Have you noticed how many ads and sponsored posts appear on your Facebook timeline? This means that through the algorithms of Facebook Ads – the site's advertising platform – you are characterized by an interesting profile for that particular brand.
If you have a digital business, you already know the importance of creating relevant content for your audience, don't you? This is precisely one of the secrets of the success of Facebook Ads: you can promote not only your brand but also content, materials, or any other type of post that you find interesting to reach a larger audience. That's why boosting posts on Facebook has become one of the most common and effective ways of creating online ads.
Of course, as with any other advertising platform, you need to do some testing and practice before you can see the results of your action. That's why we're giving you some tips so that you can program increasingly effective ads for your business.
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After all, why bet on ads?
As with the different forms of traditional advertising, the main reason for a company to create online ads is to gain visibility in front of an audience. Without boosting content, organic search will likely become the only way to reach your customers.
By organic traffic, we mean that your audience will only reach you if they search for a keyword related to your content on a search engine – such as Google – or if they already have a relationship with your company on social media.
In other words, betting solely on an organic strategy is risky, as your content may be spread mostly by those who already know your brand and are interested in your product.
By paying for an ad, however, you can reach a larger audience, as you no longer have to rely on specific searches to be found. In this way, paid traffic is characterized as a strategy that aims to increase your brand's online presence not only among users who already know it but also among those who don't and who may be interested in what you offer.
Although there are tactics for increasing organic traffic to your company page, if you want to promote offers, create an audience for certain content, or even impact your personas, for example, Facebook Ads remain the best strategy for increasing your brand's visibility.
What is Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads is Facebook's advertising platform. With it, you can create highly targeted campaigns for those who access this social network, just like Instagram. You can make hundreds of combinations of audiences and interests to reach more people. Ad formats are also very wide-ranging.
Using Facebook Ads makes it much easier to be relevant on these two social networks and get better results for your company's marketing strategy.
Here's how to use Facebook Ads to create relevant ads for your company.
The first step: access Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is hosted on Facebook's platform and you can access it via the Ads Manager.
Ads Manager: this tool is simpler to use and allows you to create ads and manage them. To access it, simply click on the arrow next to the questions icon in the top bar of the Facebook page.
Whichever you choose, these two tools will guide you through the same basic process of programming an ad: creating a campaign, a set of ads, and, only then, the ad itself.
Creating the campaign
By opting for Facebook Ads, you can reach both people who are already fans of your page and an audience that doesn't know or isn't yet involved with your company. Creating a campaign means deciding on the purpose of your ad and, consequently, the audience it will reach.
So analyze the main objectives of your strategy. You can create ads to gain page likes, generating greater engagement or a higher conversion rate on your material, for example – think about which objective best fits your advertising proposal.
When you access the ad manager, this is the screen you will see:
If you have any doubts when it comes to choosing the best type of ad for that particular post, we'll explain the purpose of each one, so you can better understand what the results of your action will be. See the infographic below for a detailed summary of these options:
- Brand recognition: this type of ad will ensure that your message reaches a greater number of people who have a real chance of being interested in your brand.
- Reach: Here, your ad will be shown to as many people as possible, without worrying too much about other actions.
- Traffic: by choosing this objective, Facebook will make sure that your ad is shown in a way that makes people go to your website, blog, or other external environment.
- Engagement: if you want more likes, comments, and shares on your posts, this is the objective you should choose.
- App installs: use this ad objective if you have an app and want to increase the number of app installs.
- Video views: if you have produced a video, published it on Facebook, and want it to get more views and engagement, this is the objective to choose.
- Registration generation: with this objective, you can link your posts to contact forms and thus capture strategic data from your audience, such as email or phone number.
- Conversions: with the conversions objective, as well as getting people to visit your pages, you can get them to convert within them – by leaving some contact details.
- Store visits: if you thought Facebook ads were only for digital businesses, you're wrong. With this objective, you can advertise from your location, bringing people from the Internet to you.
Once you've determined the objective, it's time to create the ad set. So let's get down to what you need to know to use this strategy to your advantage.
Selling product catalogs
In this type of ad, Facebook automatically shows the products in your catalog, according to the audience you've selected.
Ad set creation
The Facebook Ads ad set is an extremely important part of your promotion process. This is where you can choose the audience you want to target, the positioning of your ad, the budget you need, and the date it will run.
Audience segmentation
For your ad to be most effective, it needs to be seen by the right people, right? To do this, Facebook Ads allows you to choose the audience that will be reached by your publication.
When it comes to targeting your audience, you have two starting points: you can use people who have already interacted with your company as a base, or you can create your audience from scratch, based on interests, demographics, etc.
Let's talk a bit about each option.
Start with a personalized audience: people who have already interacted with your company
By setting up your campaign with this option, you can use the contacts your company already has and target your ads at them. This applies to email lists, phone numbers, Facebook and app IDs, and visits to specific websites, among others.
This is a method that usually brings excellent results, since people who already know your company are more likely to interact with it or accept your offer. And if you think this is a limitation, it's worth knowing that it's also possible to create the famous Lookalikes or similar audiences. In other words, you can ask Facebook to create a list of thousands (or millions, you decide) of contacts who use this network and who have a similar profile to your contacts.
Once you've chosen your audience here, you can define their location, and age and even limit the reach according to their interests and specific data to get it even more right.
Create a target audience using detailed segmentation
If you don't want to set up your audience based on those who have already interacted with your business and want to explore the options of Facebook Ads, you can create your audience from scratch using detailed targeting.
