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Facebook Paid Advertising: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide Part Two

Okay, we’re back! After reading part one of our ultimate beginners guide to Facebook paid advertising, you’ve gone away and researched your niche, and now you’ve got a much broader understanding of where to place your ad right? You’ve got a list of keywords, blogs, guru’s, phrases, brands, magazines and movies all related to your product and target market. So what’s next? We make our advert of course!

Putting a Facebook Advert Together – Ad Copy, Images and Congruence

The copy (text), images and other elements that make up your Facebook advert can have a huge effect on how your adverts will perform. You need to think about each element individually in relation to your audience. Step one is to consider whether your audience is a new/targeted audience or a retargeting/remarketing or custom audience.

Easy tiger, an explanation is coming! (Can’t wait? Scroll down to The Facebook Pixel – Remarketing & Custom Audiences Part 2, but make sure you come back here right after!)

If you are introducing your brand or product to a person for the first time, you need to use language that will explain who you are and what you provide. Speak to your potential customer’s pain point, or you could start by asking them a question to grab their attention.

If your audience is a retargeting audience, you don’t need to introduce yourself at all. They already know who you are and what you’re doing, you just need to provide them with a reason to return to your site. Use familiar language types, be more friendly and personable and try to speak directly to your audience in the first person.

When it comes to images, you want to stand out from the crowd. In a newsfeed full of people trying to stand out from the crowd, that can be difficult. Some advertisers like to put a bright border around their adverts to make them stand out in the news feed, like this:  

 

Stand out with your Facebook advertising

 

Others like to use humour to stand out:

Stand out with humour

 

And some like to use emoji’s or emoticons to catch an audience member’s eye:

 

Catch your audiences eye with emoticons

 

These are all good tactics to try and implement, and you will have various levels of success with each depending on who you are targeting, the products you’re promoting and the ad type you are using.

Play around with ad placement but focus mainly on Desktop and Mobile newsfeed as these adverts are the most native to the Facebook platform and look most like normal social content as opposed to advertising. (You can access ad placement from the edit Ad set section.)

 

Focus on desktop & mobile for your Facebook paid advertising placement

 

 

The important thing is to test each advert individually and judge it on individual results. What works for one niche or product might not work for another. It really is a trial and error game at times, but the more you work at your designs the easier they will become to create. I would recommend the use of photoshop to create your image but you can also use bespoke programs like Canva and PicMonkey to get some really nice results.

If you’re worried about image sizes, check out the Facebook Ads Guide – it’ll tell you everything you need to know!

Facebook will also give you an option to create a multiple image ad. Here’s some pretty clever and creative examples of how people have used them creatively.

Play around, don’t be afraid to try new things. You can always turn it off again!

 

Get creative with your Facebook advertiising

 

Dunkin Donuts Facebook ad example

 

So we come to congruence. What does it mean and why should you care?

Well, it means that everything with your Facebook advertising; copy, language, colours, logos, images, landing pages and offers are all along the same theme! But congruence basically comes down to making your audience feel relaxed and comfortable with everything about your ad.

The Facebook Pixel – Remarketing & Custom Audiences Part 2

Okay, back to the pixel again! If you read the whole Digital Marketer post, they may have cleared up some of the confusion. But here it is again, just in case you missed it.

Probably the most powerful audience option in Facebook advertising is remarketing to those who have already visited your site. That’s why the pixel is so important, because it’s going to tell Facebook exactly who has visited your website and how to reach them in a cost effective way. What’s great about retargeting or remarketing is that you don’t have to introduce yourself, service or product to them again. They already know who you are! So how do you get at these people? Build a custom website audience!

Setting up your custom website audience

To set up your custom website audience, click into your ads manager account and click ‘Tools’ again. This time, select the option labeled ‘Audiences’. From here you will be taken to the audience generation screen within Facebook ads manager. Click on ‘Create Audience’, then select ‘Custom Audience’. When prompted, select the ‘Website Traffic’ option.

**PLEASE NOTE** This process will only work if you have your Facebook Pixel correctly installed on your website and it is working!** Check out the screenshots below if you’re a little bit stuck.

 

Setting up your custom website audience

 

Once you’ve made your selection, you can start creating your custom audience. Facebook will start to utilise your custom pixel to generate an audience of people who have visited specific URL’s on your website. All you have to do is tell it which URL’s you want to include or exclude. It’s also good to exclude people who have visited a page such as www.imaginarysite.com/order-complete so you aren’t targeting people who have already bought your product, especially if you are about to offer non-buyers a free gift or discount. You don’t want to annoy people who have already bought now, do you?

Facebook will also let you include past web traffic for the duration which your pixel has been active on your website. So go back in time and target all that lovely traffic!

Once you’ve done this, name your audience and save it (so you can access it when creating an advert later). Your custom audience will now begin to populate. It’s important to remember that it will take time to populate the audience, so don’t panic when Facebook tells you the audience is too small. It does need more than twenty people to generate successfully though. If you haven’t had that number of people visit your website yet, it could be time to try and drive more traffic to your website in other ways first.

Once your audience is populated you can start using it in combination with the different ad types to get back in touch with your previous visitors. Think about your objectives when choosing an ad type and it will practically choose it self. To serve an individual advert to a custom audience, all you have to do is select your custom audience from the ‘custom audience’ box at the top of the targeting section when creating an advert (see the image below).

It’s really that simple!

Now you have everything you need to start speaking with your retargeted audience. Remember, you won’t need to include any ‘interests’ for a custom audience because they already know about you and your site. Leave the age, gender and location wide open (unless you have a specific country in mind) because Facebook already knows who to serve the advert to and where they are.

