The Five Most Common Facebook Ad Questions I Get Asked
I’ve been running Facebook Ads for myself and my clients for over 3 years, and over that tim...
Read article
5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I First Ran Facebook Ads
Having run Facebook ads for five years for myself and my clients, there has been a lot of things I’ve learnt. Some of the lessons really hurt, in both my confidence and my pocket, but that’s like everything. There are some steep learning curves with Facebook Ads, and today I hope others overcome these learning curves.
1. Manage Your Expectations
Facebook Ads can be AMAZING for your business, generating you large numbers of leads and sales at a good cost. That said, don’t expect these amazing results on day 1. Facebook Ads need to be tested and optimised over many days and weeks, before you can start getting good results. Over that time, you need to be willing to spend money, with no guarantee of results.
What you will get however is data on what audiences and ads work best. With this data, you can optimise your ads to get the best results. But to get to that stage, you have to be happy to spend, and be patient. The long term results will be so worth it however, I promise you that!
2. Targeting is so, so key
Precise targeting of your Ads is absolute paramount to success. It’s not just a case of getting a great image/video, writing a bit of copy and publishing your Ad to the world. That just doesn’t work. You need to be aware of your target audiences, and then program your Facebook Ad Sets to target only those people.
And with Facebook Ads, compared to many other marketing methods, you’re really able to precisely target thanks to a chunk of different targeting options:
-Location
Location is where exactly in the world do you want to show your ads to. This will rely heavily on what exactly you offer.
-Custom & Lookalike Audiences
Custom audiences are a specific group of people you’re targeting. Typically the audience group must include at least 1000 active Facebook profiles for the ads to start.
-Interests
Facebook has 1000s of different pieces of information on users about what they like, what they do, how they shop etc. A near endless list of useful information, all you need to do is target interests that your ideal target audience would have.
-Demographics
Facebook also holds other information that can be so useful for you:
-Age
-Gender
-Languages spoken
3. Monitor your Ads several times a day
As established in lesson 1, you need to constantly be testing, measuring and optimising your Ads. You can’t simply launch some to the world and leave them for a week. Well, you can do that — if you want to waste your money and get little if any results.
But just how often do you need to monitor your Ads and make changes if applicable? I’ve tested many frequencies, from daily to hourly. You can’t go too far wrong with 3–4 checks a day. If you’re spending a lot of money, there is definitely an argument for checking more often.
That said, there is no perfect formula for all. And as with every other aspect of your Facebook Ads, test and measure different monitoring routines. You also have the ability to set up automated rules for your Ads which can make changes depending on the rules you set, which in theory replaces the need to monitor so often.
However I’ve always found the automatic rules to be no replacement for a human manually monitoring. But they’re good for looking after your Ads for an evening whilst you’re having date night etc
4. Focus on two goals — getting your ad viewed, and then clicked
Facebook Ads come with so many different metrics — impressions, views, clicks, conversions, frequency, engagement, the list is endless. And that is absolutely great, don’t get me wrong.
But you want to primarily focus on just two — views and clicks. These are the two metrics that make the difference between Ad success, and Ad failure. Why is this? Because there are 5 steps to your Facebook Ads:
- Stage 1 — Your Ads are live and start to be shown to people in your specified target audience
- Stage 2 — People start to view the ads because, if you’ve read my previous post on 3 ways to get more views in your ads, you’ve created ads that stand out and appeal to people as they’re scrolling through their newsfeeds.
- Stage 3 — Some of the people who took the time to view and read your ad like what they see, so much so they click on the ad or link inside of it. This is usually associated with an offer or call to action — Click to get your free guide today!
- Stage 4 — They land on your landing page and see what you have to offer in further detail.
- Stage 5 — They take the action you’re asking of them. Often it will be submitting an email address for your guide or something similar to that. This could also include buying a product, watching a video, signing up for a webinar/event — the list goes on.
The less views you have at stage 2 — the less clicks you get, and the less conversions (sales, opt ins, signups). And the more clicks you have at stage 3, the more conversions you’ll get. It’s a simple case of the compound effect.
Start by getting your views up — and then your clicks. And eventually, you can look to optimise your landing page and offer.
5. My opinion is irrelevant
Now this is an interesting one. Each of us have the blessing of our own opinions on literally anything, including our own Ads. It’s very tempting to put together copy or an image for an Ad, and think it’s amazing.
But you can’t do that — you need to think about what your target audience would like, what would attract them and make them view your Ad. That will give you a good basis for your Ads. BUT, going forward you need to start letting the results (views, clicks) tell you what your audience.
There’s no need for our own opinions, or any assumptions about what works or doesn’t (never ASSUME, it just makes an ass of you and me!) — simply run some Ads, measure the results, run some more and compare. Only keep running Ads that your audience prefers.
Oh, and even when you’ve tested tonnes of Ads and have found the perfect one, that doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax. Oh no!
Inevitably your audience will get sick of your Ads, even those they love — so you need to test some new ones and repeat the process. Everybody's preferences adapt, just make sure you keep up!
A Gift For You
As a thank you for reading today I want to offer you free copies of our guides.
Helping our clients fill their events and webinars, or supporting them to do so themselves, via Facebook Ads is something we do 365 days a year.
How do we do this?
Through our done for you and done with you services that you can learn more about here.
Whilst you’re here, I’d like to invite you to learn how The Marketeer continually filled the UK’s market-leading portfolio builder and property educator webinars and events over the last 24 months.
Sell more. Inspire more. Change more lives.
Take care,
Dan
Copyright © The Marketeer 2019 - 2022
Related Posts
Contact
Get In TouchFree Resources
Free eBooks© Copyright 2021 The Marketeer | All Rights Reserved
Website design and maintenance by
