The Facebook advertising tool is an accessible platform used by many entrepreneurs in the e-commerce field and marketers, especially those who are just starting out and do not have much experience in advertising or a large advertising budget. Anyone can promote their small business on Facebook through ads, as long as they are willing to learn the basics.
However, this has also led to increased competition, rising costs, and decreased return on ads. Despite the declining trust in Facebook ads, there are still ways to leverage this strategy for advertising on social media.
In this beginner’s guide, we will look at what makes Facebook a popular advertising platform and guide you step by step on how to set up a Facebook ad campaign to increase sales for your business.
Step 1: Set up a Meta Business Suite account (formerly known as Facebook Business Manager)
Many people who abandon advertising on Facebook do so because they set up their account incorrectly or feel overwhelmed by the multiple advertising options available on Facebook and never reach the stage of actually running the campaign.
So, to start off on the right foot, you must first ensure that your Meta Business Suite account is set up correctly.
Meta Business Suite is the part that contains your Facebook ads account, business pages, and other tools that you will need to run your ads.
To create your Meta Business Suite account, go to business.facebook.com and click on “Create Account.”
Facebook will ask for your business name, your Facebook business page (create a page if you don’t have one), your name, and your email address.
Next, you will need to create an ad account or add an existing ad account. This can be done by selecting Ads in the left sidebar menu.
Follow the instructions to create an ad account. This is your ads hub, where you can navigate to all the different areas of your business on Facebook.
Step 2: Install the Meta pixel
One of the most common frustrations among new advertisers on Facebook is understanding whether their ads are actually doing their job. You can boost a post or set up an ad campaign in the Ads Manager, but without installing the Meta pixel, you won’t know if the ad has generated any sales on your website.
The Meta pixel is the connection point between your Facebook ads and your website. The pixel is a tracking code that you need to create within your Meta Business Suite account and then add to your website before you start paying for ads. The pixel shows you all the actions taken by visitors coming to your website from your Facebook ads. Simply put, the pixel tells Meta not only whether your ads generated results but also which specific audience and which creative pieces are coming from those conversions.
Setting up your Meta pixel on Shopify
Setting up the Meta pixel on your website is easier than it seems and rarely requires digging into code.
If you are using Shopify, setting up your Meta pixel is as easy as copying your pixel ID (a 16-digit number) from your Meta Business Suite account and pasting it into the Meta pixel ID field, which is found under the Store settings in your Shopify store.
You should start seeing activity on your website within a few hours of adding your pixel ID to your Shopify store. Statistics like the number of visitors, cart additions, and purchases are tracked in your Meta Business Suite account under Pixels.
Step
3: Creating a Facebook Audience
Targeting the right people with your ads is essential for advertising success on Facebook. With billions of global users, finding those who are likely to be interested in your brand or product requires leveraging Facebook’s audience feature.
The audience is a section within Meta Business Suite where you can create lists of people you want to target with your ads. There are several different features available within the audience section to help you define these lists, but they can be divided into two main categories: retargeting and prospecting.
Retargeting: Converting Warm Audiences
A person who has visited your website, added something to their shopping cart, or followed you on Instagram is likely to consider buying something from you – they might just need a little nudge.
If you’ve browsed a brand’s website and found yourself targeted with their ads every time you open Facebook or Instagram, that’s called “retargeting,” and it’s one of the most effective forms of advertising on Facebook.
You can create retargeting audiences on Facebook using the custom audiences feature, which is found in the audiences section of Meta Business Suite. Facebook gives you the option to leverage all the data collected by the Meta pixel and your business pages through custom audiences.
Learn more: What is Retargeting in Google Ads and How Does it Work? (2023)
When creating a custom audience, you are provided with a list of different sources you can leverage. Three primary sources that e-commerce businesses should use are customer lists, website traffic, and catalogs.
1. Customer List
The customer list allows you to upload a file containing email addresses, phone numbers, and any other contact information you have collected from customers or potential customers. Facebook matches this information with its users so you can directly target them with your ads.