 

Setting up your custom audiences

 

They know you, you know them

Because you are serving adverts to people who are already familiar with your brand or product, make sure you’re speaking to them in a more friendly or personal manner. It’s good to work on the assumption that the reason they didn’t buy when they first visited your website is because they were busy, instead of because they weren’t interested in the product. So right there in the ad, remind them you’re there, and ask them why they didn’t buy, or why they forgot to complete a purchase. This is a powerful copywriting tool to utilise. It could also be good to give them a 10% discount code or free gift to re-ignite their interest in your website or product.

Important things to note – Compliance, approval and restrictions

Each individual campaign and advert variation you create within the Facebook platform is subject to review before going live. That’s why it’s important to familiarise yourself with Facebook advertising terms and conditions and check them regularly because they tend to change frequently as the platform develops and moves forward.

Facebook prides itself on trying to maintain clean, ethical and well targeted advertising. They want to provide their users with offers and advertising that they will find interesting, useful, non-threatening and non-invasive. So for this reason there are A LOT of rules in terms of Facebook advertising policies and compliance.

Here’s the link again – it’s REALLY important!

It’s not unusual to have a Facebook advertising campaign disapproved for a variety of reasons. Don’t worry, it happens to everyone. And you aren’t going to have your account banned for making simple, honest mistakes with your language, images or targeting. Just don’t try to skirt around the terms and conditions and all will be well!

Here’s a few juicy notes on Facebook advertising rules you might find relatable as a MoreNiche affiliate:

 

  • ALL supplements must be targeted at users aged 18 and over
  • NO before and after pictures on ads or landing pages
  • NO false claims on ads or landing pages
  • NO mention of controlled substances or legal alternatives to a named controlled substance
  • NO restricted products or ingredients
  • NO tobacco related products
  • NO foul, racist, sexist or offensive language or imagery
  • DO NOT call out an individual audience for having undesirable body types, disabilities or health problems e.g “Do you have crows feet and bags under your eyes?” Or “Fix your flabby love handles with these tips”
  • ALL images must be relevant to what is being offered and cannot be intended to shock or offend
  • NO images or text that implies you are in any way endorsed by or affiliated with Facebook itself

 

Please be aware of all of the above. You could endanger both your ad account and fan page if you continue to break Facebook advertising rules and dodge compliance issues.

Adverts and content must adhere to Facebook’s community standards at all times. So dig deep and get reading!

Troubleshooting your Facebook advertising campaigns

There are many things that can go wrong with a social media campaign. And ideally you will want to change one aspect of a campaign at a time so you can see how it affects your desired outcome. So what questions should you be asking yourself if your campaign isn’t going to plan?

Here’s a few things we’ve learned when troubleshooting a campaign.

 

  • Have you left campaigns for 3-5 days to settle and optimise?
  • Are you testing multiple ad variations against one another to determine the most successful advert?
  • Are you solving a problem for people?
  • Are you providing value?
  • Do they need what you are offering?
  • Is your audience too broad?
  • Do you know your niche well enough?
  • Are they seeing the benefit from your ad image and copy?
  • Are you following up on different advertising platforms and with email marketing?
  • Is your ad scent congruent?

 

If you’ve checked off this list, and you still can’t pinpoint what’s going wrong, tear it down and start again.

Digital Marketer tells us that eight out of ten social media campaigns fail to break even or better. So don’t get disheartened. It takes practice, refinement and persistence.

Budgeting and monitoring your ad performance

There’s more to Facebook advertising than just setting up your ad and leaving it to its own devices. Monitoring your ad performance is crucial, as is managing your ad budget carefully. These tips will steer you right.

 

  • Keep Starting Budgets Small – We like to start with small budgets (£5 – £10) to test the ad creative, ad variations, the subject of the ad, the audience itself and their response. You will usually get a good idea of how your ads are performing after 3-5 days. So don’t get deflated if you don’t see your ad performing after 12 hours. Give Facebook some time to optimise the ad and get it in front of enough eyes to make a call.

 

  • Take note of data daily – Checking your ads performance at the same(ish) time every day means you will be getting the most accurate readouts and stats from the Facebook platform.

 

  • Keep an eye on your relevance score – This is super important. The Facebook Relevance score is similar to Google’s quality score in that it directly tells you how your adverts are being received by the audience with 10 being incredibly strong and 1 being terrible. If your ads are hovering at 5 or below, turn that advert off as it could eventually endanger the integrity of your brand page and ad account. You can see your relevance score by clicking through your campaign to each individual advert and scroll along in the metrics provided.

 

  • Keep an eye on CTR, CPC, CPM – These statistics, along with the relevance score can be taken from the ads manager, and are the KPI’s (or key performance indicators) of your advert. Not only is it important to keep an eye on how much money you’re spending but it’s also good to see what value you are getting from money you are spending.

 

  • Beware of frequency – Ad frequency is just that – how frequently your advert has been seen by each audience member on average (this stat can also be accessed in the same place as CTR, CPC, CPM etc). If it’s getting above 2.5 it means you may have burned through your audience and it could be time to shut the ad down. 

 

Facebook Advertising: Go, Go, Go!

Okay, so hopefully you’ve now got a clearer understanding of how Facebook advertising works and how you can get the most out of it. It’s time for you to get out there and start advertising. Please remember to split test everything, and always let the data guide you. I wish you luck on the road to Facebook advertising success!

2 replies on “Facebook Paid Advertising: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide Part Two”

I would like to add that it is almost impossible to get any weight loss ads accepted. Facebook have a huge problem with it..

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