Fundamentals of
Facebook Ads

Learn Facebook Ads in five steps

Step one - fundamentals

Facebook Ads allow your brand to reach thousands of potential website visitors and customers in a low cost, effective manner. Whilst SEO and other organic channels take time to attract website visitors, Facebook Ads can bring immediate traffic to your website.

Multiple factors make up a Facebook Ads campaign including account and campaign structure, audience targeting, budgets, ad creatives and much more. Each company will have a different approach to managing Facebook ads, depending on their brand and the journey users take before becoming customers.

As Facebook owns Instagram, when you set up a Facebook Ads campaign, you will have the option to also run your ads across Instagram.

Whilst there can be complexity in creating and managing Facebook campaigns, one rule should be emphasised above all else:

You need to have a great offer and a genuine reason for someone to click on your ad.

In the digital strategy section, we covered how understanding customers (their needs, frustrations, aspirations etc) was key to providing value (solving a problem, helping them, making things easier etc). We covered how content marketing, not advertising, was now the most effective method of gaining initial customer attention and brand awareness.

In the SEO section, we covered how to use keyword research to find content marketing topics which would attract large amounts of traffic to your website.

All these considerations come into play when creating Facebook ads.

Unlike SEO which is intent-driven (i.e. people searching for specific keywords through Google), Facebook ads are a disruptive medium. You need to give people a reason to stop scrolling through their news feeds and notice your ads. Creating ads which promote value-based content (i.e. helping the user) is the key to maximizing click-through rates.

As mentioned in the digital strategy section, paid mediums (such as Facebook ads) are simply the communication channel for reaching potential customers. You can have the largest budgets, the best campaign structure and the most optimized ad account but if you’re promoting products/services people don’t see any value in (i.e. a reason to click), the ads will underperform.

The performance of Facebook ads will be largely dependent on only two things:

The messaging within your ads (which customers can relate to) and the value users will receive once they click on the ad.

The quality of your creative assets including images, videos, design, originality etc. Does your ad stand out in the cluttered news feed?

Bland generic ads will simply blend in with the hundreds of other content pieces people see when quickly scrolling through their news feed – you need to give people a reason to stop scrolling. Ads need to be highly relevant and relatable to receive attention which is why developing a strong understanding of your customers is the most vital step.

The performance of Facebook Ads can be highly dependent on the type of industry you are in, the type of business and customers you have and the products/services you sell. An approach (e.g. campaign structure, targeting, budgets etc) which works well for one business may not work well for another.

Tip

The key to successful Facebook Ads (and digital marketing in general) is 80% testing and finding which targeting, creatives, placements, budgets etc work the best for achieving the goals for your specific business.

Once your ads are running, the majority of your time will be spent measuring results to find which audiences are the most responsive and which ad formats are performing the best. These insights will help guide decisions for creating future ads, allocating new budgets, targeting specific audiences etc.

The most effective approach to managing Facebook Ads is to have a specialist who spends the majority of their time within the platform.

Not only does this provide time to properly analyze daily performance across campaigns, ad sets and ads but also allows for optimizations as soon as possible. For example, if you notice the cost-per-acquisition of leads suddenly drops, you can quickly add more budget to reach more users and attract additional potential customers.

If someone is jumping between Facebook Ads, Google Ads, SEO, Social Media etc, there is simply no time (or focus) to properly manage and improve campaigns. Whilst Facebook is an established platform, new features and options are continually being added (and removed).

A specialist is much better positioned to understand all advertising features (resulting in using the platform to its full potential) opposed to someone who can only spend a few minutes a day checking on ads.

If you decide to use an agency to manage your Facebook ads, choose one specialised in your business type and industry (e.g. eCommerce businesses within the sporting goods industry). These agencies will have a range of data, insights and knowledge gained from clients (who are similar to your brand) which can help ensure your Facebook ad performance will be optimized from the start.

Using content marketing to create Facebook ads

Understanding the customer journey – awareness, consideration and action – is key to creating ads tailored to each stage of the journey. These tailored ads achieve much better results and more conversions than generic mass market ads (e.g. buy our product now) sent out to everyone. You wouldn’t show an ad trying to sell an $800 product to an audience who have never heard of the brand or shown any interest in the product.

