BEFORE WE START

*Ahem*. This is the most comprehensive piece of research I’ve done about Facebook ads and I still can’t fit everything into one post! Before we really get stuck into this, you need to make sure you’ve installed the Facebook pixel, so head over to  grab our free tutorial on the Facebook Pixel. Without it, you might as well just burn fistfuls of $20 notes. As we get into this, you’ll see how important it is to be able to track the effectiveness of your ad spend.

Now have a quick look at the diagram below.

1. FACEBOOK GOALS

Pixels at the ready, everyone? I’m going to assume you’ve added your Facebook pixel. So, before we dive into the types of ads and the various layouts, the most important thing to work out before you start, is your goal.
There are quite a few different types of Facebook ads and Facebook have recently split them into three official goals:

• Awareness 
  This is the broadest category. It includes any general call-to-action advert and also includes increasing your Reach. ie. targeting people in a certain geographical area to increase relevant page likes).
• Consideration
  Getting people to interact with your product. Includes driving traffic to your site, getting people to interact with a post, video views to raise awareness and lead generation (eg. collecting emails via contact form in the ad that sends any emails to an email manager like Mailchimp.)
• Conversions 
  Get more people to your website.

Here is a link to an article by Facebook itself on how to choose the best objective for your business. There is a lot of overlap between the three categories and the different objectives and that can be confusing. Facebook says to think of choosing your objective as just the first stage in narrowing down your choices in order to find the most effective template.

And here is the Facebook summary page that I found really handy. It allows you to see the templates available within each objective. The Facebook ads documentation really is very thorough and easy to understand.

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2. CUSTOM CONVERSIONS

I know I’ve been banging on about the Facebook pixel and having goals, but both of those things mean nothing unless you’re tracking conversions.
So what are conversions? They are a thing in the Facebook Ads Manager and if you don’t set them, you won’t know whether people are doing what you want them to do. For example, you can still get top line data, like whether people click on your advert call-to-action, but if you want to know if those people actually worked through your website and filled out your contact form, then you’ll need to set up a Conversion. And also, why wouldn’t you want to know this?

Firstly, you need to know what your conversion end point is. In my case, upon checkout completion, I re-direct people to a specific page, so I can directly map my ad spend to the end result. ie. a successful purchase.
Yours might be a landing page just for your Facebook ads that captures email and redirects to a thank-you page. Or a contact form that re-directs to a contact page.
Let’s circle back for a moment. No matter what your business is, I firmly believe that you will benefit from having a dedicated landing page to ask someone to opt-in to your list. Remember, they clicked to find out more. So what do you want to show them?

If you are getting people to click through to a landing (sometimes called squeeze) page, then you can easily track the effectiveness of specific adverts. And you can also greet them with some tailored content, like a video message and of course, whatever incentive they clicked on the link for in the first place. If you don’t feel that works for you, then at least consider setting your site up so that you have a page which is a proper end goal. ie. a contact form redirect to a thank-you page.

ADDING THE CUSTOM CONVERSION

So many people don’t know this feature exists in the FB Ad Manager. Honestly, I didn’t know for ages, and it made total sense of the pixel as soon as realised what it was.
Go into the Ads Manager area and hover over the top left hamburger menu. Click on Custom Conversions and add your own. You need to choose the event that most closely matches the page you want to track. In my case, I’m setting up a few. Here’s my new Add To Cart page conversion so you can see what it looks like.

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3. AUDIENCE TARGETING

It’s time to talk about targeting. Let’s say you create a really beautiful advert and lots of people click on it. If you haven’t targeted the right audience, then you’ll get little or no conversions, yet you’ll still be paying for those clicks. This is what happens to most people the first time they run an ad. It feels like a lottery and you end up practically burning money (I did this!) There are two main types of targeting (I use both at the same time – they start as cold traffic and then over time, become warm traffic).

CUSTOM AUDIENCE (WARM TRAFFIC)

Again, you can create two types of audience.

a) Retargeted Audience. These are people who have already interacted with your page, engaged with your posts or who have visited your website (tracked by your FB pixel). You can choose to show you ads only to this people. These people know who you are and probably like you. They’re a safe bet. Once you’ve created this audience you can save it and use it again.
b) Lookalike Audiences. Within custom audiences, you can also generate a Lookalike Audience. ie. you can ask Facebook to use a source such as your business page likers and create a whole new audience of people who look just like them, but don’t know you, and therefore are likely to be receptive to your message. Let’s call them lukewarm traffic.

LOCATION TARGETING (COLD TRAFFIC)
Perfect for people who don’t know about you at all, location targeting uses tools things like Demographics (job, title, age range, relationship status), Connections (to your page) and Interests (to other pages) to target completely new people. This is when having a landing page or lead magnet (opt-in incentive) works well to warm them up a bit.

