Do you have something to sell but aren’t getting the reach you want?
Facebook Advertising may be the answer!
You can use the techniques within this post to improve your product sales, personal services sales, or even just to drive people to your social media sites.
You’re about to learn how to:
- Drive traffic to your website
- Copy your current audience
- Set up ads
- Optimize your spending
All of this will be summarized from an in-depth LinkedIn Learning course by Megan Adams (2020). Keep reading to learn how Facebook Advertising can improve your reach.
Business Manager
Business manager helps you “organize and manage your business” (Adams, 2020). It’s what helps you present your product or service to your target audience.
What can it do?
- Run & track ads.
- Manage your pages & ad accounts.
- Collaborate with an agency or marketing manager.
If you have multiple accounts, multiple people running your account, or are working with an agency… this is for you!
5 steps to set up your business manager
- Go to www.business.facebook.com and log-in with the account (personal or business) you want to have connected with Business Manager.
- If you don’t already have one, create the business page you want to use in Business Manager.
- Follow the steps to create your business manager account.
- Once you are in, click on Business Settings in the top right corner. This is where you’re going to set up your Business Manager Criteria.
- Scroll down and click Setup Guide to get started with setup.
Under the pages tab, you can add and remove pages you want to control with your Business Manager. Further Up, you will see a tab called People, where you can add others to your account.
Navigating your account
Navigating your account doesn’t need to be difficult! Here are some key areas you’l want to check out.
Homepage: here you will see everything that’s going on with your account. Things like your ads, your pages and performance.
Business Settings: This is where you control things like settings or adding your business partner on your account. You can grant specific permissions.
Business Asset Groups: For managing larger corporations and larger groups to manage specific assets.
Setup Guide: Refer here when you get stuck.
Business Info: snapshot of what’s going on.
Notifications: Choose what and how you want to receive information about you Business Manager account.
Setting up Business Manager may take some time but will be worth it in the long run!
Take time to set up roles and permission. Do this by “inviting” someone you want to add to your account. Once you enter their email address, you can choose what permissions you would like to give them.
Within each team members profile, you can add or remove pages you want them to have access to.
Managing Ad Campaigns
Managing an ad campaign is easy! First, navigate to “Ad Manager” on your screen in the top left corner.
Next, select the green “Create” button, where you’ll be guided through the creating process (Adams, 2020).
You’ll be asked questions as you go along the process. You will start by selecting a marketing objective. Follow the instructions from there. It will allow you to choose where to target your ads and how much your budget is.
Tip: have a clear objective before you create your campaign. If you are trying to sell a product to teens but your ad campaign appears in an area with a large population of retirees, you will not have the conversions you need. I found this great article on how to pin-point your target audience in case you’re still learning – like me!
The final step will be to add images and ad text.
Images are worth 1000 words but if the words in your ad don’t catch your audience’s attention, you won’t be making many conversions.
I wrote a blog post that will help you create great marketing copy so you can get the results you want!
Adams (2020) recommends tracking your results with Facebook Pixel. This will tell you where your clicks come from.
Managing Multiple Campaigns
You could manage each campaign separately… or you can do it in bulk! Chances are, you’re a busy person and this will save you time.
- Go into the “Ad Sets” Tab.
- Select the ads you want to change all at once (location change, etc.)
- Select “edit”.
Scroll down and check out the changes you can make!
You can also download your campaigns to excel to manage externally.
To do this, you may choose to copy and paste the campaigns into excel or by downloading the data with the import/export button beside the green “create” button.
Add tags to your campaigns to help organize and categorize them. You can find this option by selecting a campaign, then hovering over the little dots on the menu. A little setup in the beginning will save you time in the long-run.
Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you can add to your website to track conversions from facebook ads. If you have it connected to someone adding a product to the cart, it will let Facebook know. If you are getting great conversions, Facebook will understand and be able to keep firing the ad that’s working.
