not just checking out your blog.
Your lookalike audiences are your warm traffic. The best offers for a warm audience include something free, like an ebook, giveaway, demo, or webinar that offers more detailed and dense content than an ad for a cold audience.
Your custom audiences are your hottest traffic. You can target this hotter traffic with things like a “buy now” button, free quote, demo, or trial. The focus for your hot traffic should be giving them an easy way to purchase RIGHT NOW.
The only parts of a Facebook Ads campaign that you can control are the audience and the ad itself. That’s why it is crucial to understand as much of the things you cannot control as possible.
We mentioned this earlier, but it needs to be repeated due to its high importance. You want to understand which audience is responsible for the success or failure of your campaign so that you know exactly what to do to optimize results.
When you have multiple audiences in one ad set, you have no idea what audience your conversions are coming from. As a result, you have no insights into what’s working for what audiences and what isn’t working. Organization is the key to success, and this small tip may make all the difference for you.
Audience Insight Reports are your best friend because they show everything that is out of your control.
These reports are crucial for not only optimizing your existing audiences, but also for building new saved audiences. You have to continue to learn as much about your audience as you can. For instance, seeing that 95% of the customers are female in the above photo, maybe we want to switch up the ad copy to sound more appealing to women.
Setting up an optimized Facebook Ads Campaign takes research, motivation, and a lot of patience. Sometimes, you aren’t going to launch a successful campaign on the first attempt. But with continued focus and practice, you can master this program in no time.