If you’re a location-based business (photographer, website designer), this is an absolute gift. You can get really specific with location, right down to postcode. Relationship status means you can target anyone who is engaged and when it comes to interests, you can type in anything you want to try to get lucky from specific wedding venues to well-known wedding blogs. If you’ve only ever been boosting posts, you’ll love this.

Again, if this audience works well for you, you can save it to re-use and then feed it back through the Lookalike Audience machine.
Below is my latest targeting set. I do have some custom audiences saved but I’m always trying new ones. You can see I got lucky in the interests section with some of the software companies whose users I want to market to.

And finally, here’s a link to FB’s audience targeting advice page. Very easy to understand.

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4. ADVERT FORMAT

What’s hot right now? Let’s keep it short and sweet. It used to be that you could upload any old image that showcased your brand, add a little text and a link and you were good to go. Now there is a huge amount of choice in terms of ad format.
Remember, whichever objective you choose when you go to create your campaign, will determine which templates are available you. Quick reminder – here’s the Facebook Ads Guide.

Here’s a run down of what people tell me is working at the moment.

• Facebook Links format. ie. a nice image, some text and a call to action.
• Facebook Carousel. Up to 5 images people can click through (I’ve had good results with this myself). See below.
• Video Views with Call To Action. I’m currently running a Likes campaign with a simple video slideshow for a client and we’ve picked up nearly 600 really targeted likes, some clicks through to the website at a very minimal cost.
  Top Tip 1: you can then retarget any people who watched your video for a certain number of seconds).
  Top Tip 2: if you are speaking in your video, add captions as so many people browse on mobile with the sound off.
• Canvas Views. I’m really excited about this. Yet to try it. When you open one of these beauties, you can reveal additional copy, images, video in a full screen view with a nice call to action. It feels really immersive and I love it when I see these. Big retailers are doing this well. Go visit somewhere like M&S for example, throw a couple of things in the cart and watch how they retarget you with some nice canvas ads shortly after.
• Lead Advert Form. If you are wanting to grow your list, this is brilliant. You can hook it up to Mailchimp or your chosen email service, advertise your lead magnet, a form pops up, they enter their email and your email automation begins without them ever having to leave Facebook. If you are daunted by building landing or sign-up thank-you pages, this is a really simple and effective way of getting started with this. I’m definitely going to use this one.

 

 

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5. WRITING YOUR AD COPY

Here are the main components you need to think about, in the order they are displayed in an actual advert:

1. Ad Text
2. Image/Video
3. Headline
4. Link Description
5. Display Link
6. Call to Action: choose from Book Now, Download, Learn More, Shop Now, Sign Up.

1. AD TEXT
I’ve seen more and more long-form ads in my feed lately where you have to click more to read the whole thing. If you need to do that, do it and think about putting two versions out (long and short message) to test the effectiveness.

• If you are going for the long message, make sure what’s visible tells people exactly what they are going to get, or what problem you are going to solve for them if they click. Basically, keep things clear and simple.
• If you are targeting warm/cold traffic, assume people know nothing about your business name and brand. Just get them to click. You can convince them later on.
• Be very specific about the people you are speaking to. Vague adverts don’t work. e.g. Do you want a better website? Vs. Are you scared you might break your website when you update it?

2 & 3. THE IMAGE & THE HEADLINE
I actually think of these as doing the same thing. I usually create a graphic that repeats the headline but in visual form. Some people prefer graphics, some prefer to read the headline. Either way, make sure this states exactly what they are going to get/find if they click.
e.g. The Free Ultimate Website Security Guide

4. THE LINK DESCRIPTION
Keep it snappy and make sure it doesn’t get cut off. Summarize your ad text here.

5. THE DISPLAY LINK
This is actually an url-shortening tool. Even if you have a really long or hard-to-remember link, you can choose how to display it here.

6. THE CALL TO ACTION
Choose the one that makes the most sense in terms of the final outcome and which makes it seem the easiest. If you’re offering a download, then use Download, even if they actually have to sign up first to get the download.

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6. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

We are nearly the end of our Facebook journey. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks clicking on good ads, signing up for all the things, to see what kind of marketing funnels people have got going and my email inbox is groaning. I’ve basically taken one for the team. So, I thought I’d show you some brilliant ads and interesting ads. Here they are, with my notes. Look at them all and you’ll see a pattern…

1. THE ANTI AD
Basically doing everything FB marketers tell you not to do. Brilliant copy and image. Very meta. Made me really look and worth hunting down just to read all the comments. Facebook page here.

2. THE MESSENGER BOT FUNNEL AD
So this isn’t the original ad that I responded to, but if you go visit his website, I bet you’ll get retargeted almost immediately. He invites you to engage via Messenger. It’s a very clever automated sequence and he has his messenger-bot running from the comments of every post. Try it, leave a comment and keep an eye on this guy. Messenger marketing is going to be huge and not just for the big players. Facebook page here.