This gives you hundreds of options for location, age, interests, relationships, professions, education, and much more! So all you have to do is find out who the ideal audience is for your business and define it on Facebook to get a high-quality reach.
To give you an idea of the number of combinations you can make in the tool, click here to access a super complete infographic with all the possible targeting options in Facebook Ads. You can make very different combinations and get very specific data on who you want to target.
Positioning
Defining the positioning of your ads means choosing how they will appear to your audience.
In this part of the process, by clicking on “automatic positioning”, you can choose to let Facebook itself study the places where your ad performs best and choose where it will appear.
However, our tip is to opt for the “edit placements” command, so that you have greater control over where your content is displayed. With this power in hand, you have the possibility to run tests and thus understand which publication locations lead to the greatest return on investment – this will help you to consolidate your ad strategy more and more.
Budget and…
There is no minimum budget to start advertising on Facebook Ads – you can invest as much as you think you need. It may be possible to achieve some of your goals with as little as US$10.00, but the platform also applies the rule that with greater investment, better results will come.
One of the most important parts at this point in the process is to pay attention to how you will be charged by Facebook: by CPM or CPC.
CPM
By choosing CPM you are using a cost-per-thousand payment, which means that for every thousand people who see your ad, you pay a fixed amount set by Facebook itself.
CPC
CPC is the cost per click. Here you can choose the amount you are willing to pay for each click made on your promoted post – in other words, you have more control over the final investment.
To find out which type of promoted post best suits your business (and your wallet), there's only one way: test! Experimenting with both types of ad is the only way to find out which one brings the greatest return for your project and objective.
Either way, whether CPM or CPC, you can pay for your Facebook ads in the same way: by credit card or bank slip.
In the budget section, you can also decide whether you want to invest an amount per day or whether you want to set an amount for the whole campaign and let Facebook decide how to use the money throughout the campaign. Depending on the option you choose, you'll also have different types of scheduling (which is our next topic and is linked to the budget).
…Programming
Audience indicated, positioning chosen and budget determined – now there's just one step left in the process of creating your set of ads: defining when and for how long they will run. It's very important to pay attention at this point, otherwise, you could end up spending more than you'd like.
As we mentioned, this part depends a little on the type of budget you chose in the previous step. Let us explain:
If you've chosen the daily budget, you'll have the option of publishing your ad uninterruptedly or at a specific time interval. If you choose the first option, you should know that your ads will remain on the air, consuming the daily amount, until you pause or delete them. However, if you have chosen to set a period, your ad will only be broadcast during that period and will automatically end afterward.
Create the ad
After all this planning, defining objectives, audience, and budget, it's finally time to create the ad itself.
There are two ways to do this:
- Create a new ad: make your ad completely from scratch, choosing attributes such as the image, format, text, and links.
- Use an existing post: you can choose to turn an existing post that is important to your strategy into an ad. This way, you don't have to worry about choosing the image or text, for example – the ad is already ready.
Regardless of the format you decide to use, it's important to think about the presentation of your post – after all, Facebook is an extremely visual platform, so an eye-catching image can be the key to attracting a user's attention.
Also invest in the different formats that Facebook offers, in addition to images and videos. Making carousel ads or using the canvas format, for example, can have a very positive impact on your strategy. And if you're also advertising on Instagram, it's worth remembering that everyone can now advertise in stories, which is a new and attractive way of reaching your audience!
Finally, don't forget to be very specific when creating a caption for your ads and always interact or suggest an action to users – liking the page, the post, or downloading a material, for example. This way, you'll get more people attracted to what you're advertising!
Manage your ads
Facebook Ads gives you access to a page where you can manage all your ads. Here you can get a more complete overview of what you've been doing and track the performance of each campaign, ad set, and ad.
If you're using the Power Editor tool, you can also create customized reports on the performance of your ad strategy, so you can study the results of each campaign in more detail.
Some types of metrics you can follow
Once the ad has been created, the work doesn't stop. You need to keep an eye on people's reactions and look for opportunities to improve.
Here are some of the metrics you can follow:
- Reach: the reach of a post refers to the number of people who have been impacted by it. These are people who have somehow seen your ad.
- Clicks: the number of clicks shows the number of people who clicked on any part of your ad – be it the page name, the link, to open the image, or “see more”. For specific ad types, such as traffic and clicks, it's important to focus on the number of clicks on the link and not just the total.
- Reactions: with the number of reactions, you can see how many people have liked your post, how many have commented, and how many have shared your ad.
- Negative feedback: it's also important to keep an eye on the negative feedback received by your post, such as hides, complaints, spam tags, and unfollows. This will prevent your company from having reputation and brand positioning problems.
Additional tips: use conversion pixels.
The so-called conversion pixel generates a code to monitor the effectiveness of your ads. This means that if your ads lead users to a blog or video channel, for example, you can easily measure whether your audience is accessing these pages.
Another feature of using the conversion pixel is the possibility of having a more consolidated strategy when targeting your ad audience. This is possible because this feature allows you to track visitors who have been to certain pages of your business.
Test, test, test…
It's important to understand that Facebook Ads alone won't work miracles for your business. A very common mistake made by those who use Facebook Ads is to believe that making an ad format and investing an amount is a guarantee of success. Remember that Facebook is a social network, so the audience is very varied and you always need to test new ways of connecting with them.
Always test new ads, analyze the results, and try to innovate. This is the best way to find out what works for your business and what doesn't. To venture into the world of online advertising is to venture into a world of testing, after all, you'll only be able to find out which strategy works best for your business if you test and measure each one.
Do you have questions or suggestions? You can leave them in the comments!
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