Creating an audience using a customer list is excellent for re-engaging previous customers with new products or reaching out to email subscribers who haven’t made a purchase yet.
Learn more: Creating the Right Audience for Your Facebook Ads
2. Website Traffic
Website traffic allows you to create a retargeting list to reach visitors to your website. Here, you can create lists of varying sizes based on actions taken or pages visited on your website. Lists that typically target good conversions include those who have visited your website in the past 30 days or added something to their shopping cart in the past 7 days.
3. Catalog
This custom audience allows you to reach people who have interacted with items in your catalog.
Prospecting: Finding New Customers
Finding new customers is a better way to expand your business using Facebook ads than retargeting previous customers and converting website browsers.
Searching for new customers is commonly referred to as “prospecting” and involves advertising to those who have not purchased from you or interacted with your business online. For small to medium-sized businesses, this audience encompasses the vast majority of billions of active Facebook users, and it can be challenging to figure out how to narrow this list down.
Facebook has created two useful tools to help businesses find the best potential new customers:
1. Lookalike Audiences
One way Facebook finds good customers for your business is by using the list of customers or leads you have already compiled. Lookalike Audiences use data from your custom customer lists to create a new audience filled with Facebook users who share similarities with your current customers.
Can
Creating Lookalike Audiences using any of your custom audiences, ranging in size and similarity from 1% to 10% of the specified country’s population. A 1% Lookalike Audience consists of people who closely resemble your custom customer audience, making them an easy target for your prospecting campaigns.
As you expand your targeting and increase your budget, you can shift to a 3%, 5%, and finally 10% Lookalike Audience to gain broader reach while maintaining a user profile that matches your customers.
2. Interests, Behavior, and Demographics
If you don’t have a list of previous customers or website visitors to create a Lookalike Audience, you can use Facebook’s data on interests, behaviors, and demographics to create a prospecting audience when setting up an ad.
Here’s a breakdown of each category, with examples of subcategories within each:
Demographics include basic data such as gender, age, and location, as well as user profile information (e.g., new mothers, engineers, recent graduates).
Interests relate to the pages and content that Facebook users have interacted with (e.g., K-pop, snorkeling, exercising).
Behavior involves actions taken by users that are recorded by Facebook (e.g., celebrating a birthday, moving to a new city, having a baby).
There are likely many audiences you want to test from all the options available in interests, behaviors, and demographics. Since interest and behavior audiences are usually relatively broad and consist of hundreds of thousands to millions of users, it’s a good practice to test them individually so you can determine which works best.
Once you identify the audiences that convert through your ads, you can begin experimenting with additional audience layers to expand your prospecting campaigns.
Step 4: Create a Facebook Ad Campaign
To start creating your first ad campaign, go to the Ads section of your Meta Business Suite account and click on the “Create Ad” button. From there, you will be prompted to select an objective.
There are seven categories of objectives in Facebook ads:
1. Increase website traffic: when you want to drive traffic to your website.
2. Boost a post: if you want to promote an organic post.
3. Increase messages: the goal of running click-to-message ads.
4. Promote your page: simple ads that promote your business page on Facebook.
5. Promote your business locally: if you have a local business or event.
6. Increase leads: to collect contact information from people on Facebook.
7. Automated ads: Facebook will test different ad versions to see which works best.
You should consider your business objective and what you want to achieve with your Facebook ads, allowing those answers to guide your decision.
No matter what objective you choose, Facebook will always charge for impressions – the number of people who see your ad. It’s important to let Facebook know what your goal is so that your ads can be optimized for your objective. If you choose traffic but are actually looking for purchases on your website, you won’t be guaranteed to reach your goal because it hasn’t been set as a campaign-level objective.
Step 5: Choose Your Creative and Schedule Ads
The next step in creating a Facebook ad is to create the creative – the ad itself.
