Facebook advertising has evolved into a powerful advertising platform in recent years. It’s allowing the advertiser to find the right customer effectively and accurately. But to use on these powerful features of Facebook ads is quite complicated. Therefore, we need to understand many terms such as target on customers’ interest, lookalike audience calculations, remarketing based on website traffic, and so on. It was dizzying enough because we could start the games.
Don’t worry, this tutorial will start from scratch and gradually explain the most basic operations of placing Facebook ads to help you effectively place your first Facebook ad.
How do Facebook ads work?
If you pay to advertise on Facebook, your ads will have the opportunity to appear in front of customers.
For example, when you are scrolling in your Facebook News Feed, and you are constantly watching about Coffee sharing post, you will sometimes see some “Sponsored” tags regarding Coffee related sponsored, this is actually a placement of an advertisement.
In addition, on the right side of the news feed, you will also see some ads.
Facebook ads are very effective for SMEs
Let’s see what is the reason why Facebook is helpful for SME:
1. Automation of Sales System
Bosses mostly exhausting to managing their business. Therefore, they are not able to spend extra time to learn and manage, therefore most easy to give up on this method. But after we had spent our time to learn the skill, the Facebook advertisement will become an automation sales system and helps our company keep finding new lead even though we are on vacation.
2. Affordable Advertisement Cost
Traditional media advertising such as a billboard or roadside banner is not suitable for small businesses because the entrance fee is very high, easily costs about RM10,000 per insertion, it was too burden and risk to small businesses. Whereas, Facebook advertising will be more thrifty which we could start to advertise start from USD5, and we could clearly know our ROAS (return on ads spend) from the report.
3. Huge database coverage
While I am writing this article, Facebook has more than 2.5 billion users worldwide and 23 million users in Malaysia, which is more than 70% of the population, so basically you can reach any kind of person except the elders who are older and who do not use computers.
4. Precisely Target Audience
You can use hundreds of items to specify advertising audiences, such as gender, region, age, interests, and characteristics such as novice parents, newlyweds, etc., to effectively exclude “non-customers” and accurately bring messages to target customers.
How much does Facebook advertising cost?
When we advertise on Facebook, Facebook will calculate how many visitors see your ad or how many will click on it, so the question is, how much does it cost? Two big factors as below will determine how much is your advertisement cost:
1.The quality or Relevant of Post
Facebook was so taking care of their user bounce rate. What is the bounce rate? For example: If I’m a man, Facebook shows me ads for women’s clothing, and that’s irrelevant. It will reduce my interest to continue scrolling in my news feed. But if the ads are related to my interest, we are not might continue reading on them even though it was a sponsored post. Facebook understands this, so it rewards some “relevant” and “high quality” ads, which will get higher exposure at a lower price.
2. Audience spending power
This is mainly related to competition. For example, if your audience is Malaysian, the price will be higher than in Bangladesh. This phenomenon is because the spending power of Malaysian is higher than Bangladesh, and brands will calculate the advertising effectiveness based on returns, so they will be willing to pay higher fees to expose advertisements to Malaysians. However, we do not need to worry too much about this, what we should concern was, find the most suitable audience for your products and services.
Getting started with Facebook ads
Before I start to explain, I would like to mention that many DIY SMEs would like to “Boost Post” method. I am personally don’t recommend this. There are many restrictions on this feature, such as the inability to specify marketing goals, restrictions on interest settings, and restrictions on some bids. Instead, you should use Ads Manager to serve and manage your ads. With Ad Manager, you can achieve the same effect as Boost Post does, moreover, it can be more precisely on audience setting. You can also choose other more effective marketing strategies based on your advertising objective.
Create your first ad with Ads Manager
I highly recommend you use a computer to operate the advertising manager. Although the mobile phone also has ads management apps, the phone app settings sometimes have some technical problems. To work with more effectively, my image is a screenshot from the desktop version. I will assume you already have a personal Facebook account. You can click the triangle in the upper right corner of the homepage after Facebook login, and you will see the option of “Create Ad“:
Step 1: Set your advertising goals
After entering, the first setting is “Marketing Objective“.
