Facebook Ads is considered an easily accessible advertising tool used by many entrepreneurs and marketers in the field of e-commerce, especially those who are just starting out and do not have much advertising experience 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 decreasing returns on ads. Despite the diminishing trust in Facebook ads, there are ways to leverage this strategy for advertising on social media.
Step 1: Set Up Your Meta Business Suite Account (formerly Facebook Business Manager)
Many people who abandon advertising on Facebook do so because they set up their accounts incorrectly or feel overwhelmed by the multiple advertising options available on Facebook and do not reach the stage of actually running the campaign.
So, to get started correctly, you should ensure that your Meta Business Suite account is set up properly.
Meta Business Suite is the part of Facebook that contains your ad accounts, 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 you for your business name, your business’s Facebook 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 instructions to create your ad account. This is your ad hub, where you can access 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 working. 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 resulted in any sales on your website.
The Meta Pixel is the point of connection 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 who come to your website through your Facebook ads. Simply put, the Meta Pixel tells you not only whether your ads have generated results but also which specific audiences and creative pieces they’ve converted from.
Setting Up Your Meta Pixel on Shopify
Setting up the Meta Pixel on your website is easier than it seems and rarely requires delving into the code.
If you’re 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, found under your store’s settings in the preferences section of your Shopify store.
You should begin to see website activity within a few hours of adding your pixel ID to your Shopify store. Statistics such as the number of visitors, cart adds, 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 crucial for successful 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 audience feature.
The audience
is a section within Meta Business Suite where you can create lists of people you are targeting with your ads. There are many different features available within the Audience section to help you define these lists, but they can be divided into two main categories: retargeting and exploring new customers.
Retargeting: Converting Warm Audiences
A person who visited your website, added something to their shopping cart, or followed you on Instagram is likely considering purchasing something from you – they may 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, this is what’s known as “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 found in the Audience section of Meta Business Suite. Facebook gives you the option to take advantage of all the data collected by your Meta Pixel and 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 main sources that e-commerce businesses should use are customer lists, website traffic, and catalogs.
- Customer List
- Website Traffic
- Catalog
The customer list allows you to upload a file containing email addresses, phone numbers, and any other contact information you’ve collected from customers or potential clients. Facebook matches this information with its users so you can target them directly 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 Facebook ads
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 visited your website in the past 30 days or added something to their shopping cart in the last 7 days.
This custom audience allows you to reach people who have interacted with items in your catalog.
Exploring New Customers: Finding New Clients
Finding new customers is a better way to expand your business using Facebook ads than retargeting previous customers and converting website visitors.
Finding new customers is often referred to as “exploration” and involves advertising to those who haven’t bought from you or interacted with your business online. For small and medium-sized businesses, this includes the majority of active users on Facebook, and it can be challenging to determine how to narrow down this list.
Facebook has created two helpful tools to assist businesses in finding the best potential new customers:
- Lookalike Audiences
- Interests, behaviors, and demographics
- Demographics include basic data such as gender, age, location, and user profile information (e.g., new moms, engineers, recent graduates).
- Interests relate to the pages and content that Facebook users have interacted with (e.g., K-pop, diving, fitness).
- Behavior refers to the actions taken by users that are recorded by Facebook (e.g., celebrating a birthday, moving to a new city, having a baby).
Facebook works to find good new customers for your business using the list of customers or clients you’ve already gathered. Lookalike Audiences uses data from your custom audience to create a new audience filled with Facebook users who share similarities with your current customers.
A Lookalike Audience can be created using any of your custom audiences, and its size and similarity range from 1% to 10% of the specified country’s population. A 1% Lookalike Audience contains people who most resemble your custom audience and are therefore an easy target for your customer exploration campaigns.
When
You expand your targeting and increase your budget, you can move to an audience that resembles your audience by 3%, 5%, and finally 10% to gain more reach while maintaining a user profile that matches your customers.
If you do not have a list of previous customers or website visitors to create a lookalike audience, you can use interest, behavior, and demographic data on Facebook to create an exploratory audience when creating an ad.
Here is a breakdown of each category, with examples of subcategories within each:
There are likely many audiences that you would like to test from all the options available within interests, behaviors, and demographics. Since interest, behavior, and demographic audiences are usually relatively broad and consist of hundreds of thousands to millions of users, it is a good practice to test them individually so you can find out which works best.
Once you identify the audiences converting through your ads, you can start to experiment with additional audience layers to expand your campaigns in customer exploration.