Advertising on Facebook is very different from traditional advertising and has a unique set of best practices for creative advertising on Facebook that achieves effective results.
When creating an ad, you will have the option to select the Facebook business page and/or Instagram account that will display your ads. This secondary benefit is a great opportunity to increase brand awareness and social media followers, even if it’s not the overall goal of your campaign.
After
Define your creativity, you have the opportunity to choose:
1. The audience you wish to target
2. The budget you wish to spend
3. The ad placements within the various Facebook networks
You will have the option to define and refine the audience list or retargeting you created in the audience section. By selecting locations, gender, ages, and languages, you can narrow down your audience further and provide more variations to test in different ad sets. Select “Create New” to build your audience.
Next, specify the duration for which you want your ad campaign to run. You can choose to run ads continuously or set a specific date range.
Then, enter your budget and choose whether you want a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Your decision on the amount to spend on ads depends on several factors:
1. The marketing budget: You can spend what you can afford.
2. The cost of your product: Generally, higher-priced products require higher ad spending.
3. The goal you are optimizing: Sales-focused goals like purchases usually cost more than awareness-focused goals like engagements and clicks.
4. The average customer acquisition cost: If you have tried paid ads on other platforms and have a customer acquisition cost, you’ll want to apply it here.
You should always ensure that you are giving Facebook ads a fair chance by allocating enough budget to achieve your goal. Once your ads are live, allow time (and budget) for Facebook’s “learning phase” – the period during which Facebook’s algorithm analyzes your data. You can use campaign budget optimization on Facebook to automatically manage your campaign budget across ad sets for the best results.
Finally, ad sets allow you to choose where your ad will appear. You can choose between Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and Messenger ads.
Once you are done and ensure everything is good, click on “Promote Now.” Facebook will review your ad. Once approved, it will be published!
Retargeting with Dynamic Product Ads
One of the most common forms of advertising on Facebook in the e-commerce space is the dynamic product ad. If you have browsed an online store and then been targeted with the exact products you looked at, you have seen a dynamic product ad in action. These ads connect your Meta pixel data with your Facebook product catalog, so the products you viewed or added to your shopping cart are displayed to visitors to your site.
The product catalog on Facebook is another connection between your business website and your ad account and can be set up within the Meta Business Suite, under the Assets list. You can create a catalog through your Meta pixel or, if you are using Shopify, you can easily add the Facebook sales channel and sync products with your ad account.
Once your catalog is created and you’re ready to create a dynamic product ad, go back to the Ads Manager and create a new campaign with “Catalog Sales” as the objective. This will allow you to specify your product catalog at the ad set level, as well as customize the audience you want to show related products to.
In addition to retargeting previous customers or website browsers, you can also use dynamic product ads for prospecting. If you choose this option, Facebook will display products from your store that it believes will be relevant to new prospects based on their profile data, even if they haven’t visited your site before.
Step 6: Optimize Your Facebook Campaigns
Setting up a campaign on Facebook is an important first step, but learning how to monitor and optimize ad performance over time is essential if you want to succeed on the platform. Typically, you should check your Facebook ads at least once a day (and much more often as your budget increases).
You may
It can be tempting to make changes to your targeting or stop an ad if you haven’t seen purchases after one day, but it’s important to be patient.
Facebook ads need time to optimize so the algorithm can learn who the people most interested in what you’re selling are. If you’re unsure whether you should stop your ad, try waiting until it gets at least 1000 impressions before you invest more or stop it to test something new. Creating a Funnel
Creating a Funnel
Retargeting and marketing to previous customers are two important tasks for targeting them, but they work best when implemented together to create a “funnel.”
A funnel is a marketing strategy based on the simple fact that the vast majority of people you’re marketing to are not ready to buy at that moment. The funnel-based strategy focuses on tailoring your ads based on your audience’s purchase intent and their familiarity with your brand and products.
A funnel can be built on Facebook by targeting a cold audience of potential customers.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/guides/facebook-advertising
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