How to Create Ads on Facebook

Do you sit at your computer and stare at those ads on Facebook and wonder how businesses do them and if they’re effective? Well, considering some business fan pages have tens of thousands of fans…they must be doing something right! So, it’s time to become a part of this phase and understand how the big guys do it and how us small businesses can utilise the ads on Facebook in the most cost effective way.

Note: Facebook has certain rules on what you can and cannot advertise; what you can write and what types of images are suitable. Make sure you check these out before you start. You can view the Facebook Advertising Guidelines here: https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php

I am going to take you through a journey on what you would see and experience when putting together your Facebook Ads. You need to understand what type of Ads you can create, how you can effectively utilise the Facebook targeting tools to segment and drill down your audience, how to set up your campaigns, budgeting and scheduling; and finally you need to understand how to measure and track your ads and if they are being effective or not!

So, sit back, relax and be ready to be taken through the journey on how you can create Ads on Facebook!

 

In the Beginning… Designing Your Ad

When designing your ads on Facebook you will need to firstly work out where the ad will be directing the visitor to; such as your Facebook page or an external URL on your site.

Once you know this you will be able to set the ‘Destination’ of the ad, which will then allow you to design it. If your destination is your Facebook page there are a few options you have when creating your ads, let’s check these options out now…

 

Sponsored Stories – Page Like Story

Sponsored Stories are only seen by Friends of Connections as it indicates that they ‘Liked’ the page. The reason you would implement such an ad is to boost your fans on your Facebook Page as it is more targeted at a branding exercise rather than informing people about something you offer.

 

Facebook Adverts – Page Post Advert

This type of ad is one that picks up a post you have made on your page and you can use it as an Ad. This ad type can have a customised audience as the one above could only be sent to Friends of Connections. Use this type of ad if you want to advertise an informative post you placed on your Facebook page. The benefits of this are that you could post a link on your Facebook page leading to your website and then use this type of ad to advertise it. The result would be more likers plus more website traffic!

 

Facebook Adverts – Facebook Adverts for Pages

This is the most common ad type, and the ad type you will want to know how to setup. This ad type allows you to choose where you want your ad to go to, for example it may lead to your Wall or Welcome app – see the Destination App.

 

You will notice that with this type of ad the ‘Title’ cannot be changed and will remain as your name. The ‘Body’ is the text you want to show up in your ad, this can only be 135 characters long so make sure you make it compelling enough to attract attention. Then you can choose your own image to upload, the image needs to be 110 pixels x 80 pixels.

 

The reason you would want to implement such an ad like this is to boost traffic to your Facebook Page. You could set up a competition and advertise the competition through these ads, which point to your Competition form on your Facebook page (third party app is needed for Forms on Facebook). You don’t have to have anything special to advertise, you could just utilise this type of ad to encourage visitors to visit your page and to generate brand awareness.

 

Other than the above ad types if you selected an External URL as your destination, you will need to create a completely different type of ad, let’s check out the steps for setting this up!

 

External URL destination

If you choose that your ad is going to be directing to a web address then you need to set the destination as an ‘External URL’. From this setting you can place in your URL, make a 25 Character headline, type your Body copy and choose your image – it’s pretty much the same as the above!

This type of ad is perfect if you are advertising a specific product, which means it would allow you to direct the ad to that specific web address!

 

A great way to utilise an ad like this is if you create a landing page specific for a campaign you are running; such as a competition or a special product offer. You use your Facebook ad to lead the traffic to this landing page, which you can then track the traffic, generate more traffic, and track conversions on your landing page!

 

When choosing your image…

Believe it or not but that little image is the BIGGEST part of your ad! It needs to capture your audience’s attention, and then it’s the copy that they will read!

The image needs to be likeable and attention seeking. For example if you are advertising a service you may want to put an image of someone pulling their hair out and then have the copy read that you can help them!

Here are some tips:

• Women like to look at other Women.
• Women like to look at Babies.
• Men like to look at Women.
• Smiles are more attention seeking.
• People also like cute animals such as kittens.
• Images with words in them also work really well!

Make sure your image is capturing the eye of your audience; make them want to click on your ad!

Here are some examples of good images…

 

Remember the images need to be 100 pixels x 80 pixels.

 

Ready, Aim, Fire! Targeting your Audience

Targeting your audience is the next step in creating your ads. Prior to designing your ad you would have known who you want to target, whether it be quite niche (24-34yr old, Females living in Melbourne that like Painting) or if it’s a mass audience (All Males Living in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane).