Facebook has three broad categories of goals, which are Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Each category has different individual goals, a total of eleven different goals, it was confusing. With different types of marketing objectives, Facebook will help you find the most suitable and best audience to see your ads, so it is important to set the right goals to match your business goals. But understanding all the target traits and how to use will require a whole article. Therefore, I suggest that novices can choose one of the following:
1. Immediately Selling
The benefit of immediate sales is to immediately obtain profits, reinvest back in advertising costs, and quickly increase customers and businesses. On the contrary, the disadvantage is that most competitors want to sell immediately, and not many people are willing to buy immediately, so depending on the industry and competition, it may not be easy to obtain a positive return. If you want to try to sell immediately, make a post to sell the product or service, and then select “Traffic” as the goal. Traffic means that you want to bring your advertising audience to your website and then sell on the website.
But what about if you don’t have a website?
In fact, I would highly recommend that you first make a website. You can use refer to this article How to Create a Website to DIY your own website. However, if you really can’t make a website, for the time being, you can also use this traffic target to take users to your Facebook Messenger messaging tool, and let the user PM private message to you to query or order purchase.
2. Increase Pages Follower
The advantage is your page’s followers will notify your promotions or new products in the future. The more fans, the more people will receive the notification. Of course, we have to pay attention to some tips on how to effectively attract likes and turn fans into customers. Otherwise, you will spend a lot of money to save like but eventually no business. Choose “Engagement” and select “Page Likes” approach, therefore Facebook will use their calculation mode to help you find the most people like your page.
If you have a popular post been liked and shared by many people, you can also use “Post Engagement” to boost it. This can viral by likes and shares, so that can attract more people through your post.
Not sure what to choose? If not sure, I suggest trying to sell immediately, which is the goal of “Traffic”.
3. Campaign Budget Optimization
In terms of budget, set a single-day budget that you want to spend each day. The higher the budget, the higher the number of contacts. The minimum daily budget is USD1 in Malaysia. For beginners, a minimum of USD5-10 per day is considered good.
Step 2: Set your audience
This part is the most powerful feature of Facebook ads. This is the most critical part of cause your advertisement successful. Choose the accurate audience and your ads can get you high-quality customers at a low cost. On the contrary, if chosen to imprecise audiences, your advertisements will continue to be displayed to the people who will never visit you, incurring advertising costs.
1. Custom Audience
Custom audience is a very effective function, but it is more advanced. You need to install the pixel and have a certain amount of traffic before it can be used effectively. As novices may skip it for now.
2. Location, age, gender and language
If your target audience is Malaysian, choose “Malaysia” for location. For regional businesses such as restaurants, retail stores, etc., be aware of who can set “Live this place“, “Recently here“, or “Travel here” in the location. Furthermore, you can also enter an address and let Facebook help you find an audience within a custom kilometer.
Age, gender, and language settings you can check the data from the Facebook report after you run your ads to find out more about which audiences are best for you.
3. Detailed Targeting
You can set “Demographic“, “Interests” and “Behavior” here. For example, you can browse the viewing options and choose for example relationship status to target on insurance business, baby product or wedding-related products. You can also choose an industry or occupation, which is more suitable for some B2B businesses. Of course, there are many interesting conditions, such as photography, fitness, computer technology, cooking, etc. We may try to enter interest keywords to search.
Besides that, we have a small tip of this detailed marketing which is setting your competitor’s page name as your keyword. For instance, one of our clients is selling coffee capsule, their big competitor is Nespresso. I can set the audience to be interested in their page.
This is the most effective and easiest way to accurately set the target customer.
4. Audience Size
You may ask, which range is a considerable good quantity? The number of precise customer groups should be bound to be small. If the number of audiences is too large, the accuracy of the audience will decrease. However, you also need to understand the principle of “audience fatigue” in Facebook advertising operations. If your audience is 10,000 and Facebook help you reach 1,000 customers a day. In a short period of time, your ads will be repetitive to the same audience. Just imagine if your ads continue to running several months, everyone will have seen the ad several times, even dozens of times.
The phenomenon will be that customers who have patronized you have already patronized, and those who are not interested in you will continue to be uninterested in you. Hence, the effectiveness of your advertisement will continue to decline until it returns to zero. The solution is drastically to change the content of your ad or change your audience.
In conclusion, you must change ads or audiences before the same ad reaches the same audience too many times. Besides, you can see the contact frequency in the advertising data. Ideally, an ad should ideally not reach the same audience more than 2-3 times within 7 days, and the total frequency of contact should not exceed 4-5 times.
You can change your audience or ads every two weeks to a month within 10,000 – 100,000. This situation should allow you to have high advertising accuracy and low cost per click and traffic. Of course, it depends on your budget. The bigger the budget, the more contacts you have daily, and the higher the frequency of updates.
