Advertising on Facebook - a guide on how to get started

Facebook advertising campaigns - do you need them? If so, how do you start? Finally, is Facebook's advertising system built to meet your expectations? We will answer these and other questions in this post. We will also advise you on how to start your Facebook advertising adventure and show you step by step how to build an effective campaign.

Currently, Facebook is used by over 29 million people just in our home country which is Poland. This means that in your country also,  your current and potential customers are certainly among them as well, which means that if your business is not on Facebook, you are missing out on communication with them. However, the fanpage itself is not enough to talk about the presentation of your offer. In order to take full advantage of the potential of the described medium, you need to invest in advertising.

Facebook advertising campaigns can bring tangible results, both in terms of building brand awareness and in terms of sales, multiplying the profits for your business. After all, it is another medium through which you can reach the awareness of people belonging to your target groups. And as you can see from the number of users, the potential is very large.

Effective advertising on Facebook - how to do it?

Facebook gives advertisers a lot of tools thanks to which they can create precise target groups as well as advertising creations. Actually, the most important of them is the Facebook pixel. It's a piece of code that you put in your website's code. Thanks to it, it is possible to study the behavior of users visiting it and on this basis create recipient groups on Facebook to which the advertising creation will be directed at the next stages of the campaign.

In practice, it looks like that, for example, we see that users visiting our website throw products into shopping carts, but do not proceed to the initiation of the purchase. What can we do with this information? First, we create a group of non-standard recipients. Then we start building a Facebook campaign based on remarketing. The idea is to reach people who have visited your online store, viewed products, added something to the cart, but abandoned that cart. Thanks to advertising on Facebook, we can remind them of an abandoned cart, which may encourage them to make a purchase. Sounds fun, doesn't it? What can we do more with such users? Facebook gives us the opportunity to find people who are similar to them in its medium. So, they will probably also be interested in the products offered in your e-commerce. Moreover, they can be people who know and visit your competitors' stores! By reaching them with a personalized advertising creation, you have a chance to multiply your profits.

Action strategy based on advertising goals

Where to start building a Facebook campaign? Before going into the tool, you should think about what you want to achieve with the ad. The primary goal is usually one, but there are also micro-goals. For example, for an online store, sales will obviously be the primary goal. But there will also be other assumptions along the way: increasing traffic on the external website, building brand awareness or activating a selected audience. Determining micro-goals is very important, because only 3% of recipients show the willingness to buy in the initial phase of the campaign, the rest are people for whom it still needs to be built. This is done with the help of the already mentioned micro-targets.

How does it look in practice? First, let your potential customers get to know you - so we build brand awareness. Another thing is commitment, i.e. we want the recipients of the ad to be active in our creations. Once they are engaged, we can send them to an external storefront so they can start browsing the products. Then it will be important for us to add them to the basket, then initiate purchases, and finally buy. Each of these steps is important as it creates some kind of relationship with the brand.

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The purpose of the campaign

We build a campaign through the ad manager. The first step is to choose one of the advertising goals that Facebook offers us:

• building brand awareness - here we can choose either brand recognition (so that the ads are remembered by their recipients) or reach (to display ads to a maximum number of people);
  taking action, i.e. activating the target group - here we can choose: traffic (we direct recipients to a specific destination: store, application, etc.), activity (we want to get, for example, comments, reactions or likes), installation of the application, viewing a movie, acquiring contacts or messages (the idea is for recipients to write on Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram Direct);
  conversions (especially useful for the ecommerce industry) - it is about specific activities: including sales from the catalog, traffic in the company (we mean visiting the store when you are nearby) or simply conversions, i.e. we want the recipient something specific made: bought, added to cart, initiated a transaction, etc.

Image source: facebook.com

After selecting your campaign goal, you can move on to creating an ad set.

Creating an ad - sets and creations

At the level of ad sets, we set:

• campaign optimization,
  budget and schedule for displaying ads,
  information on the group of recipients (location, age, gender and detailed targeting options),
  ad placement.

The important note is that one advertising target can have several ad sets. And individual ad sets can have several ad creatives (where the optimal number is 6).

Campaign optimization in the Ad Manager

Depending on your choice of advertising target, you can choose to optimize your ad. The idea is to decide which Facebook users to look for in the learning process and to whom to target your ad. For example, you can choose to show your ad to the people who are most likely to click the link or view the page content. Or, you can choose to have a unique daily reach, which means your ad will be shown to everyone in that group once a day.

