For a social media marketer, it is needless to say about the importance of advertising on Facebook. Citing the huge statistics of Facebook, a marketer can easily understand why investing on Facebook ads matters his business.
For beginners, the ad set up process may seem daunting. For them, this is a perfect guide for making a better advertising campaign on Facebook.
Why Advertising on Facebook?
There are three primary reasons why one must jump on to Facebook advertising:
• Targeted reach
• Deep engagement
• Proven results
Targeted Reach:
We know that there are plenty of social networks serving on the internet. There are some networks which started even before Facebook. But no network is in the parallel with Facebook to reach your targeted users at the right moment.A whopping 1.71 billion population of Facebook (as of the Q2 ‘16 stats of facebook) allures us. The mobile user count of facebook is over one billion. And it’s amazing that Facebook boasts more than one billion people using it every day.
When you can see almost a quarter of the global population in a single community, what else can be better than that for you?
Deep Engagement
As per the statistics, people spend around 1 out of 5 minutes on mobile using Facebook or Instagram (an acquisition of Facebook). With this fact, a marketer can understand what kind of engagement his business can get on Facebook.Proven Results:
Facebook works a lot on helping businesses getting great results for their marketing on its platform. It focuses on making your posts reach the right users at the right time. One can realize the fact when one comes across the filters used for targeting the audience while making a campaign. You can see the success stories of hundreds of businesses who leveraged the advertising features of Facebook to get success.You can have extreme reach, and deep engagement and there are many success stories to inspire. I think these are enough to convince you. So now, let us see how you can make an ad campaign on facebook for your business.
Creating an Ad Campaign on Facebook:
Before starting your ad campaign, you have to identify your objective clearly. You may want to increase the brand awareness of your business, increase the traffic for your blog or website, promote your offers and coupons or generate leads for your business. So the first step in making an ad campaign isI. Objective:
Your objectives are classified into three types such as Awareness, Consideration and Conversion advertising campaigns.
Awareness Campaign:
These campaigns help you creating awareness about your business or services. You can boost the reach of your posts, promote your page, reach the people located near your business or increase the brand awareness of your business.
Consideration Campaign:
These kind of campaigns help you in making the people considering your services. For instance, you can persuade people to visit your website, install your app, or to attend an event you are organizing or you can collect leads for your business.
Conversion Campaign:
These ad campaigns help you increasing the conversions for your business. You can increase the engagement on your apps and offer your offers to your customers. All these can be happened easily with the help of these conversion campaigns.
As shown in the figure above, you have to select your objective among the all. Then, give a name for your campaign and click on Create Ad Account.
II. Advert Account:
Here in this step, you have to give information such as the account country, currency, time zone and the advert account name. Once you furnished all these basic details, click on Continue.III. Advert Set
Here in this step, you have to determine your targeted audience, placement of your ads, and the budget and schedule.a. Audience:
If you have already made a campaign and set custom audience list, you can use the same custom audience list for the current campaign. If not, you can target audience by location, age, gender, language, interests and connection with your business. When setting the targeted location, you can see several options like people live in the location, people visited the location etc.
Once you are done with this all, you can save this custom audience list for further use. On the right-side of the page, you can see the summary of the details that you furnished and an estimated number of potential users that your ads can reach.
b. Placements:
You can define where your ads should be placed. You may want to show your ads on the news feed of mobile users or desktop users, or you want to show your ads on instagram. You can specify your priorities here. You can also target your users based on the mobile platform they use like android or iOS.
If you have any categories of users that you don’t want to show your ads to, you can mention those categories too.
c. Budget:
This is one of the important aspects of setting a campaign. Here we have to analyze the opportunities properly. Facebook gives you two options for your budget. You can make a daily budget or a life-time budget. Based on the campaign and your objective, you can decide your budget. However, the actual amount you spend may vary at last.
I usually suggest you go with daily budget. Because, there would be chance of analyzing your ad performance and monitoring the budget accordingly. There is a minimum limit for daily budget. For example, it is 40 INR for Indian currency.