If you only want to set it once, then use it repeatedly for several months or even more than one year, you need to set the audience in the range of 500,000 – 1,000,000+. Therefore, your audience will not be bombed by your ads for a long time. No fatigue. However, the relative accuracy of ads will be low, and the cost per click and traffic will be relatively high.
5. Placements, Optimization & Spending Controls
In terms of placements, I recommend using “Automatic Placement” for the time being. After the ad data appears, you can learn more about how to optimize your placements.
Other settings such as advertising optimization and spending control, I recommend that novices do not need to change the preset at all. Facebook’s default settings are good enough for newbies for the time being.
Step 3: Ad Text Image
If you use “Traffic” as your goal, you can choose to promote an existing post as an ad text image or create a new ad with a new image and text.
1. Add Image
If you are not sure which one to use, I suggest that novices can choose “Create Ad” with “Add Media“, which will have less complicated issues.
Especially if you use a Messenger private message as your destination, you must create a new ad to do so.
When you create a new ad, you will see that there are many different format options. I suggest that you can test different formats later, now we make the simplest “Add Image” to upload your image.
Facebook recommends you upload an image with a size of 1200 x 628px or 1000 x 1000px. If you are not sure, you can refer your friend who doing graphic design. It can be easily done in photoshop or firework. Besides that, Facebook allows adding a maximum of 6 images for one ad setting.
2. Drive advertising traffic to your website
3. Send Message Via Messenger
If you want to bring people into Messenger and ask them to privately inquire and place orders, select “Messenger” as the destination. Setting up Messenger content is a bit complicated, but for the first time, you can set up with the most basic reply. After the suggestion, you can learn to add this function by using the Messenger Bot message robot.
4. Add Primary Text
Add Primary Text and call to action are the text of your ad. After you enter the text, it will immediately let you see the effect.
Other advanced options such as “URL Parameters” and “Tracking” are more advanced. If you don’t understand, you can skip it temporarily.
5. Like Page
Like Page ad settings, Like Pages have fewer like ads than the settings above, but they do the same. Upload pictures and enter text to attract interested users. LIKE likes your page.
After advertising, what about the performance is not satisfactory?
It ’s normal to post the first Facebook ad, and the results and returns are not as good as expected! Even though done by expertise, when it came across to advertising on an uninvested product and customer base, it is difficult to get achieve goals from the very beginning. The essence of online promotion is continuous testing and keep optimization. Here are a few optimization methods:
1. A / B test
A / B test is to set two separate ads with the same settings except for one variable. The goal is to understand the variable effect. For example, you can A / B test with the audience, create two ads with the same text and images but in audience settings only change in one setting, such as testing two different interests. Run two ads on the same budget, run them for a minimum of 48-72 hours, and review the data. If one of the clicks has a lower cost, it proves that that audience is more likely to be attracted to your ad and click on your ad. You can also A / B test your pictures and text. The principle is the same, copy the audience settings, set the picture or text as a variable, and then view and compare the benefits.
2. Facebook Pixel
Facebook Pixel is a code that lets you install on your website. To explain briefly, when your website has visitors, the installed pixel will pass some information to Facebook to let it know which page of your website the person came from. You can use this information to set up a group called “custom audiences” to do remarketing.
3. Lookalike audience
When you had stored up a certain amount of traffic from your pixel, use this custom audience to set up a lookalike audience. Facebook uses the characteristics of people who have customized your audience to figure out a similar audience. Using this audience will be more effective than setting your audience in the vast ocean. After setting up a similar audience, you can add other basic settings such as interests and behaviors to improve accuracy.
Non-related foreigners like on your post or your pages?
Finally, after the first try to placing your advertisement, you are facing issue on many non-related foreigners like on your post or your pages, why? This is because Facebook calculates that foreign workers have the greatest chance to interact, it is given priority to them. Then, come up with the second question, how could I exclude them? If possible, using “Traffic” or “Conversion” to cooperate with the website for sales will solve most of the problems. Of course, your goal may not be sales, or you don’t have a website. What can you do? There are several other ways should help.
1. Language
If your target audience is Chinese, set the audience language to Chinese.
2. Exclude people who match
Use exclusion conditions example someone from a country, but not the one who lives in that country.
Facebook ad placement and management are not easy, I hope this article gives you a good guide to get started. If you haven’t posted Facebook ads, I suggest you follow the teaching and gradually try to run your first ad, even if the monthly budget of USD100-150, it can bring good results. It takes time and investment to effectively use Facebook advertising tools, but it is well worth the return when you do it well and become an automated sales machine for you in the long run.