Facebook Ads
How can you use the Facebook Ads platform to drive traffic to your Fan Page and website? How can you maximize the use of this platform for the potential of your business?
Ad Campaign Setup and Bidding Strategies
Paying for Your Ads
One of the most important things you need to know is that, you’re going to have to pay for your ads. When paying for your ads, you have two options in doing it.
Payment methods:
Credit Card
PayPal
Charges deducted daily
Facebook will be charging your account daily. So it is very important that you keep on top of your optimization and that you’re sure that you’re earning enough money from your ads spend. So that you just don’t go and waste money each day without getting any kind of return for it. Tracking is going to be very important as you will be charged daily for your ads.
Watch your cash flow
You want to make sure you are watching your cash flow. It’s really important because you can spend a lot very quickly. You can get a lot of traffic and Blow your budget very quickly if you’re not watching yourself and watching your impressions and putting a really short limit on your account.
Step By Step Ad Creation and Bidding Strategies
Anybody can go in and create a Facebook Ad and it doesn’t take a course to know how to do it. But the simple tricks and steps can save you a fortune in ad clicks.
Ad Creation
Choose your Product/Service
If you have your own product, that’s fantastic. If you’re going to be an affiliate or a sales person for someone else’s product, that’s good too. But at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you have something to sell or something to promote. If you’re just sending traffic to your Fan Page or to just build a lot of fans, please understand that you want to have a way to monetize that in the future. Create a plan before you start Facebook Ads because it’s expensive and unless you have a real monetization plan in mind that you can track and measure your results, you’re just going to end up spending a lot of money and a bunch of fans and then what are you going to do with them. So it is important that you have a plan. Choose your product, service or your affiliate.
Choose an Image
When you’re choosing an image, it is important to choose something that is relevant to your product but also interesting. The idea of your image is going to be to grab their attention off the page. Understanding that when people are on Facebook, they are playing Mafia Wars and looking at the photos of their family and friends, and really, what kind of image is going to grab their attention and make them look at your ad and click on it?
Write a Headline
About 75% of the success or failure of your ad is in your image. The Headline is the next most important aspect of your ad. You want a catchy headline. And the best simple tip on writing your headline is to ask them a question. When you ask someone a question and they read it, inside their head they are already answering it. SO it means you’ve got them engaged. Question headlines work very well.
Write your Ad Copy
One trick in writing your Ad Copy is writing five short sentences. It is simply what you so and what benefits it has for the people who are reading your ad. Use five very short sentences that are two to four words each. Five sentences is really great for people who are just starting out.
Advertise on Facebook Page
The “Advertise on Facebook” is a page that Facebook made to give us the option to preview our ad before we have to set it live. You can use this to your advantage in a number of ways
Destination URL
First, you have to add your destination URL. If it’s possible, you can set up a unique landing page only for your Facebook ads. So you can track with Google analytics, all of the people who are coming there are coming from your Facebook Ad, and you can track what they do when they land on that page. So that’s a really great way to track what results you’re getting.
You can also advertise something that you have on Facebook, which means advertising a group, an event, or Facebook Page. So if you want to send traffic on your Facebook Page click on the “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. It is appears with a blue link within the page under the “Suggest an Ad” button.
Title
You already know that the best way for a title is to ask them questions. You can ask a very simple question.
Body Text
This is where you are going to enter your five sentences Ad Copy. If your reader is expecting to enter their email or if they are expecting to pay cash money, or expecting to enter their PayPal details, it really helps you pre qualify them and you don’t get a whole bunch of tire kickers clicking your Ad. So if you’re gonna charge them on the next page, it is highly recommended to say that in the Ad. So that the people who click it are ready to pay so you don’t get a whole bunch of clicks but people only have a look and investigating.
One trick that you may do within the ad section is to create a variety of ads and take screen shots of these ads and split test them. You can put them in a word doc and ask the people you work with, your family members, or friends to choose the ad that they like the most. You will be surprised to see the results. The results may not be the same ad that you may have chosen. This gives you the idea of which ad may or may not do well on Facebook. This way you don’t have to submit the ad and pay for clicks to see the results.
Choose Your Targeting
Targeting is the key and this is one of the big benefits to Facebook Ads over any other PPC Ad platform. Choosing your targeting is really up to you. You can decide how targeted you want to get and you’ve got to be creative with it.
Location
argeting the United States is going to cost you more money than targeting just about any other country in the world. If you’re from the United States, United States will automatically come as default. If you’re from Australia, Australia will come as default. You can simply click the little “x” and it will remove your country if you want to.
Understand that if you want to target the people from the United States, you will get a huge volume but you will also pay a lot more for your clicks. So if you’re just testing a couple of things, it might be an idea that you just choose other countries like Australia, UK, New Zealand other than United States especially if your offers are available on those countries. You will not be paying all of those much money as those expensive states from the United States.
