How To Get Facebook Ads Up and Running Fast

With 2.7 billion active users, Facebook still offers businesses one of the largest audiences in the world to advertise their products. Around 98.5% of Facebook’s total revenue (nearly $ 70 billion) comes from businesses.

The right Facebook Ads strategy can drive new customers to your site and generate sales, new page likes, and subscribers. Depending on your industry, average conversion rates for Facebook ads range from 1% to more than 14%.

So how do you increase your chances of converting Facebook users into subscribers and paying customers? Create a Facebook Ads strategy that specifically targets the customers looking for your product and services.

Knowing how to set goals, choose precise targets, and place the right ads can significantly increase the chances that your Facebook ad will be seen by your target audience.

Building Your Facebook Ad Campaign

We walk you through the steps you will need to build a successful Facebook Ad campaign. Here are the topics that will be covered.

• What are Facebook Ads?
• A step-by-step guide to running Facebook ads
• How to use landing pages with Facebook ads
• What is the difference between Facebook Ads and sponsored posts?
• 5 different types and examples of Facebook ads

Table of Contents

Here you will find everything you need to know about running Facebook Ads.

What are Facebook Ads?

Facebook Ads are online ads that target people on the basis of their profile information, demographics, behavior, and location.

By advertising to people matching these criteria, you can use Facebook Ads to create ads that target specific products, goals, locations, and many more.

Facebook Ads also offers businesses a multitude of options regarding how their ads are displayed to their audience. Facebook also allows for the use of still images, videos, slide shows, and product collections. Use these to enhance your advertising of products, events, or content to a specific audience.

Once you create a Facebook ad, you also have control over your total budget. You can set how much you are willing to pay for each click and impression on your ad. This gives you full control over how your ad money is spent.

Here’s an example of a Facebook ad with an image:

As you can see, there are several parts of the ad that you can optimize to get your message across.

For example, if you advertise a lead magnet as an e-book, it will include information about the content of the book and how it can help your target audience solve a problem.

Here’s how InfoShare Academy announced one of their e-books, “The 125 Coding Terms for Beginners,” via a Facebook ad:

In creating the ad, InfoShare Academy focuses on highlighting its niche-intensive programming courses for beginners who want to get started in IT.

After creating the e-book and marketing it to IT beginners using Facebook ads, InfoShare Academy attracted 1,200 new contacts in just one month. Each new contact gathered using this ad cost InfoShare Academy around $ 0.35, which means that the entire Facebook ad campaign only cost the company $420.

You can replicate the success of InfoShare by following these simple steps:

A Step-by-Step Guide to Running a Facebook Ads Campaign

Step 1. Familiarize yourself with the Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook Ads Manager is where all the magic happens.

It’s where you set your goals, target audiences, set your advertising budget, and configure your Facebook ads.

The first step in creating a new Facebook ad is to launch a new “campaign.” And to do this, you must first determine what you want to achieve and set a goal for the campaign.

Facebook Ads Manager offers you 11 goals (as shown in the screenshot below) to choose from to optimize your Facebook ads campaign:

Facebook describes these goals as:

• Brand awareness : Used to increase awareness of your services, brand or business.
• Reach: Show your Facebook ads to as many people as possible in your target audience.
• Traffic: Drive people from your Facebook ad to an external link like a blog post or landing page.
• Engagement: Increase engagement, such as comments, likes, and shares on your content.
• App installs : Direct your target audience to a page where they can download your app.
• Video views: Share videos with people who fit your target audience.
• Lead generation: Ads that collect information from people interested in your product, such as newsletter subscriptions.
• Messages: Encourage potential customers in your target audience to communicate with your business.
• Conversions: Get your target audience to take an action, like buying a product or subscribing to your email list.
• Catalog sales: Display images from a catalog (such as clothing from an e-commerce store) to encourage your target audience to make a purchase.
• Store traffic: Encourage your target audience to visit your physical business location.

Once you’ve chosen a goal for your campaign, it’s time to target the right people.

Step 2. Establish your target audience

Once you’ve named your ad campaign, the Facebook Ads Manager will ask you to define who this particular ad will show to.

Here, you will have two main options to choose from:

• Create a new audience
• You used a saved audience (this includes your existing contacts, lookalike audience, custom audience, people who liked your page, or website visitors)

• 

For example, if you want to target people who are already on your email list, choose “ Existing Contacts,” and you’re done.