Facebook has numerous steps for you when drilling down your audience, let’s go through them all and explain how you might use them. Just remember, you don’t have to use the targeting options however, make sure your audience is large enough to get a response to your ad on Facebook.  

 

Location & Demographics

 

Facebook Ads allows you to drill down and target where your audience is and what gender and age they are. You could choose EVERYONE on Facebook, like the above example, which then if you look on the right you will see that your audience reach is 9,397,720… that’s really too large.

Make sure you target according to your offer. If you only want to hit people in Melbourne, then change the ‘City’ to Melbourne. If you only want to target Women in Melbourne then change the gender to ‘Female’.

The more specific you are, the higher your Click Thru Rate will be <<< Important to remember! But you want to keep your audience wide enough (large enough) so you can test who bites at your ads. If you narrow it too much you may not get any clicks.

 

Targeting Interests

 

Precise Interest targeting allows you to type in certain keywords and target according to what people ‘Like’ or what ‘groups’ people may be a part of. You can do some prior research just by searching through Facebook and seeing what type of people are ‘liking’ what groups. This may be a little too complicated and you may be better off switching it to ‘Broad Category’ rather than Precise!

Just remember, you don’t have to target any interests at all! You would only do this if you were selling a particular niche product, such as Basketball gear – then you would search for people interested in Basketball!

 

 

Targeting a Broad Interest range allows you to view all generic interests available and pin point the ones relevant to your audience. It’s a much easier and quicker way to target! If you are selling baby products you can pin point down to Parents (Child: 0-3yrs) or All Parents, if it applies.

 

Targeting Connections

 

Connection targeting is used if you want to target people connected to your Page, Event or App or people that are not connected to it. Again, it depends on what you are promoting. For example if you are promoting your Facebook Page and your aim is to gain more ‘likers’ then you would want to target people NOT connected to your page. The reason why you would choose this is so you don’t get ‘unwanted’ clicks on your ad, and so you are not paying for ‘unwanted’ clicks either!

 

Advanced Demographics

 

Advanced Demographics targets further into a person’s relationship status and their languages. If you were advertising a dating service for Men (remembering that you chose Men in the demographics area) then you would use this and target people that are interested in Women and are Single. If you were targeting Australian’s that speak Chinese for Chinese Classes then you could change the language to Chinese to hit this audience.

Remember: you don’t have to use ALL these targeting aspects when doing your campaign. As long as you know their use, then one day you might find a need for them.

 

Education & Work

 

Facebook even allows you to target down specifically to a person’s education status and workplace. If you are advertising University offers then you might want to use the education targeting method so you can target ‘At Secondary School’.

In regards to using the ‘Workplaces’ field, you would only use this if you wanted to target specific workplaces. If you sold software and wanted to get it into some firms and you knew these firms were on Facebook, then pop them into the field and get targeting! Mind you, this will bring your target reach down to a very small size, so it would be worth testing it out to see if people will click on your ad and convert!

 

Campaigns, Pricing & Scheduling

 

Once you have finished creating your ad you need to finalise your Campaign Name, Budgets and Schedule.

The Campaign Name is basically the name of your cluster of ads. For example if you are creating numerous ads for your Easter Product Special and are targeting niche audiences within each ad, then you would call your Campaign Name: Easter Special 2012. No one else see’s the campaign name; it’s just for your reference.

The Budget is how much you want to spend per day on the ads. For example if you want to spend $400 a month, equalling around $100 a week; then that is about $14 a day.

The Schedule is the timing of your campaign. You can set it up to have a start and end date or you can have your campaigns running continuously until you decide you want to stop them manually.

The Pricing section is where you place your bid for the clicks on your ad. Facebook will show you a ‘suggested bid’ it is recommended that you choose something in the middle of this pricing range so you know that your ad will show up. The rule is – the more you bid the more your ad gets shown! Remember though, you don’t actually pay that amount per-click, it differs per ad. For example if your bid is $1.20, you may only be paying $0.59 per click. However, because your bid is higher your ad is being shown more to your audience meaning you get more clicks!

 

Campaign Examples

Note: these are not live examples and have been made up for the purpose of this blog

 

Web123 –Promoting their Fan Page

This is a fake example of a Web123 Ad (so it’s not real, but it will give you an idea of how to put your own together!). Basically the purpose of this ad is to get people to the ‘Special Gift’ app on the Web123 Facebook Page.

 

 

The image chosen is one that would capture someone’s attention and make them want to know what the ad was about. The image then relates to the copy and the copy to the purpose of the ad. See the use of questions and capitals throughout the copy? This helps make the copy compelling!

