FACEBOOK ADVERTISING STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg , along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin , Andrew McCollum , Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes . It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon , Apple, and Google.





Not only do Facebook have the biggest user base, with over 2 billion monthly active users, but they also seem to make plenty of money with their advertising system.
Nearly all social media marketers consider Facebook advertising the most effective paid option out of all social networks, according to study.
Facebook advertising simply means paying to place promotions and product offers in the news feed of a specific, targeted audience on Facebook.
These Ads can appear in News Feed on desktop, News Feed on mobile, and in the right column of Facebook on desktop.
Facebook ads are targeted to users based on their location, demographic, and profile information. Many of these options are only available on Facebook. After creating an ad, you set a budget and bid for each click or thousand impressions that your ad will receive. Users then see your ads in the sidebar on Facebook.
Most people do fail (especially newbies) in making an engaging Facebook ads that converts.
This is mostly because they don’t understand their target audience, so they place ads in the news feed of the wrong people.
On this article I will be explaining how to create an engaging Facebook ads that converts.
I’m going to walk you through setting up your first campaign without breaking a sweat.
Even if you’re a complete newbie, after reading this guide, you’ll have a complete grasp of the Facebook ads.

HOW DO YOU RECOGNIZE A FACEBOOK AD?
· You will see a “Sponsored” tag right underneath the name of the page that is advertising to you.
· There’s also a unique “Like Page” button, in the top right corner, that’s never visible on regular posts.


· Finally, unlike regular news feed items, all Facebook ads have a call-to-action (also called a CTA), in the bottom right corner, which might say one of the following:

Learn More
Sign Up
Download
Contact Us
Shop Now
Book Now
Watch More
Apply Now

Facebook has also extended its possibilities for advertising to Instagram.
Instagram advertising was opened to big brands at first, but now everyone can use it.
Instagram ads are also placed inside the app’s natural feed, which relies on the same principle as native Facebook ads.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

· How to Create a fan page
· How to Setup Your First Facebook Ad Campaign
· How to Create a Realistic Budget
· How to Create your first campaign
· How to Create your ad set
· How to Create your first ad
· How to Create 2 more ads for A/B testing
· How to Kill the ads that don’t work
· How to Increase your budget
· How to Expand your reach with custom audiences; lookalike audiences

HOW TO CREATE A FAN PAGE

If you don’t already have a fan page, you must create one. Facebook ads can only be attached to businesses, never individuals.
Go to the create page site and pick an option.
Next, you have to enter some information about your page, a website and what you want the page name to be, inside Facebook.
Then set a profile picture.
Add a cover and create a call-to-action.
Under interests, select a few likes that they share with you or your brand. These can also be other influencers in your industry or products or companies.
Once you’ve saved, you’ll be redirected to your page.
That’s it! You’re all set and ready to go and start running Facebook ads!

HOW TO SETUP YOUR FIRST FACEBOOK AD CAMPAIGN.

Facebook gives you two ad management tools that we just discussed:
Facebook Ads Manager
Power Editor

The Ads Manager, which is the standard dashboard that you get when creating your ad account.
The Power Editor just a different way of organizing your ads and gives you a few more options to customize your advertising.

Instagram ads, for example, can only be run using the Power Editor.

The Ads Manager will let you do everything we’re going to talk about today, including:
· Setting up new campaigns
· Create new ads for each of these
· Manage how much you’re spending on each ad
· You can create different audiences to target
· Optimize, enhance, or improve these campaigns.

TYPES OF CAMPAIGNS

Awareness:
Facebook Brand awareness optimization is designed to help advertisers find audiences around you which are most likely to convert.
If you want to make your business known to more people, this is best for you.
Consideration : Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it
Conversions: Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service

To keep this article short you will have to read about the remaining objectives on Facebook and choose the one that suits you most.