3. THE WELL CRAFTED NORMAL AD
This is you standard common-or-garden Facebook ad. I bet this converts really well. The message is clear. The image is the visual version of the ad copy at the beginning and relates to the topic, the headline below the image tell you exactly what you’re going to get and the Call to Action (download) let’s you know what happens next. Facebook page here.

4. THE VIDEO SOUND TRICK
Confession, I haven’t actually listened to what this guy has to say, but this caught my eye when I was scrolling Facebook on my phone. He uses captions and the first caption is TAP FOR SOUND. I’m totally stealing that. Facebook page here.

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7. CREATING GREAT GRAPHICS

There seem to be five different approaches to creating the graphic part of an ad. Examples of all below the copy.

1. A VIDEO / PHOTO OF YOURSELF
If you are selling teaching or services, this is pretty effective. When I did my last webinar, I had three versions of the ad running. One showed me & my product (terrible results), one just showed the product (OK results), one showed a still of me talking with the logo overlaid (run away winner). I know that’s not very scientific but my experience is that the personal approach works.

2. THE UNDER-THE-RADAR PETS / FAMILY APPROACH
Pictures of pets and kids are shared more than any kind of Facebook post and receive more attention than any kind of post. I know when I see a child or a pet, I check whose it is, in case I want to/should leave a comment. So this approach aims to get your advert to blend in with people’s feeds and connect with them on a personal level. I see a lot of MLM/network marketers using this tactic.

3. THE PRODUCT SHOT WITH TEXT CALL OUT
If your product is gorgeous / delicious, then this is the one for you. Too much text on an ad is a terrible idea because you can’t read it on a phone, but a few key words. ie. FREE, will work well.

4. THE INFOGRAPHIC / AVATAR
These are the brightly coloured businessy graphics you see rather than actual photos. I’ve got a bit bored of these, probably because I get targeted with lots of marketing tools. Probably very effective for products / software / tools.

5. THE COMPLETELY UNRELATED IMAGE
I’m on the fence with this approach but at the other end of the spectrum, Facebook advertising can be all about pattern disruption. ie. standing out in a crowded feed. I’m seeing lots of completely unrelated but striking images. Some people report great results using this approach. I’m not so sure.

To create ads at the right size, if you drill down into Facebook’s own Ads Guide area, they detail the best sizes for each type of ad. Also, as you create an ad, your are given the dimensions.
In terms of what you use to actually create graphics, Canva have a whole section of pre-designed Facebook ads at the correct sizes which also adhere to the 20% text rule for ads. You just have to swap out the images and text. Handy.

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8. SPLIT TESTING

You done it.  This is my last section and I want to close on the subject of split testing, because it sounds technical and intimidating. Split testing is not just a technique for the big players. Our money is worth the same, so we should be just as careful about making our ad spend as efficient as possible. In its simplest form, split testing (sometimes called AB testing) is running an experiment to see which version of something gets the best results.

When it comes to Facebook, there are two ways you might want to split test. Facebook actually has an official split testing feature, which measures things like best audience, or where your ads are placed. It can’t show two different versions of the same ad to the same audience, which is pretty lame, because that the thing I’m more interested in. However, you can set that up yourself.

1. THE OFFICIAL FACEBOOK SPLIT TESTING FEATURE

In terms of Facebook, you can test one of the following three variables at any one time: Audience, Placement (ie. mobile vs desktop) or Delivery Option. For example, if you choose Audience as the variable, the Facebook Split Testing features divides your audience into random, non-overlapping groups who are shown ad sets with identical creative. But for any variable, Facebook will duplicate your and only change the one variable you choose.

The performance of each ad set is measured according to the campaign objective you set and is then recorded and compared. The best performing ad set wins. After the test is complete, you’ll get a notification and an email containing results, which you can use to guide your ad choices in your next set of ads.

2. UNOFFICIALLY TESTING WHICH AD GRAPHIC IS BETTER

Facebook ads operate on three levels. Remember our diagram?

• The Campaign
• Ad Sets
• Ads

To set up a split test for ad content / graphics, at the Ad Set level, choose the same saved audience or identical targeting for each ad set and then create a different ad for each ad set. That’s it. Run it for a set period of time and then look at your numbers.

Well done, guys. This is a long post but take it step-by-step and you’ll soon be killing with those Facebook ads. Let me know what is and isn’t working for you. The best place to do that is in my private Facebook group. Come and join us.

If that’s got you interested and you’re ready to ramp things up on your Facebook Ads, check out our Smarter Facebook Ads course, which we made specially for small creative businesses just like ours.

Melissa 🙂