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 the “Create Ad” button. From there, you will be prompted to select a goal.
There are seven categories of objectives within Facebook Ads:
- Increase website visitors: When you want to drive traffic to your website.
- Boost a post: If you want to promote an organic post.
- Increase messages: The goal of running message click ads.
- Promote your page: Simple ads promoting your business’s Facebook page.
- Promote your business locally: If you have in-person business or an event.
- Increase leads: To gather contact information from people on Facebook.
- Automatic Ads: Facebook will test different ad versions to see which performs best.
You should consider your business objective and what you want to achieve through 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 to whom your ad was shown. It is important to inform Facebook what matters to your objective so that your ads can be optimized toward achieving that goal. If you choose traffic but are actually looking for purchases on your website, your objective may not be guaranteed because it wasn’t specified as a campaign-level goal.
Step 5: Choose Creative and Scheduling
The next step in creating a Facebook ad is to create the creative itself – the ad itself.
Advertising on Facebook is quite different from traditional advertising and has a specific set of best practices for ad creative that yield effective results.
When creating an ad, you will have the opportunity 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 that is not the overall goal of the campaign.
After defining your creative, you will have the chance to specify:
- The audience you want to target
- The budget you wish to spend
- The placement of your ads within the Facebook product network
You will be given the option to select and optimize the retargeting list or explore new customers that you created in the audience section. By selecting “Create New,” you can create a new audience.
After
Set the duration of your ad campaign. You can choose to run ads continuously or set a specific date.
Then, enter your budget and choose whether you want a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Your decision on how much to spend on ads depends on several factors:
- The amount of money you allocate to marketing: You can only spend what you can afford.
- The cost of your product: Higher-cost products generally require higher advertising spending.
- The goal you are optimizing for: Goals focused on sales, like purchases, typically cost more than goals focused on awareness, such as interactions and clicks.
- The cost of acquiring an average customer: If you have tried advertising on other platforms and have a known cost for acquiring a customer, you will want to apply it here.
You should always make sure you give Facebook ads a fair chance by allocating enough budget to achieve your goal. Once your ads are published, you should allow time (and budget) for Facebook’s “learning phase” – the period during which Facebook’s algorithm analyzes your data. You can use Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) to automatically manage your campaign budget across ad sets for the best results.
Finally, ad sets give you the ability to choose where your ad appears. You can choose between Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger ads.
Once you are finished and ensured everything is good, click on “Boost Now.” Facebook will review your ad. Once approved, it will be published!
Retargeting with Dynamic Product Ads
One of the most popular ad formats on Facebook for e-commerce is Dynamic Product Ads. If you have browsed an online store and were targeted with the products you viewed or added to your cart, you have seen a dynamic product ad. These ads sync your Meta Pixel data and product catalog on Facebook, so the products you viewed or added to your cart are shown to visitors of your website.
The Facebook product catalog is another connection between your business website and your ad account and can be set up within the Meta Business Suite, under the Assets menu. 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 you have created your catalog and are ready to create a dynamic product ad, go back to Ad Manager and create a new campaign with “Catalog Sales” as the 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 relevant products to.
In addition to retargeting previous buyers or website browsers, you can also use dynamic product ads for exploration. If you choose this option, Facebook will show products in your store that it believes will be relevant to new customers 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. You should typically check your Facebook ads at least once a day (and much more often as spending increases).
It can be tempting to make changes to your targeting or stop an ad if you haven’t seen sales after one day, but it is important to be patient.
Facebook ads need time to optimize as Facebook’s algorithm learns who the people most interested in what you are selling are. If you are unsure whether you should stop your ad, try waiting until it reaches 1000 impressions before investing more or stopping it to test something new. Create a channel
Create
Channel
The exploration and retargeting of customers are both essential for targeting your audience, but they work best when implemented together to create a “channel”.
A channel is a marketing strategy based on a simple fact: that the majority of people you are marketing to are not ready to buy at that moment. The channel-based strategy focuses on tailoring your ads based on your audience’s purchasing intent and their familiarity with your brand and products.
A channel can be created on Facebook by targeting a cold audience of potential customers, such as a lookalike audience or behavior-based audience, in one campaign, and retargeting those who visit your website in another campaign. As your advertising budget increases, the channel can become more complex, with multiple campaigns targeting customers at different points within the channel:
The example above illustrates how one can
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/facebook-ads
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