With nearly 2 billion daily users, Facebook is now one of the world’s most popular and effective advertising platforms. In 2021, digital advertising accounted for 65.2 % of total worldwide ad revenue [1] and Facebook has the largest share of this market by some distance [2]. For any business seeking to maximise the return on its marketing spend, advertising on Facebook is essential.
Create your account
First set up a Facebook Business Page and then go to Facebook ads manager, where you will create your account. Together with various details about your business, you’ll also need to add a payment method ready for when you activate your first campaign. Once you’ve set up your ads manager Facebook gives you all the tools you need. This account is your control centre.
Devise an ad
In Ads manager, you’ll see options for campaigns, ad sets and single ads. When you’re ready to begin, select your preferred type of ad and click on ‘create’.
Select your campaign objective
Facebook ads management requires you to specify what you wish your campaign to achieve. You’ll see the options listed on screen. They include brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation and conversions. If, for example, you want to attract more site traffic, you’ll be asked to enter the relevant URL and Facebook will show you the most appropriate option.
Identify your audience
This allows you to target your ads at the people you consider most likely to respond. You should expect to experiment before finding the perfect configuration and there is a very useful Facebook ad management audience definition gauge to help you. You’ll find this to the right of the audience targeting fields. It offers you a huge range of indicators, including location, age, gender, work and financial status, interests and education. Consider these in the light of your objective. For example, to increase traffic, you should narrow your choices to an audience most likely to buy, but if you’re interested in raising brand awareness, a broader audience is a better idea.
Fix your budget
You can specify either a daily or a lifetime budget. A daily budget allows you to run your campaign throughout each day up to a fixed maximum spend. A lifetime budget is suitable for a longer-term campaign and your spending will be paced equally over its duration. For those who are uneasy about the cost of advertising on Facebook, these budgetary controls provide perfect peace of mind. What you spend is always up to you.
Optimisation
You can begin advertising immediately or set future start and end dates. You can also specify certain hours or days of the week for your ads to appear. If you want to use more sophisticated targeting and compete directly with other companies, you might want to consider bidding on certain vital keywords. Depending on the value of the words and the nature of your business, this may be more expensive but it will ensure your ad is seen by the most relevant people. Even without bidding, your audience configuration will mean you’ll get results. Remember that, whatever path you follow, the cost of Facebook advertising is lower than virtually any other platform.
Create your ad
With all the administrative preparation complete, it’s time for the creative work. Depending on the objective you’ve specified, Facebook ad manager will suggest the matching options. These will include layout, single or scrolling images, resolution and font sizes. Upload your creative assets and assemble them according to the chosen format and guidelines.
Once your ad is ready, you need to decide how to display it from three options: Desktop News Feed, Desktop Right Column and Mobile News Feed. As long as your ad is associated with your Facebook page, all three options are available. Bear in mind that more than 50% of internet browsing is done on mobile devices, but the choice is entirely up to you.
Monitor performance
Creating and running the campaign are only two of three vital tasks. The third is to measure how successful your ads are proving to be. If they are under-performing, you’ll want to make adjustments to one, some or all of your settings, such as the target audience configuration and the display options.
Once again, when you advertise on Facebook, the ad manager offers built-in help. It gives you access to a wide variety of metrics to help you judge, including performance, engagement, click-through rate, website actions, video views and downloads. All this data is freely available in the ad manager. You can also set it up to send you custom reports by email.
We can help
Now we’ve shown that for advertising Facebook is both affordable and easy, we hope you’ll feel encouraged to give it a try yourself. We appreciate that even when the process is broken down like this, there seems to be a lot of work involved.
That’s why we offer a Facebook advertising service, complete from start to finish. We learned the entire process in our own marketing campaigns in extremely competitive sectors and we can share our experience with you to help you get the most out of this high-achieving, low-cost platform.
Call us today and see how easy Facebook advertising can be.
- [1] www.statista.com
- [2] www.statista.com