If you’re looking to get started with Facebook ads, here are five key factors to keep in mind when planning your advertising strategy.
- Select the right goal for each campaign
- Ensure your tracking is in place with the Pixel and the Conversion API.
- Test different creative and messaging.
- Define and outline your audiences for each campaign
- Monitor and analyze reports in both Ads Manager and your analytics provider (Google Analytics) to check for nuances and opportunities for improving performance.
Select the right goal for your Facebook campaign
When choosing your campaign objective, consider your overall business objective. If you’re looking to simply reach new prospects for your new product launch, the “awareness’ objective would be a great start for your first campaign. This objective typically works well with the use of video creative, so that you can provide informative content about your products or services. However, you don’t want to stop there. Typically, with larger budgets, you have the opportunity to create additional campaigns to reach users after they’ve already engaged with your awareness ads and business page, and target lookalike audiences modeled against users who have already engaged with your ads or business. Planning and outlining your campaign structure, targeting, and goals in a spreadsheet or PowerPoint slides will help you better prepare your marketing campaigns for optimal results.
Audience Targeting
Consider defining your audience for each stage of your customers’ journey. Meaning, before you can start reaching your audiences on social media, you need to know who they are and where they spend their time.
Who are you trying to reach?
Think about what shared attributes your target audience has.
• Where and how to they spend their free time?
• What kind of content interests them?
• What kinds of challenges do they face?
• What brings them relief and joy?
Some of this information can be gained through customer and market research and insights from your organization’s sales and customer service teams. Start with the information you have and gain more through testing along the way.
Where to reach them?
Research the demographic and usage of the different social media platforms to determine which ones have the most potential to reach your target audiences.
Tracking your Campaigns
The more data you track through your funnel, the better results you will get. Many shopping carts easily integrate with the Pixel and Conversion API. Facebook has integration tools in the Events Manager that can help install the Conversion API easily if you use WordPress or Google Tag Manager.
Monitor, Analyze and Scale
Setting campaign level budgets generally works well when scaling larger advertising budgets. The campaign budget optimization (CBO) allows you to add the winning ads and audiences into one campaign and increase your budget by 10-20% every few days. A second option is to set lifetime budgets that will allow you spend a specific amount of budget over the course of your campaign duration. Your strategy will depend on the promotion time, overall budget, and type of business. Fortunately, the “Breakdown” reports in Facebook gives you insights into where you are getting the best results based on age, gender, country, and placements.
Test, Test and Test some more
Testing lets you compare two versions of an ad strategy by changing variables such as ad images, ad text, audience or placement. Testing is and always has been the best way to get better results on Facebook.
With A/B testing, Facebook will show each version of your ad to a segment of your audience and ensure nobody sees both, then determine which version performs best. As you iterate, you will find your best performers.
Resources: HubSpot and Facebook Business Manager.
Leave a Reply