Facebook Ads is an easily accessible tool used by many entrepreneurs in e-commerce and marketers, especially those who are just starting out and don’t 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.
Introduction
However, this has also led to increased competition, rising costs, and declining return on ad spend on Facebook. Despite the dwindling trust in Facebook ads, there are still ways to leverage this social media advertising strategy.
Step 1: Set Up Your Meta Business Suite Account (formerly known as Facebook Business Manager)
Many people often abandon Facebook advertising because they don’t set up their accounts correctly or become overwhelmed by the numerous advertising options available on Facebook and never reach the point of launching an actual campaign.
Therefore, to get started correctly, you should first ensure that your Meta Business Suite account is set up properly.
Meta Business Suite is the section that contains your Facebook Ads account, your business pages, and other tools 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 one 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 prompts to create your ad account. This will be your ads hub, where you can navigate to all the different areas of your business on Facebook.
Step 2: Install Meta Pixel
One of the most common frustrations among new Facebook advertisers is understanding whether their ads are actually working. You can boost a post or even set up an ad campaign in Ads Manager, but without installing the Meta Pixel, you won’t know if the ad has led to 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 running ads. The pixel shows you all the actions taken by visitors coming to your website from your Facebook ads. Simply put, the pixel tells you not only whether your ads have generated results but also which specific audience and which creative assets are coming from those conversions.
Setting Up Your Meta Pixel in Shopify
Setting up the Meta Pixel on your website is easier than it sounds and rarely requires looking into the code.
If you are using Shopify, setting up your Meta Pixel is as simple 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 Store Settings in the Preferences section of your Shopify store.
You should start seeing activity on your website within a few hours of adding your pixel ID to your Shopify store. Metrics such as visitors, cart additions, and purchases are recorded in your Meta Business Suite account under Pixels.
Step 3: Create a Facebook Audience
Targeting the right people with your ads is the key to success in advertising on Facebook. Facebook has billions of global users, so finding those who are likely to be interested in your brand or product requires using Facebook’s Audiences feature.
The audience
is a section within Meta Business Suite where you can create lists of people targeted by your ads. There are various features available within the audiences 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 visited your website, added something to their shopping cart, or followed you on Instagram is likely considering buying something from you—they may just need a little nudge.
If you’ve ever browsed a brand’s website and found yourself targeted by their ads every time you opened Facebook or Instagram, this is called “retargeting,” and it is one of the most effective forms of advertising on Facebook.
You can create retargeting audiences on Facebook using the custom audiences feature found in the audiences section of Meta Business Suite. Facebook gives you the option to leverage all the data collected by 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 various sources you can take advantage of. Three main sources that online businesses should utilize 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’ve gathered from customers or prospects. Facebook matches this information with its own users so that you can target them directly with your ads.
Creating an audience using a customer list is great for re-engaging past customers with new products or reaching email subscribers who haven’t made a purchase yet.
Learn more: Creating the right audience for Facebook ads
2. Website Traffic
Website traffic lets you create a list to retarget 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 visited your website in the last 30 days or added something to their shopping cart in the last 7 days.
3. Catalog
This custom audience allows you to reach people who interacted with items in your catalog.
Prospecting: Finding New Customers
Finding new customers is a better way to expand your business using Facebook ads compared to retargeting previous customers and converting site browsers.
Finding new customers is commonly referred to as “prospecting” and involves advertising to those who haven’t purchased from you or interacted with your business online. For small to medium-sized businesses, this segment includes most of the active Facebook users in the billions, and determining how to start narrowing down this list can be challenging.
Facebook has created two useful tools to help businesses find the best potential new customers:
1. Lookalike Audiences
One way Facebook finds good prospects for your business is by using the customer or lead lists that you’ve already compiled. Lookalike audiences leverage data from your custom customer lists to create a new audience filled with Facebook users who share similarities with your current customers.
Lookalike audiences can be created using any of your custom audiences, and they range in size and similarity from 1% to 10% of the specified country’s population. A 1% lookalike audience contains people most similar to your custom customer audience and therefore serves as an easy target for your prospecting campaigns.
When
Expand your targeting and increase your budget, you can switch to a similar audience of 3%, 5%, and finally 10% for more expansion while still being related to your user profile.
2. Interests, behaviors, and demographic traits
If you don’t have a list of past customers or website visitors to create a similar audience, you can use Facebook’s data on interests, behaviors, and demographic traits to create a predictive audience when creating an ad.
Here’s a breakdown of each category, with examples of subcategories within each category:
Demographic traits 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, tubing, working out).
