The potential for targeted reach on Facebook is significant, making it an indispensable tool in a marketer's arsenal.
Why Advertise on Facebook?
Facebook's expansive reach is not the only reason to consider it for your advertising needs. The platform allows for meticulous targeting, enabling you to direct your ads to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, thereby increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Moreover, the platform's real-time analytics empower advertisers to track ad performance and optimize their strategies for future campaigns. However, to truly harness the power of Facebook advertising, one must first become adept at navigating the Facebook Ads Manager.
How to Run Facebook Ads
1. Create an account with Facebook Ads Manager.
Before you can start advertising, you'll need a Facebook Business Page. Once that's in place, head to the Facebook Ads Manager website and follow the prompts to set up your account, confirm your information, and establish a payment method. This hub will be where you manage all your Facebook advertising activities.2. Start creating an ad through Facebook Ads Manager.
The Ads Manager dashboard will display all your campaigns, ad sets, and ads, along with their performance metrics. To create a new campaign, select the appropriate ad type and click the "Create" button. This is where your journey of crafting an effective Facebook ad begins.3. Choose an objective.
When you begin to set up a campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, the very first step is to choose your campaign objective, which is the primary goal you want to achieve. Facebook has categorized these objectives to align with your marketing goals. Here are the objectives you can select from:- Brand Awareness: Increase people’s awareness of your business, brand, or service.
- Reach: Expose your ad to the maximum number of people in your audience.
- Traffic: Drive traffic to a specific web page, app, or Facebook Messenger conversation.
- Engagement: Get more people to see and engage with your post or Page. Engagement can include likes, comments, shares, event responses, and offer claims.
- App Installs: Encourage people to install your app.
- Video Views: Get more people to watch your videos.
- Lead Generation: Collect lead information from people interested in your business.
- Messages: Encourage people to contact your business using Facebook Messenger.
- Conversions: Encourage people to take a specific action on your website (like subscribe to your list or buy your product), with your app, or in Messenger.
- Catalog Sales: Connect your Facebook ads to your product catalog to show people ads for the products they are most likely to want to buy.
- Store Traffic: Drive nearby customers to brick-and-mortar stores.
4. Choose your audience.
Facebook's targeting capabilities are extensive, allowing you to specify your audience with precision. Whether you're aiming for a niche group or a broader population, the platform's targeting options and audience definition gauge will help you identify the optimal audience for your campaign.5. Set your budget.
Setting your budget is a critical step in managing your Facebook ad spend effectively while striving to achieve the best possible results. Facebook provides flexibility in budgeting by allowing you to choose between two main types of budgets: a daily budget and a lifetime budget. Here's how they work:Daily Budget
The daily budget is the average amount you're willing to spend on a specific ad set per day. It is useful if you want your ads to run continuously throughout the day and is ideal for campaigns with an ongoing objective like brand awareness or engagement.- Consistency: Using a daily budget means that Facebook will try to spread your ad spend evenly over the course of the day.
- Minimum Spend: The minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD, and it must be at least twice your Cost Per Click (CPC) to help ensure the delivery of your ads.
- Flexibility: You can adjust your daily budget at any time if you want to increase or decrease the amount of money allocated to an ad set.
Lifetime Budget
A lifetime budget is the amount you're willing to spend over the entire period you plan to run a set of ads. This option is suitable for ads with a fixed start and end date, such as a promotion for an upcoming event or sale.- Allocation: Facebook will pace your spending over the lifetime of the ad set. This means that while you may not spend an even amount every day, you will not exceed your set budget by the end of the campaign.
- Scheduling: You can also specify the exact times and days of the week when you want your ads to appear if you choose a lifetime budget. This is known as ad scheduling and is only available with a lifetime budget.
Additional Budget Considerations
- Bidding Strategy: Your budget will also be influenced by your bidding strategy, whether you're paying for impressions, clicks, or conversions. You can let Facebook automatically bid for you or you can manually set your bid amounts.
- Ad Delivery: Facebook offers different ad delivery options such as standard delivery, which spends your budget evenly over time, and accelerated delivery, which spends your budget as quickly as possible (this option requires manual bid pricing and is typically used for time-sensitive ads).
- Cost Control: You can set bid caps or cost controls to ensure you never pay more per click or conversion than you're comfortable with, giving you more control over your ad spend.