HOW TO CREATE A REALISTIC BUDGET

You need to have a few campaigns running, simultaneously, to convert strangers into loyal customers.
But… how are you supposed to come up with a budget for something like this? What is a ‘reasonable’ amount to spend? Especially if you’ve never run a single Facebook ad before?!
Don't worry, we got you covered.
Let’s start with a few other questions, first:
· How much is your product or service?
· How many do you want to sell?
· What’s your conversion rate already?

For example, let’s say:
Product price: $100
You want to sell: 10
Conversion rate: 1%
Now a little basic math can help us figure out that in order to make $1,000, off of 10 sales with a 1% conversion rate, you’re going to need 1,000 clicks on your ad.
So… how much is it going to cost to get those 1,000 clicks? That’s what you want to figure out here.

Because it will tell you how much to set aside for a Daily budget. This is the max number you want to spend each day to attain your goal. It’s just a small piece of the overall Lifetime budget for the entire campaign.
After defining budgets, you can select an objective so that Facebook will automatically help you do a better job of reaching your goals. For example, you can select either Conversions or Link clicks as your Ad Delivery Optimization method to get the best results.
That’s how you determine what you should be spending in total. Here’s how to adjust the incremental bids (like how much you spend per click) in order to get the most bang for your buck.
Your two main bidding options are manual and automatic.
Manual means you can control the limits for how much you spend. But automatic is good when you have no prior experience of what an ‘acceptable’ limit should be.

The other important point here is that your Cost Per Click isn’t the primary metric you should be watching. Instead, the Cost Per Action (or Lead or Acquisition) is when you’re driving product or service sales. So by selecting Automatic bidding, it will help adjust things for you to maximize sales.

You can also use Delivery Schedules to adjust how much you’re spending by day of the week.
This means you can stop your ads over the weekend if your office is only open on business days only.
After running campaigns for a few weeks, you might also notice that certain days or times generate the best results for the least amount of money. So you can use this option to control how and when your ads are shown throughout the course of the week.
All these will make more sense when you start your first campaign.

CREATE YOUR FIRST CAMPAIGN

To get started, go to the top right of your fan page, click promote and then select ‘Go to Ads Manager.’
You will then be redirected to your dashboard that I showed you earlier, where you should click ‘Create Campaign.
Then, you can choose your objective.
Now, enter the link to your website. If you’re promoting a product, this would be the sales page. If you’re promoting an event, make it the sign up page.
On to the next step!


CREATE YOUR AD SET

You’ll then be taken to the ad set creation section, where you first must decide on your target audience.
This part is kinda tricky depending on how big or small your pocket size is.
For example, 10,000 might be an OK audience size if you have a tiny budget but if you’ve got a healthy budget, you can go up to between 500,000 and a million.

You’ll need enough people to allow Facebook’s database to help optimize your campaigns.
Never start a campaign with audience over 10million or else you’ll completely squander your budget on people who have zero interest in what you’re talking about.
So start small. You can always expand later.
Then you will be required to pick a few specific cities in the countries that you want to target (even better to focus on one country) and narrow down the age span to about 10 years.
After selecting a few interests and behaviors, your audience will reduce making it more targeted.
Next up, you need to set a budget.
You want to start small, remember? This is just an experiment.
So, set your daily budget to $5 and fix the end date for the ad campaign (3 days minimum).
Under ‘Optimize For,’ set it to what you want to pay for (link clicks, purchase etc).

For ‘Ad Scheduling,’ you have to leave it set to running ads all of the time, since your campaign has a fixed start and end date.

CREATE YOUR FIRST AD

Now, you get to choose the layout of your ad and what content to put in it.
Simplicity is key when you’re first starting out. You don’t want to get too fancy, too early, and bogged down in all of the details.
So Keep it simple.
So let’s start with a single image ad first.
Stay with a single image and then choose ‘Select Images.’
You can then choose to upload your own picture or browse free stock images. Always use your own pictures.