Behaviors relate to 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 would want to test from all the options available within interests, behaviors, and demographics. Since interest, behavior, and demographic audiences are typically quite broad and consist of hundreds of thousands to millions of users, it is good practice to test them individually so you can find out which works best.
Once you identify the audiences that convert through your ads, you can start experimenting with additional audience layers to expand your predictive campaigns.
Step 4: Create a Facebook Ads Campaign
To start creating your first campaign, go to the Ads section in your Meta Business Suite account and click on the “Create Ad” button. From there, you will be prompted to select a goal.
There are seven categories of goals within Facebook Ads:
1. Get more website visitors: When you want to increase traffic to your website.
2. Boost a post: If you want to promote an organic post.
3. Get more messages: The goal of running click-to-message ads.
4. Promote your page: Simple ads promoting your business page on Facebook.
5. Promote your business locally: If you have a personal business or event.
6. Get more leads: To collect contact information from people on Facebook.
7. Automated ads: Facebook will test different ad variations to see which works best.
You should consider your goal as a business and what you want to achieve from your Facebook ads and let the answers guide your decision.
Regardless of the goal you choose, Facebook will always charge based on impressions – the number of people your ad is shown to. It’s important to clarify your goal to Facebook so that your ads are optimized for that goal. If you choose traffic but are actually looking for purchases on your website, your goal won’t be guaranteed because it was not specified as a campaign-level goal.
Step 5: Choose Your Creative and Schedule It
The next step in creating a Facebook ad is to create the creative – the ad itself.
Advertising on Facebook is entirely different from traditional advertising and has its own set of best practices for creative advertising on Facebook that actually converts.
When creating an ad, you will have the option to specify 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 the campaign.
After defining your creative, you have the opportunity to choose:
- The audience you want to target
- The budget you want to spend
- The placement of your ads across Facebook’s various networks
Your ads will be
provide you with the option to define and refine the audience list or retargeting that you created in the audience section. By selecting locations, ages, nationalities, and languages, you can narrow your audience further and provide more variations for testing in different ad sets. Click “Create New” to build your audience.
Next, specify the duration of your ad campaign. 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 how much to spend on Facebook ads will depend on several factors:
- Marketing budget: You can only spend what you can afford.
- Your product cost: Higher-cost products generally require higher ad spending.
- The goal you are optimizing for: Goals focused on sales such as purchases usually cost more than goals focused on awareness like interactions and clicks.
- Average customer acquisition cost: If you have tried paid advertising on other platforms and have a cost for acquiring customers, you will want to apply that here.
Always ensure that you give your Facebook ads a fair chance by allocating enough budget to achieve your goal. Once your ads are live, you should allow time (and budget) for the “learning phase” of Facebook – the period when Facebook’s algorithm analyzes your data. You can use Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) to automatically manage your campaign budget across ad sets for the best results.
Finally, ad sets allow you to choose where your ad appears. You can choose between Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and Facebook messages.
Once done and ensuring everything is good, click “Boost Now”. Facebook will review your ad. Once approved, it will be published!
Retargeting with Dynamic Product Ads
One of the most common ad formats on Facebook for e-commerce is the dynamic product ad. If you have browsed an online store and were targeted with the exact products you viewed, you have seen dynamic product ads in action. These ads link your Meta Pixel data with your Facebook product catalog, so the products you viewed or added to your cart on your website are shown to visitors.
The product catalog on Facebook is another connection between your website and your ad account that can be set up within the Meta Business Suite, under the Assets menu. You can create a catalog using 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 you have created your catalog and are ready to create a dynamic product ad, go back to Ads Manager and create a new campaign using Catalog Sales as your objective. This will allow you to select your product catalog at the ad set level, as well as customize the people you want to show related products to.
In addition to retargeting previous buyers or website browsers, you can also use dynamic product ads to target prospects. If you choose this option, Facebook will show products from your store that it thinks will be relevant to new prospects, based on their profile data, even if they have never visited your website 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 (even more frequently 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 that Facebook’s algorithm can learn who the most interested people are in what you sell. 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
Targeting potential customers and retargeting previous buyers are two important audiences to focus on, but they work best when done together to create a “funnel.”
A funnel is a marketing strategy based on the simple fact that the vast majority of the people you are marketing to are not ready to buy at that moment. The funnel strategy focuses on tailoring your ads based on your audience’s buying intent and familiarity with your brand and products.
The funnel can be achieved on Facebook by targeting a cold audience of potential customers, such as a lookalike audience or a behavior-based audience, in one campaign, and targeting those who
Source: https://shopify.com/blog/facebook-ads
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