Content marketing can help improve the performance of Facebook ads by providing an initial contact point for customers to notice your brand. Rather than pushing a product at first contact, content can offer value and an incentive for people to click on the ad and visit your website. SEO keyword research can help highlight which topics are most popular and in-demand which can guide which content pieces you base your ads on.

Tip

Instead of the traditional approach of pushing sales-based ads trying to achieve an immediate sale, content-based ads provide value first. People are more receptive to this approach as ads no longer appear disruptive or annoying but instead help them by solving a problem, learning something new, providing value etc.

Many brands quickly create ads and then spend the majority of their time ‘optimising campaigns’ (by adding more money to budgets, additional targeting etc) due to ads underperforming. Spend the majority of your time creating ads based on customer research and value creation.

Once people have clicked on an initial content-based ad and visited your website, you can show these users a follow-up more sales-based ad through retargeting.

You can gauge how interested users are in your brand by measuring how long they stay on your website. Someone who spends 3 minutes reading a content piece and then visits other pages would be more interested than someone who only stays for ten seconds then leaves. Facebook has automatic tracking (through the Facebook pixel) which helps measure this type of engagement.

Facebook ads and the customer journey

A company with a longer customer journey may use a variety of campaigns and ads to convert Facebook traffic into paying customers.

First, they may use general branding ads (i.e. how they provide value to customers) to attract people to their website. Then, visitors who have expressed a genuine interest in the brand/products will be shown product-focused ads (i.e features and benefits of the products). If users return to the site and spend a good amount of time viewing individual products, ads encouraging purchase can be shown (e.g. sales and discounts, free trials etc).

A business which sells low-cost products (such as t-shirts, accessories etc) may only use top-level broad-based advertising as their customer journey is much shorter. There is no need for a user to visit the website multiple times to learn more about the product or brand. This type of product can be promoted directly (i.e. a simple price and ‘buy now’ option) to users in the first ad they see.

As you plan your Facebook ads approach, consider the type of product/service you have and the resulting customer journey. Some brands will have many campaigns and ads running across cold/warm/hot audiences whilst others will promote their products directly to cold audiences only.

Facebook ad structure:

Facebook ad accounts are structured across three levels:

Campaign type (i.e. the objective you’re trying to achieve – such as lead form signups or product purchases)
Ad sets (i.e. audience and interest targeting)
Ads (creative pieces and differing ad formats – videos, images etc)

Campaign type:

When advertising on Facebook, you have a range of pre-set campaign objectives to choose from across awareness, consideration and conversion categories.

Ad sets and audiences:

Ad sets contain various ads within your overall campaign and are based around audience selection and interest targeting.

Rather than creating audiences from scratch, you can create specific audiences in the ‘Audiences’ section of Business Manager and save them to be used in future campaigns.

Ads:

Facebook Ads are available in a variety of formats including single image or video, carousel or collection ads. An ad set will ideally feature a variety of ads in different formats (such as images and videos) as people respond differently to certain formats. If you only use video to promote your brand, those who prefer images may skip over and ignore your ad entirely.

Budgets:

When deciding how to allocate funds across campaigns and ad sets, you can retain manual control or have Facebook decide on the best allocation.

Manual control is known as ABO (Ad Set Budget Optimisation) and budgets are set at the ad set level. Facebook’s AI control is known as CBO (Campaign Budget Allocation) and budgets are set at the overall campaign level (encompassing all ad sets).

ABO allows you to set individual budgets for each ad set within a campaign. The budget is allocated across all the ads within an ad set. If one particular ad is performing much better than others, Facebook will automatically allocate more funds to that particular ad within the ad set. This allows the strong performing ad to have an even greater reach.

CBO will allocate the budget across all ad sets within a campaign and may allocate more funds to an ad set (i.e. a particular audience) which is performing better than others.

This concludes step one of learning Facebook Ads (fundamentals). In step two (planning a campaign), we’ll cover how to avoid many common mistakes brands make when planning their ad campaigns. You’ll also learn the different types of audiences available to target on Facebook and how to develop ad creatives which attract attention from the first glance.