You can schedule your ads continuously from the start date or you can schedule them on some specific dates.
Facebook gives you a choice to optimize the audience. If you want to get more clicks, you can tell Facebook to deliver them to such people. If you choose impressions, Facebook will deliver the ads to the people who are likely to make an impression.
You can set automatic bid or manual bid. If you opt for automatic bid, facebook will determine the right amount of budget that your ads worth. Else you can set the bid amount by your own. If check the manual bid option, you can give the bid amount that you want to pay for a click or an impression.
Now, you can select when you want to be charged. If you set optimization for advert delivery to impressions or daily unique reach, you will be charged as per the budget for every 1000 impressions. But if you optimize it for clicks, you can have one more choice i.e Cost per Click. I usually suggest you this CPC especially for SMBs. Because clicks get you more engagement when compared to other actions. So, you can get the better results for your business through your campaigns.
IV. Advert Creatives:
This is the last stage of the ad campaign setting process. In this stage, you are going to set the content and links for your ads. For the campaign, you can use already existed post or can create a new post.a. Format:
Generally, we have two formats of ads on Facebook or Instagram. You can create a static media ad or a carousel ad. This purely depends on the theme of the ad. To explain more and clearly, it is better to use the carousel ad format.
b. Media:
You can add the media files to the ad. Click on the type of media, images, slideshow or video.
For Images: the recommended dimensions of image is 1200 x 628 pixels. For a better view, keep the aspect ration as 1.91:1. It would be great if you use some overlaid text on the image.
For Slideshows: you can upload 3 to 7 images. Click on the create slideshow, and you can upload the images or videos for your slideshow. There, you can set the aspect ratio, duration of the image and other effects.
For Videos: mp4 or MOV are the recommended formats. The maximum length of the video for Facebook is 60 minutes whereas for Instagram it is 60 seconds and the maximum size of the video is 2.3 GB for both the platforms.
c. Pages and Links:
Here in this part, you can add an existed Facebook page or Instagram account. Here itself you can give the URL of the website, headline of the advert, text and a Call-to-Action. In the advanced options, you can give the news feed link description, display link, and the parameters for the URL. Below all these, you can see the pixel tracking section where you can generate a pixel cod.
You can place this pixel code in your website and track the conversions and engagement on the website. Click on the create pixel button and give the pixel name. You can get the code installed right at the moment or sent to your email.
At the right side of the page, you can see the preview of the advert that you prepared.
Once you are done with all the things, you can review the entire order. Later, you can place the order. Once you placed your order, it will go for a review by Facebook.
You can see all the status and other statistics of your campaigns on the dashboard of your ads manager.
Bonus infographic:
12 Tips On How To Build Retail Campaigns On Facebook
Conclusion:
Well, you have created a beautiful ad campaign. When you are making a CPC campaign, you have to face some competition from your rivals. At the time of placing an ad on the news feed of a user, Facebook conducts an auction for your ads and others ads that target the same user. Here in this case, Facebook considers three factors:1. The bid you stated
2. What would be the response of the users for your ad
3. How relevant that particular user is for your business.
Based on these factors, Facebook delivers the ad on the news feed of the user. So all you can do for a better reach is, targeting the audience properly and setting the right bid for your ad campaign.
Once you started your campaign, you need to monitor the performance of your ads. You can use the analytics of Facebook. Using third-party tools like HootSuite or SocioBoard is also helpful in this regard.
Author Bio:
Hello, Mates! I'm Sumit Ghosh, CEO of Socioboard Technologies and the Marketing Head of Socioboard. I'm responsible for the overall marketing strategy of SocioBoard, including product marketing, positioning, inbound demand generation and online marketing. Socioboard's new approach to open source social media management is changing how Social Media Marketing companies, digital agencies, corporations, and web/broadcast media across the world thinks about Socioboard. Follow Socioboard on Facebook and Twitter.
