Recently I was interviewed for a magazine article on Facebook Ads. I thought some of my answers might help people considering getting started with Facebook Ads…

How can Facebook ads help my business?

Facebook offers powerful and unique ways to show your adverts to the people who are most likely to care about your business.
With adverts, you can:

Reach people based on location, age, gender, interests and much more.
Use tools to understand how they’re performing and make them even better.

It really depends on what would help your business achieve objectives, so consider that, then work out how Facebook ads can help you achieve that.

What should I promote? (Page, website, tickets, opt in)

Most people we work with are chasing one of a few things:
1/ Increased likes/grow their audience
2/ Increased engagement – more people seeing and interacting/acting on their posts
3/ Website traffic – more people to their website, which, if it is a high converting website should result in leads or sales

Those are the most common ones. But there are many more things you can do with Facebook ads including increasing attendance to your event, downloads of your app, reaching people in your local area (great for people with a physical location) and more.

What’s the trick to Facebook ads?

Gee that’s like asking ‘what’s the trick to building a rocket ship’. There’s kind of quite a few tricks involved! 😉

How much should I spend?

It really depends on what your objectives are. If your budget is limited, you could get away with $200 – $300 a month on boosted posts only, but this will only achieve that one result – increased visibility on your posts. If you want to be more serious about chasing results via Facebook Advertising, we’d recommend $5 – $7 PER OBJECTIVE you want to fulfil. For example if you want more likes, you’d do a campaign just on that allocating $5- $7 a day just on that. If you want to generate more traffic to your website, add another $5-$7 minimum to achieving that. And on it goes.

Do I need a big following for FB ads to work?

Not necessarily. It’s certainly not all about likes these days. It’s more about what results you are getting from Facebook. You can have a very low likes base, yet be driving tons of traffic from your Facebook ads direct to your website and generating enquiries and sales. You can also generate enquiries direct on Facebook via the Lead Forms function. Big followings can look impressive, but they’re certainly not the be all and end all.

How do I know if they are working?

You should check a few things such as:
1/ The results displaying in Facebook Business Manager or Ads Manager. There are various drop downs you can apply to slice and dice the data.
2/ Make sure you have Google Analytics and Conversion tracking in place to measure your results from Facebook ads in Google also (they are always about half as good as Facebook reports!) As an agency we like using Google Tag Manager to throw our Google Analytics tracking and Facebook pixels into to keep it all neat and tidy. This also helps make updates easier.
3/ Taking a look at your Facebook Insights (on your page) can also help you understand your audience and how it may be changing subject to your Facebook ads, depending on what type of ad campaign you are running and over what time period.

What’s your top tips for effective Facebook ads?

Great imagery that will connect with your audience is key. Careful headlines and calls to actions are essential too. If you are sending traffic to a website, you’ll also need a good performing/high converting website to get the maximum results.

When should I start using FB ads?

Once you have established on Facebook, are clear on your objectives and target market, have great imagery, a great offer/hook or general marketing messaging, have downloaded any databases you have access to (for upload to Facebook Business Manager), have a budget allocated and maybe even some video content, you’re good to go!

Anything else we should know about ads?

If you install Facebook pixels on your website you can get really clever with features on Facebook ads including remarketing people who have visited your website in the past 30, 60 or 180 days (depending on the time frame you set), or showing them ads based on what pages of your website they visited (yes really!)

We also love uploading databases clients supply us (acquired scrupulously of course) to Facebook, and then running ad campaigns to them, or lookalike audiences (audiences who look like the database) as then you know you’re getting to the ‘right’ people.

More features are rolling out for Facebook Ads all the time. It’s a great space to play in and certainly keeps you on your toes!

Would you like to get started with Facebook Ads? Contact us!

Looking for training in Facebook Ads! See what is coming up here.