But if you’re trying to find new people to target, choose “ Audience You Define. This will help you establish the type of audience you are trying to target.

Lookalike Audience Option

The lookalike audience option allows you to create an audience based on the characteristics of your current customers or email subscribers. This way, you will be able to reach people who are most likely to be your target audience.

And as GetResponse’s director of content marketing and partnerships, Michal Leszczynski explains, Lookalike Audiences allow you to target only a specific subset of your audience by providing other characteristics, such as location, gender, age, or interest.

Let’s say you want to run your ads for entrepreneurs who are similar to your current clients, but only for those located in California because that is where you are hosting your next meeting. In this case, all you have to do is select the list or segment that includes the entrepreneurs that should be used for the comparison and add California, United States, as an additional characteristic.

Michal Leszczynski, Director of Content Marketing and Partnerships, GetResponse

Finally, you can target people who already like your Facebook page or have recently visited your website and choose to advertise to them using the “people who like your page” or “website visitors” options.

Next, choose where you want your ads to appear.

Step 3. Choose your Facebook ad placements

Since Facebook has other platforms such as Messenger and Instagram, it gives you the option to advertise on all of them.

You will also need to decide which device you want to target (mobile, desktop, etc.)

and where you want the Facebook ads to be placed (on newsfeeds, Instagram stories, Messenger messages, etc.)

If you’re new to Facebook ads, all of this can be a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, Facebook Ads Manager offers an automatic placements option that you can use, which uses algorithms to place your ads in the best places for your budget allocation.

Facebook also says that choosing automatic placements can make your ads more memorable.

According to Facebook research, the combination of advertising on Facebook and television can be effective for some advertisers. Ads on and off Facebook, on mobile devices and desktop computers, can have a similar effect. ” the company says.

However, if you want to choose where your first ad will be displayed manually, select ‘Edit placements’ and you will be shown this:

Then you will need to choose:

• Device types: Do you want your ads to show on mobile devices? Desktop computers? Or both?
• Operating systems: Do you want only Android users to see your ad? You can make it happen
• Platform: Do you want to stay on Facebook or have your ad show on Instagram, Audience Network or Messenger?
• Placements: Will your ad appear only in the news feed or do you want it in people’s stories and messages as well?

Once you’ve adjusted your target audience, it’s time to set your ad budget.

Step 4. Set your Facebook Ads campaign budget

This is where you set your daily budget and decide how long your ad campaigns will run.

You have two options for setting your budget:

• Total budget: The maximum amount you will spend on the ad campaign before it stops running. If your total budget is $ 5, you will be charged up to $ 5 and then the campaign will stop.
• Daily budget: The amount that will be spent on the campaign on a daily basis.
•  If you choose a daily budget of $ 5, you will be charged up to $ 5 each day the campaign runs. 
• Note that this amount could be slightly exceeded, but generally it would not be too far.

Here’s what your campaign budget settings look like in Facebook Ads Manager:

But if you are using Facebook’s GetResponse ad tool, you can easily create your ad by dragging an image or video and then typing the page text and font:

Once you’ve added your items, you can preview how the ad will look on your potential placements (such as newsfeeds and Instagram stories), and then you’re ready to go!

How to use landing pages with Facebook ads?

Facebook ads can be set with the goal to send an audience to a specific product or site.

One of the best ways to do this is to use specific landing pages for the Facebook ad campaign you launch.

If you send leads to your home page, you risk losing their attention and miss out on the chance to convert the visitors into leads . Studies show that 31% of advertisers lose leads because they send traffic from Facebook ads to their homepage, instead of a landing page optimized to convert visitors to leads.

Specific landing pages for Facebook ads should have all the elements of any successful landing page, such as:

• A clear, compelling and unique selling proposition (USP)
• Eye-catching headlines
• Design elements that are consistent with the Facebook ad.
• High-quality product images / videos / carousels
• A single, of course …

Pro-Tip to Conclude

Facebook allows the tracking of offline conversions this can provide you the information necessary to understand the effectiveness of ads that drive sales offline. Also, you can utilize this tracking information to build custom audiences of the people who engage with your brand offline. This way you can target them even more effectively with future ads.