Facebook for Business: How To Build A Successful Ad Campaign

This is the fourth article from our “Facebook for Business” series and today we will go over the process of setting up your Ads Manager account, tracking and retargeting your website visitors and potential clients. Ready? Here we go!

Facebook does a really great job at gathering and analyzing the tons of information that millions of its users add to their profiles (age, location, marital status, interests, music, books, trips, life events – the list is endless). Ignore this great pool of details and you’re missing on a golden mine for advertising. Facebook is not just one of the most effective social media platforms generating a positive ROI, it’s also quite easy to learn and manage.

So, let’s begin with the main components you need to know and understand before setting up your first Facebook ad.

Ads Manager

If you have never run a Facebook ad before, you’ll have to set up your Ads Manager account and enter all your billing information. You’ll need to go to your Facebook Settings dropdown and select Create Ads.

After you’ve set it up, you can easily access it from the left sidebar of your Facebook newsfeed page, create new campaigns, monitor existing ads and analyze the results of those that are completed.

Custom Audiences

Many businesses overlook the potential of Facebook Ads when it comes to re-marketing. Re-marketing means targeting people who have interacted already with your brand and visited your website but haven’t converted to a customer yet.

To retarget these users, you create Custom Audiences, which optimize the efficiency of your ads and and lead to higher conversion rates.

So, there are a few types of Custom Audiences that you can create – based on your customer lists, website visitors or users that interacted with your app.

To create a custom audience do the following:

• go to your Ads Manager,
• go to the top left navigation area with the 3 lines (burger menu)
• then goo across to the Assets Columns and choose Audiences. This will take you to another window of your Ads Manager.
• There, find the blue button – Create Audience and select Custom Audience.
• A new window will pop up where you’ll have to decide on the type of Custom Audience you want to create.

There are 3 useful custom audiences types for Photographers:

1. Customer File – For Custom Audiences based on Customer Lists – you can use a spreadsheet/ database list that you have; or upload your contacts from your newsletter provider (i.e. MailChimp). In this way, those who haven’t seen your newsletter can still be targeted with the same piece of information via Facebook.

2. Website Traffic, allows you to create lists of people who visited your website or a specific page on your website, let’s say your Product or Pricing page, in the last 5 -30 days (up to 180).

These lists require you to have your Facebook Pixel installed on your website, described in the section below.

One piece of advice would be to keep track of visitors for more recents periods, 15 up to 30 days max, since they still remember your brand and are more likely to respond to your ads.

Choose the option from the drop down menu, it could be all website visitors, from specific pages, those who browse your site the most, or even events (if you have event tracking set up).

Once you’ve chosen the setting, create the audience.

3. Engagement. Create an audience with people who engaged with your content on Facebook or Instagram

You will have a few options:

• Create a list with people who watched your video(s) (at least 3 or 10 seconds, or at 25, 50, 75 and 95% of your video).
• Create a list of people who opened or completed your form (if you did Lead Ads)
• Create a list of people who opened your collection ads or Canvas
• Create a list of people who engaged with your Facebook page.

You can do a few combinations here, for example build a list with those who engaged with any post or ad, or visited your page or choose the default option:

People who meet any of the criteria:

Create a list with people who engaged with your Instagram business profile:

Create a list with people who interacted with your Event(s), responded interested or going, who have visited the event page, etc:

The maximum time people will stay in engagement audiences is 365 days, except for the audiences with lead forms – a total of 90 days.

These are the most useful ways to create custom audiences if you have a website and you engage with clients and potential clients on social media.

Lookalike Audiences

Another great feature created by Facebook is Lookalike Audiences. They’re composed out of users who “look alike” your Custom Audience pool of people – with similar interests, pages liked, groups joined, etc.

This is the second most efficient type of advertising you can do on Facebook, since you’re targeting people who are very similar to your existing customers and fans.

To created a Lookalike Audience, go to Tools -> Audiences -> Create Audience and choose Lookalike Audience.
In the pop-up window, in the Source sections you’ll be able to choose one of the Custom Audiences that you’ve created already, and based on that create a Lookalike pool. For example, you chose as source your Facebook Fan Page (Flothemes in our case) and it automatically suggests you the country where the majority of your followers are.

Enter any country / regions you wish to target (but just one at a time) and choose the Audience size based on how similar you want them to be. Highly suggested is to keep this at 1-2%, for more accuracy and relevance. 

Facebook Pixel

As mentioned earlier, Facebook has this amazing tool which helps you create Custom Audiences by tracking your users, called Pixel. This is by far, the most effective and useful feature created by Facebook for advertising.

Basically, it’s a piece of code generated by Facebook, which you install on your website to track people who visit it and perform certain actions (make a purchase, sing up for a newsletter, etc). If you want to track specific events, you’ll need to set up event tracking via the pixel manager.

This will let you follow users that accessed your website through your Facebook Ads, and register their exact actions. Did they buy a product? Did they navigate through your portfolio? This helps evaluate the success of your ads (judging not by reach, but by actual conversions), get a clear idea on your ROI and future strategy.

In the following blog post we’ll describe the types of ads you can run via Facebook, which ones are more or less effective and why. If you’ve missed the first three parts from the Facebook for Business series – take a look here: Part I – Why Consider It?, Part II – How to get started and Part III – Content Management.

Flothemes,
Empowering You.