One more thing..
Facebook used to have a ‘20%’ rule. Basically, their system wouldn’t allow any image ad that is over 20% covered with text.
Once you’ve cropped the image and formatted it correctly, you’ll see a simple preview of your ad.
Now you need to write the copy for your ad and choose your CTA button. Your Facebook fan page will be automatically connected (unless you have multiple ones).
Headline: This is easy. Make sure that your headline grabs your reader’s attention.
HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
The trick is to tap into the underlying primal motivations that move people. Physically, emotionally, and literally. The ones that get people to sit up and take notice. To stop what they’re doing and pay attention.
When you’re done, hit place order (don’t worry, nothing will happen, just yet).
Your ad is now in approval mode. You will get a Facebook notification, once it’s approved.
You’ll then be redirected to your dashboard. While you’re waiting for your ad to be approved, you should do a few more things.
First, turn off your ad set, again.
Then, go to ‘Edit Ad Set,’ (the button will show up right next to your ad set name).
A tab will slide in from the right side, which, as a side note, shows you how many people your campaign will likely reach each day this gives you a good idea of what to expect.
Scroll all the way down and uncheck everything, except ‘Desktop News Feed.’
The reason is that we only want one ad in one channel, because otherwise, you won’t be able to analyze the results.

CREATE 2 MORE ADS FOR A/B TESTING

Let me tell you a pure truth.
I have no idea what ad will perform best at this point. Which means the only way to still create a profitable ad campaign is to test a few different options and see which one works.
So now let’s take the same ad we just created, but give it a few minor tweaks in order to run a split test. The ads will mostly be the same, so there’s not even a ton of work involved. You can get a split test up-and-running within minutes after reading this next part.
Go to your campaign and click on the name of the ad set.
You’ll then be taken inside of the ad set, where your first ad lives.

Check the box in front of your ad and click on ‘Create Similar Ad
You’ll be taken to a new ad screen.
Facebook already hints that we should tweak something. However, don’t change up too much…
You should actually just change one thing.
The only way for you to determine what works and what doesn’t, is by changing one single element, from ad to ad.
You'll need to give your ad campaigns enough time to get some meaningful results.
As discussed earlier, Facebook’s platform needs a little time to help you optimize (or self-correct). So that means your performance can actually start to improve after a few days.
A huge mistake many new advertisers make is pulling the plug too early.
Results don’t look promising after only a few hours or a day. People will get nervous because it looks like an ad isn’t taking off. So they kill the campaign before it’s had a chance to start working properly.

KILL THE ADS THAT DON’T WORK

Once you have some data on which ad works the best, turn off the other two. Run with the best performing ad until it stops working.


INCREASE YOUR BUDGET (THIS IS OPTIONAL AND NOT ADVISABLE FOR NEWBIES)

Before you dump more money into the ads, make sure that you’re converting on the back end!
For example, let’s say you’re able to generate a new customer who pays you $100 for only $10. That’s great!
It’s so great, in fact, that you can probably even afford to spend a little more to make sure that you’re getting each and every customer you deserve.
So why not increase your bids a little bit?!

EXPAND YOUR REACH WITH CUSTOM & LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES

So far we’ve mostly focused on creating a single campaign for a new audience.
But we can also go into a little detail here so you know what’s coming up next when you get one successful ad campaign off the ground.

Custom and lookalike audiences are a great way to increase the detail of your ad targeting (custom audience) and expand your target audience reach (lookalike audience) to maximize your ad campaign results.
Why?
This is because ad campaigns which target custom audiences get rewarded by Facebook’s own Relevance Score. This is a measurement they use to determine how well your ad is going to fit those people.
The higher the Relevance Score, the better click-through rates you can expect, and the lower cost per clicks, too.
A lookalike audience will let you ‘clone’ that awesome audience so that Facebook will try to find more people just like them. You can select a country and percentage (like 1%, 5%, or 10%) to control how tightly defined you want that audience to be.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, this guide gives you everything that you need to get started today, in less than an hour.

Hope it was helpful?

Source

https://www.haychsblog.com/2019/05/facebook-advertising-step-by-step-guide.html?m=1

Okay.

Good write up. If you'd like to learn about advertising in general (not only Facebook), so you can understand it from a wider view, you can do so here: https://ekene.substack.com/p/advertising?r=611hj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy