How does Facebook advertising work?
Facebook Ads allow you to get your brand seen across the platform in a number of different ways. You can promote your page, posts, your website and your products and services to a highly targeted audience.
You can target Facebook users based on a specific location, demographics, and profile information. Once you have created an ad and chosen your audience, you set a budget and let the ad run. You will then be able to track the results of your campaign.
How to advertise on Facebook
Creating your ad
Here are the steps you will need to take to start setting up your Facebook Ads.
If you already have a Facebook business page, you’ll be able to go directly to the Facebook Ads Manager to create a Facebook ad campaign. If you don’t already have a business page, you will need to create one before you can run any ads.
Step 1: Choose your ad objective
Once you’re in the Business Manager, select the campaigns tabs and click create. Facebook will provide you a list of campaign objectives to choose from based on what you want to get from your ad.
Facebook provides a number of goals for an ad campaign which fall within three categories:
Awareness
These ad types should be used to generate interest in your product or service and will be shown to as many people within your target audience as possible. Objectives include:
- Boost posts
- Promote your page
- Reach people near your business
- Increase brand awareness
- Increase your reach
If you have a small budget, awareness ads are likely to be the most effective type for your business.
Consideration
Within this type of ad, the objectives help to get potential customers thinking about your business and start to look for more information about it. Objectives include:
- Send people to a destination on or off Facebook - drive traffic to your website or a separate landing page
- Encourage app installs
- Raise attendance at an event
- Get video views
- Collect business leads
Conversion
These objectives encourage those who are interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service. Objectives include:
- Increase conversions on your website
- Increase app engagement
- Allow customers to claim an offer
- Promote your products or catalogue
- Drive people to a brick and mortar store
Step 2: Name your campaign
Provide your campaign with a name so that you can track its progress and success. At this point, Facebook will also ask you to declare whether your ad fits into any special categories such as credit or politics.
Your ad campaigns are also made up of ad sets which allow you to create different ads with the same objective but you can choose different targeting methods such as gender, age and location.
Step 3: Set your budget and schedule
Choose the business page you want to promote and then decide on your budget. You can then choose to set a daily or a lifetime budget as well as start and end dates for your campaign.
Setting a schedule is the most efficient way to spend your budget as it will allow you to show your ads when your target audience is most likely to be online. This prevents you from wasting budget on people who are unlikely to convert. However, you’re only able to schedule your ads if you set a lifetime budget for your ads.
What does daily and lifetime budget mean? A daily budget will mean that your ads will only spend so much money within a day and your ads will no longer be shown once this has run out. A lifetime budget will be spread out across the duration of your campaign to show your ads when they’re likely to be most effective.
Step 4: Select your target audience
When selecting your target audience you can either create a specific audience for your ad or you can add a custom audience of people who have already interacted with your business both on and off Facebook. This will require a pixel inserted on your website so that you can track visitors.
You can also create lookalike audiences which will target people who are similar to the people who have already engaged with your business.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make with Facebook Ads is not targeting them correctly. Facebook allows you to target users by:
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
- Connections
- Relationship status
- Language
- Education
- Workplace
- Job title
As you choose your audience demographics, you will see an audience size indicator on the right hand side of the screen which will show you your potential ad reach. This will also show you the estimated number of engagements for what you might be able to achieve with your ad.
Step 5: Choose your ad placements
If you haven’t run Facebook ads before, its easiest to use automatic placement. This means that Facebook will automatically show your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network at the times they’re likely to get the best results.
Once you have used Facebook more and know what works for your brand and your customers, can start placing your ads in more specific locations.
Step 6: Create your ad
The last step is to choose your ad format and then add in the text and images or videos you want to use for your ad. The ad formats available at this stage will be based on the objectives you chose at the beginning.
You can also choose a call to action such as learn more or buy now on your ads to provide users with an indication of what you want them to do next.
Once you’re happy with the way your ad looks, you can set it to go live or schedule it.
Types of Facebook ads
There are a number of Facebook types available including:
- Image ads - these can be created quickly by either boosting an existing post with an image or using an image from your Facebook page.
- Video ads - videos can run in both Facebook’s News Feed and in Stories or you can have them appear as in-stream ads in longer Facebook videos. This a great way to showcase your product or your team.
- Carousel ads - these ads allow you to show up to 10 images or videos of your products or services. You can also include a link for each individual image or video.
- Slideshow ads - this is an easy way to create a short video using a selection of images, text or video clips. These are an easy and effective way to draw the attention of your potential customers.
- Collection ads - these ads are only for mobile devices and provide you with the chance to showcase five images or videos that customers can click on to purchase a product or service.
- Lead ads - only available for mobile devices as they are specifically designed for users to provide their information easily. They’re perfect for collecting newsletter subscriptions, promoting free product trials or allowing customers to ask for more information. This will allow you to feed your sales funnel.
- Dynamic ads - you can promote targeted products to customers who are most likely to be interested in them and make a purchase. This allows you to target people who have visited a product page or placed a product in their cart and abandoned the purchase. This reminds them to complete their purchase and is proven to be effective for driving conversions.
Why should you use Facebook to advertise your business?
There are a huge number of reasons to use Facebook to advertise your business, providing a range of benefits.
- Your customers are on Facebook
Around 44.84 million people in the UK have a Facebook account and use it on a regular basis. That equates to 66% of the UK population!
No matter who your customers are, they are likely to be using Facebook and using it every day. Facebook also owns Messenger and Instagram which is another way that you can access an active and engaged user base.
- You can target specific users
Facebook allows users to share personal information and updates with their network. All of this information helps Facebook to create detailer user profiles that can be used to help you target the right people in the right place.
- Generate brand awareness
It’s likely that you already have business pages set up on Facebook and/or Instagram to allow you to connect with potential and existing customers on social media. Creating adverts through your business page helps to increase brand exposure and grow a following for your business.
- An affordable advertising platform
Advertising your business on Facebook only costs as much as you’re willing to invest. The platform allows you to set your budget and will stop showing your ads when the budget is reached. Remember that the higher your budget, the more users you’re going to reach.
- You can use retargeting
Retargeting allows you to reach even more of the right users and get results for your business. It will allow you to target people who have already visited your site, used your app or have given you their email address. This audience is already familiar with your business which makes them more likely to engage with your business.
- Facebook ads are easy to set up
It’s incredibly easy to set up a Facebook Ad and you will start to see results on the same day. Facebook will take you through the process step-by-step, prompting you to select the type of ad you want to run, the audience you want to target and the budget and timeframe.
Like any other online ads, Facebook ads as a pay per click model but you can also pay by impression, pay per like or pay per action too.
- Provides useful analytics and insights
Facebook shows you the results of all of your campaigns including impressions, click through rate and conversions (depending on the ad type you choose). It will also show you the cost of each of these metrics to provide measurable insights into your ads.
- Facebook ads support your organic activity
Paying to increase the reach of your posts on Facebook can help to boost your organic results too. You should think carefully about the posts you turn into ads to get the most from your budget.
Creating ads allows you to target the audience that you know will find your ads most relevant and are most likely to engage with them. Some of these users will then share, like or comment on the post which makes it visible to more similar users without you having to pay more.
By targeting the relevant people, you will gain page likes from the people who are likely to continue engaging with your page. Once they have engaged with your page once, they will see all of your content organically in their news feed.
- Boosts your SEO strategy
Search engines like to see social signals when ranking your website. Social signals refer to any activity on your social media content including shares, likes and comments. Advertising on Facebook can help to increase these social signals and will have an impact on SEO rankings.
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