 

 

With targeting, the audience in this respect are people in the capital cities within Australia and are aged between 24-50 years old. Note that the gender is left on ‘All’ as it doesn’t matter if the person is male or female. From this targeting we can see that the ‘Estimated Reach’ is 5,299,380. Now, this is quite large and we would have to consider bidding a lot of money to actually reach all those people, so we want to segment the audience further…

 

 

Due to the fact that the business targets small businesses, it was chosen to go by ‘Precise Interest’ and target people that like things that relate to small business.

Web123 also doesn’t want current fans to ‘like’ the page, so the ‘Connections’ is set to ‘Only people who are NOT fans of Web123’. This means that people that are fans won’t see this ad – even if they do fit into the other targets, this target method excludes them.

The other Advanced Demographics and Education & Work do not apply to this ad so those fields are left blank. 

 

 

Finally the Campaign needs setting up. This is the easy part! As you can see the Campaign’s daily budget will be $20 and will run continuously with a Max bid of $1.50.

Want another example? See this one… 

 

 

Fitness club Example

Again, this is another fake ad made up for this blog. The purpose of this ad is to lead people to the website, as you can see ‘External URL’ has been chosen and the URL has been placed in there.

 

 

Because we are working on an External URL destination, this means we can place whatever header we like. This ad is going to Target Men wanting to get fit… with this in mind we specifically type out the audience in the headline so it can act as another way of grabbing your audience’s attention. 

Again utilising capitals on keywords such as WEIGHT, FIT, FREE, NOW act as Call to Actions and mind jogging words to get your viewer to react!  Be careful with your use of all caps though, Facebook doesn’t like your entire heading in capitals.

 

 

As the headline pointed out, this ad is targeting Men in Sydney. So, the ad needs to set the location as Sydney and change the gender to Men. The ‘Estimate Reach’ is now at 1,036,040; because this business is located all around Sydney (hypothetical) they want to target all over Sydney and not exclude anyone. Due to this, the next few targeting steps have been excluded as they are not needed.

 

 

Finally, the Campaign setup! The Campaign Name is chosen along with the budget of $10 per day, an ongoing schedule for the campaign at a bid of $0.96. 

 

 

Measuring and Tracking performance

Once all your ads are created and they are up and running you need to measure and track their performance. It is recommended to keep an eye on it on a daily basis and to change up your ads every 1-2 weeks.

Here are some things you need to understand within the tracking of your ads…

 

Overall Campaign Performance

 

 

The above image shows the overall performance of your campaign, not the individual ads.

Social reach: This is the number of people that saw your ad with the name of their Friends that had liked your page already, hence they ‘liked’ your page.

Reach: The number of individual people that saw your ad.

Targeted: The number of people your ad can reach based on the targeting you selected.

Clicks: Number of people that have clicked on your ad.

Connections: The number of people that have ‘liked’ your page within 24 hours of seeing the ad.

The above example shows high Clicks but low Connections, this means that if we looked at this campaign most of the ads would be leading to an external URL not to the Facebook Page.

 

 

The above image shows additional information in regards to measuring your campaign performance.

The most important aspects in this fata you want to focus on will depend on the purpose of your campaign. If the purpose is to gain more ‘likers’ then you want a high Connections figure or if the purpose is leading them to an external URL you want high Clicks.

Frequency is basically how many times an individual is seeing this ad. The above example means each individual in the audience targeted has seen this ad about 22 times.

 

Individual Ad Tracking

 

Facebook also lets you see statistics for individual ads; these will be presented next to the ad itself. Basically, the ‘reach’, ‘frequency’, ‘social reach’, ‘connections’, ‘clicks’ and ‘CTR’ mean the same as the campaign information but these stats are for the individual ads not the overall campaign.

The Status column allows you to view the status. You can ‘Pause’ or ‘Delete’ ads from this, and if an ad of yours is waiting for approval it will have a ‘clock’ symbol there, and if your ad was disapproved it will have a red circle there instead.

From here you can update your bids by just clicking on the bid and adjusting accordingly. The Price shows how much you are actually paying for that ad, as stated earlier you will always pay less than what you bid.

 

 

Hopefully, this How to Create Ads on Facebook guide gives you a good basis of how you can go about getting your own ads up and going!

Don’t forget that if you have any questions about this process you can leave a comment below and we would love to help you.

If you don’t have Facebook for your business yet and you want to create Ads on Facebook then you should check out this Facebook Kickstarter Package to get you started.