Steps to set up Pixel:
- Head to your Ad Manager and select Pixels under the measure and report column.
- Facebook will walk you through the steps once you have landed on the Pixels page.
- Click on Set Up Pixel and this dropdown menu will appear so you can choose how to do your website setup.
If you are totally lost, you can try reaching out to your website developer for help!
Use the “Custom Conversions” tab to tell your Pixel what you want it to track.
Setting up Pixel is complex. If you want to learn more about how to install Pixel on Facebook, I invite you to check out the article I just linked.
Optimizing your Campaign
Use the Custom Conversions tab to give direction to your ad campaign. Your campaign should already appear in this menu. If you haven’t created it, go back a few steps and do that now.
- Click on the name of your Pixel campaign and a menu will pop up. Here you can choose options such as monetary amounts, rules, and activity.
- Click on Create Ad on the top right of the menu screen. This will take you back to the ad manager screen
- Under the Market Objective menu, choose Conversions on the right hand side. This will allow you to edit your campaign and set it up. You may set your budget and schedule as well!
Campaign Analytics
You just created an awesome campaign, but now you want to track its success. This is where Analytics comes in. Check out the Facebook Pixels Overview below.
Click “View Analytics” to see more detail such as dates or how long people are on the website.
Want a custom dashboard, you can do this by expanding the “Create Dashboard” button on the left hand side.
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences tell Facebook where to target your campaign.
Do you have teens? This would be the perfect time for driving schools to send you ads about driving lessons.
Complaining about car troubles on Facebook? What a great time for car dealerships to send you ads about new cars!
These are some examples of YOU being the audience. You want to target the perfect audience for your campaign too.
First, go into Manage Ads, then select the Audiences button listed under assets.
Next, choose Create Audience, then custom audience. Here you can see a menu where you can choose where your audience comes from.
You can choose website sources, which will require Facebook Pixel plug-in to be installed. Or you can choose to upload a customer file. You can also use Facebook sources, including Facebook owned apps like Instagram.
Already have the perfect audience? Create a lookalike audience. This is an audience that has similarities to customers who already visit your site. You can make the audience more or less broad.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to understanding Facebook Audiences.
Advanced Advertising
Once you have the basics down, use advanced advertising features to get even better results. There are three that we will talk about here.
Split Tests
Use Facebook split testing to see which ad works better for your target audience. The idea is to compare ads. You will choose just one variable, such as image or text, then compare the metrics.
To use this feature, create your campaign, then choose the “Create Split Test” button. Within the settings, you will be able to choose whether you want to do a creative split, audience or placement split test. Facebook will do the split for you.
Re-target
Use the advanced advertising features to re-target a customer that already purchased.
Note: You should already have Facebook Pixels installed to use this option.
Pixels is where Facebook will get the information on your previous customers to re-target.
This may be a good strategy if you sell a consumable product, such as cleaning products or food items.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads re-target customers that have already shown interest in a particular product on your site. They are more personal and will include items they have added in their cart or have been looking at on your site.
Conclusion
Megan Adams Conclusion
Advertising is a continually changing landscape. Continue to learn and check the FB developer site frequently. Below are some additional resources from Adams (2020).
Megan Adams (2020) also has a LinkedIn Learning course called Advertising on Facebook, which is the less advanced version of this course.
My Conclusion
Wow, did we ever just learn a lot of information!
If there is one thing I took away from this course, it’s a better understanding of how advertisers use Facebook to target us as customers. I’m sure we have all experienced talking about something, like going on a trip, only to start receiving ads from travel agencies while browsing Facebook.
This is an ad that I found on my Facebook feed. Apparently Facebook thinks I should start a podcast to go along with my blog. What do you think?
I hope you enjoyed learning about Facebook Advertising! Subscribe to my blog for more fun!
References
Adams, M (2020). Advertising on Facebook: Advanced. LinkedIn Learning. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/advertising-on-facebook-advanced-3/next-steps?u=2109516
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