How To Use Facebook Ads

An Overview of Facebook Ads for Beginners

Facebook is the most used social channel with 1.39 billion monthly active users. Without a doubt, your target audience has a presence on Facebook making it a fantastic opportunity to promote your brand! Most users visit it every day and the average time spent per visit is 20 minutes. The largest age group is between 25 and 34 years old.

Posting organic content is essential to keep your community engaged but to grow your audience and make your voice resonate louder than your competitors consider paid content. Facebook ads have different goals such as:

• drive traffic on website
• drive traffic into store
• make people download an app
• increase conversion
• increase number of fans
• increase engagement

The first step before you can start to promote content is the creation of a Facebook business page.

Create an ad

To create an app you have two options: Facebook ads creator and Power editor. The first is better if you are a beginner since it’s easier to use but you should move to Power editor once when you feel more comfortable though because it offers more flexibility.

Choose a Facebook campaign objective

Facebook offers different ads solution depending on your goals and makes it easy to determine which one is ideal.

• Page post engagement: get more likes, shares and comments on a post already published
• Page likes: get more likes on your business page and grow your community
• Clicks to website: redirect fans on your website to drive more traffic
• Website conversion: encourage people to act on your website (fill a form, make a purchase, sign up). This solution requires the integration of Facebook conversion pixel
• App install: encourage users to download your mobile or desktop app
• App engagement: get people to use your desktop app
• Event response: promote your event
• Offer claims: find new customers and drive traffic online and offline

Each solution has a different ad size, image resolution, call-to-action and character limit.

Set a campaign budget

The budget can be set at the ad level, meaning for one campaign you can set a different budget for each ad. You can also determine the budget on a daily model or for the lifetime of the campaign.

Define the audience

To ensure you reach the right people Facebook’s algorithms are based on different criteria such as:

• Location
• Demographics (age, gender, education, job, etc)
• Interests (activities on Facebook and other websites)
• Behaviour (purchase habits, devices you use, etc)

Facebook collects the information from a user’s account, the pages liked and also pages shared through their partners outside of the Facebook platform.

You’ll be able to customize your audience among the existing one or create lookalike audiences, meaning people who have certain similarities with your audience.

Choose a location

• Users newsfeed: It’s the biggest chunk of real estate and the one with the most visibility since it appears along with your friend’s content. It can be liked, shared and commented same as an organic post but it’s labeled as “sponsored”.
• Mobile newsfeed: There are 1.9 billion mobile monthly active users so this is a great place for your ad. Keep in mind, if your site is not mobile-friendly it doesn’t make any sense to redirect people to a bad user experience.
• Facebook’s right-hand column, beneath the Trending topics section.

Who will see your Facebook ads?

Those who Facebook determines have a real interest in your business through their online activities or their friends activities are the most likely to see your ads. Despite delving out the dough, your ad won’t appear if Facebook determines it’s not relevant to your audience’s interests.

Thanks to retargeting, Facebook is able to track users activity on different websites and show them similar or related articles. For example if you search for pregnancy topics on Google you might see ads for baby diapers on your newsfeed. For your privacy you are able to opt out from out of this.

Worried about privacy? Users are able to manage the ads they see through Ad preferences (already running in US) to select what ads they want to see, making them even more relevant. Facebook provides an explanation of why users see the ad and the user is able to remove or add interests.