Choosing how to optimize is important because it also affects how your ad is billed. You can pay per click or per impression (in this case, it will average the cost of 1000 ad impressions).

Budget and display schedule

For each ad set, you can set either a daily budget or a total budget. In the latter case, you must remember to set an end date for the campaign so that Facebook can spread the budget appropriately. It may also happen that the amount you added is insufficient and you will need to change the amount for the ad to run.

The display schedule is nothing more than the campaign start and end date. You don't have to fill in the second date if your marketing activities will be continuous and you do not plan to have a specific end date for the entire campaign.

Ad targeting

Choosing a wide audience is important, but you must remember that they are not random people. These should be users who are among your potential customers. Facebook allows you to choose them quite precisely. You can choose where they live or are, their age, gender, demographics, and specific behaviors and interests. You can also exclude groups with specific characteristics.

You can also build a custom target audience. Effective ads use this method of targeting because it is very precise. It is possible to create a group of recipients who like your fanpage or have recently been active on your post. You can select users who, for example, watched at least 50% of the video you shared or visited your company website in the last 60 days. There are many possibilities. And this is not the end. A very interesting option is to create groups of similar audiences. These are users similar to those who, for example, have already made a purchase in your store or filled out the form available on your website, etc.

Source: facebook.com

Source: facebook.com

There are a lot of people on Facebook that are similar to your current customers. Thanks to the advertisement, you can reach them and through a dedicated creation encourage them to take specific actions. Each set of ads you create can be targeted at a different audience, thanks to which the campaign will be very extensive, and thus will have a better chance of finding new customers for you. By creating separate sets of ads in the Ad Manager, you will be able to reach a large audience, and thanks to the created division, you will know which users respond best to the entire campaign.

Placement of the ads

Facebook ads are visible in different places. At the ad set level, you too decide where your company's ads will appear. Currently, via the Ads Manager, you can create campaigns simultaneously visible on Facebook and Instagram. Therefore, when it comes to placement, you have a very wide range of options. The following locations are currently available:

• news on Facebook
  Instagram news,
  stories and rolls: Instagram Stories, Facebook stories, Messenger Stories, Instagram rolls,
  Facebook marketplace,
  Facebook's right column,
  Facebook video sources,
  Messenger inbox,
  express articles on Facebook,
  in-stream on Facebook,
  in-stream on Instagram,
  Explore on Instagram tab
  applications and websites: Audience Network,
  Instagram shop,
  ads in the form of an overlay in rolls on Facebook,
  Facebook search results,
  sponsored messages in Messenger.

Source: facebook.com

Each of the above mentioned places is important, but requires proper preparation of the advertising creation, with particular emphasis on graphics.

Advertising creations

The last element of building an advertising campaign on Facebook is preparing a creation that will be displayed to recipients.

Facebook offers great possibilities when it comes to advertising format. The most popular are video creations (it is not only a movie, but also a slide show) and graphic ads: collections and carousels. Especially the latter are often chosen by online stores that operate on the basis of a product catalog. These are dynamic ads, in which the images change depending on the behavior of the recipients (every single click counts here).

Source: facebook.com

When an ad is chosen, the focus must be on the graphics (especially if the ad is not based on the product catalog) and on the content. Regardless of the ad format you choose, you need basic text and a headline. You can also be tempted to add an additional description.

When preparing the ad content at this campaign level, we already know what target audience will see it. Therefore, you can create a dedicated message. Several versions of the body text and headings can be prepared. Facebook itself will decide on their connection and who and in what configuration a given creative will be displayed.

See more: Facebook Ads - dynamic ads for the ecommerce industry?

Below we present examples of advertising creations prepared by us.

Źrodło grafiki: facebook.com

Source: facebook.com

It is a good idea to prepare several ad creatives for each ad set so that they are displayed on a rotation basis, which can largely guarantee good results.

Finally, it's a good idea to build URL parameters for a given ad so that you can see the campaign data in Google Analytics. It is also very important to connect the account pixel, which will allow you to monitor events containing conversions caused by advertising also on Facebook.

Facebook advertising campaigns

Facebook gives its advertisers many possibilities. The interface itself, however, is not very intuitive, and some of the available options are so hidden that if you don't know something like this exists, you might not find it. Switching between the successive layers of the campaign is also problematic, and the current sending of working copies seems quite resistant. Nevertheless, a skillfully constructed advertisement can bring tangible results and tangible profit. After all, Facebook is used by over 29 million users just in Poland alone. So if you thinking about exploring this market in your country you just need to find the right users and show them what you have to offer.

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