It is also recommended that you setup different campaigns for the United States and everywhere else. You can create a separate campaign for each country if you want to if that’s how specific you want to get.
Demographics
You can choose whatever age range you want. If you need an exact age match, then you can choose an exact match for age and gender. You can be as specific as you want.
Likes and Interests
This is really cool because this is where you can start typing in things that the people that you are targeting also like. You can not specifically target Fan Pages that you don’t own. But you can start typing in names of famous people or the names of the owners of those Fan Pages. If they’re indexed by Facebook, they’ll show up here. So if you want to target people who like specific things that are also related to your products or services, you can specifically target those people by just getting creative.
Connections on Facebook
Target users who are connected to – you can target users who are connected to your Fan Page if you want to give them offers or special service. They are only for people who are already fans of your Fan Page.
Target users who are not already connected to – this is really great to use if you are advertising to your Fan Page and your objective for your ad is to get more fans for your Fan Page. Enter the name of your Fan Page in the box. If you want more fans, then don’t let this ad show up infront of your current fans.
Friends of connection
In here, you can target people who are friends of your current fans. So if you set this up and target people whose friends are connected to your Fan Page people are more likely to click and join the Fan Page if their friends are already fan of it. This is very powerful and you can use this to your advantage.
Advanced Demographics
Birthday- You can also target people on their birthdays if you have a special birthday offer. Not so many people are using this. So if you have a cool idea, you can look into that and it will definitely get people’s attention.
Interested In – You can also target people based on their sexual preferences.
Relationship – You can target people based on their marital or relationship status. Depending on your product or service, this may be appropriate to you.
Languages – If you want to target people who speak different languages, especially of your product is available to other countries, it’s a great market because clicks are so cheap especially on non-English speaking countries. This is a great option for you to use.
Name your Campaign
It is necessary for you to name your campaign.
Campaign Naming Tips
Create a code you understand – it will help you stay organized and see results at a glance. When you create your campaign, you just don’t name it because later on you’re going to have all these different campaigns and you’re not going to understand which one’s which.
In creating code you may want to include Product Initials, Age and Gender, Targeting, and Country. This is a really cool tip and this will help you organize campaigns at a glance.
Ad Bidding Strategies
Set your campaign budget low for testing.
Start with $15-$20 per day for campaign and set a very low campaign budget for testing because you’re just not sure how this is gonna go. You’re going to get a flood of traffic and it will greatly affect your budget.
Choose CPC (Cost per Click)
Choose CPC bidding. This is what’s working on Facebook right now. CPC is the most effective way to do it.
Bid well below whatever Facebook suggests. Bid for about 25 to 30 cents per click.
Facebook is going t warn you that you should bid to what they recommend but if you follow this tip, you will find yourself saving a dollar or more per click and it is very powerful. You will need to increase your bid later on.
You want testing to be slow and steady to make sure you are converting well and make sure that you are getting enough money and then you can ramp it up from there.
Why not CPM? (Cost Per Impression)
That’s for paying Facebook just to show your ad to people. You are not paying for every single click but you’re just paying them to show it. CPM ads do get preference and they are shown more often. But it is recommended that you stick with CPC because the tracking is so much better and with CPM they’re just going to show your ad everywhere and you’re not sure if you’re going to get any clicks from it.
This is great for brand awareness and if you don’t actually care if people click on your ad or not. This is if you just want your name or your launch to be everywhere and if you want it to be infront of people.
You can start with CPC bidding and when you reach a CTR of over 0.20% then you can switch to CPM. This is more advanced and it is not recommended to use CPM unless you have a rate of over 0.20%.
Submit your Ad and Wait for Approval
Sometimes your ad will get approved immediately but other times you could wait up to 48 hours. What you can do while waiting is you can pause the campaign because when Facebook Approves it you could be asleep and they could approve it and all of a sudden it’ll be showing. You don’t want your ad to be showing when most of the people are asleep. It may not be an optimal time of the day for you so you want to make sure that you can control it. So you can go in and pause the campaign and the wait for the next day and if it’s approved, you can set the ad live and see what’s going to happen live.
Ad Approval Process
Ad approval process can take a while. Understand that this is a manual review process. Real people are looking at your ad and it usually takes 2-48 hours in sometimes even longer in some cases. About 30% of ads are disapproved so it doesn’t necessarily reflect on you or your ad. The best thing you can do is resubmit it. Just make sure you are following their guidelines and if there is nothing wrong, you can just resubmit your ad for approval. If you get disapproved twice, facebook tells you why. You need to pay attention to that and make sure you get it right the next time you make some changes.
While waiting…
- You can keep creating new ads. Create at least 3 new ads.
- Keep them in the same campaign.
- Keep the same headline and ad copy.
- Change the image.
So the best thing you can do is create 3 new ads, pause the campaign and wait for them to be approved. Once they’re approved, you can set them live.
