Advertising on Facebook can be extremely profitable, but it can be very costly with little return if not done right. This article will cover how to place Facebook advertising and 19 tips for maximizing your return!

Create a Marketing Plan Based on Objectives

Facebook advertising is just one element of your marketing plan and should be treated as such. You need to be sure you are communicating to your audience through other media such as newsletters; content marketing (blogging), Instagram, etc. Also, learn more about Etsy promoted listings 2019 and beyond.

Before creating and executing any advertising, clearly define your objectives, and be specific.

Here are some example objectives:

1.  I want to increase sales for my birthday invitations for kids under 5 by 20%.
2.  I want to increase wedding themed carving board sales by 25%
3.  I want to build an email list of 1000 subscribers
4.  I want to have 2000 followers on my Facebook page

Once these objectives have been defined, you are ready to create your marketing campaigns, which includes Facebook advertising. Be sure your campaigns have the same look and feel, so your audience can easily identify your brand.

Set-up a Facebook Business Account

While you can set-up ads from your Facebook page; it is best to set-up a business account manager. This interface is specifically designed to manager your advertising and will allow you to create multiple ad campaigns and content posts using a simple dashboard. Other key features include managing your assets, such as targeted audiences, images and videos. They also provide valuable metrics and analytics.

Get Started by going to https//business.facebook.com

1. Click on the CREATE ACCOUNT Button in the upper right-hand corner.
   -If you aren’t currently logged into Facebook, you will be asked to log in.
   -If you don’t have a personal Facebook account, you will need to create one.
2. Create your business account

3. Insert your business name in the appropriate field.

 

4. Add your name and business email address. Select Finish.

Getting to Know Facebook Business Manager

Within the Facebook manager menu, you will be able to create and manage your ads, review metrics, manage your Facebook pixels for your hosted domains, and manage your assets (images, audiences, etc).

Choosing the Right Type of Facebook Campaign

Marketer’s use the term campaign for many things, so don’t get confused by the various campaign types you will see. However, you do need to determine the type of campaign you are going to run before setting up your Facebook ads. Based on the objectives you set, you will want to run any of these campaigns:

• Cold traffic campaigns – marketing tactics specifically focused on new leads, or people who have never heard of you. These campaigns should build your audience and mailing list, create a general interest in your products and make people aware of your brand.
• Remarketing campaigns – marketing tactics focused to people who have heard of you by visiting your website, Facebook page, or who subscribe to your email list. These campaigns generate revenue and build brand loyalty.
• Branding campaigns – marketing tactics that meant to strengthen your brand and awareness of your brand, not necessarily about generating leads.

 Setting up your Facebook Campaign:

The first step is choosing your Facebook campaign type. You are presented with awareness, consideration, and conversion options. Choose your Facebook campaign type based on the type of campaign you want to run from the options above. For example, if you are building your mailing list, then choose Consideration>Engagement>Page Likes. If you want to send people to your website, choose Traffic. If you want sales, choose Conversion.

What is A/B Testing?

Marketers use A/B testing to determine which ads are more effective. This means you create multiple ads and test based on audience or creative. Facebook implements A/B testing for up to 4 ads at one time. Each ad must have a minimum budget of $5.00/day.

A/B Testing Tips:

 

For Creative Testing, choose one thing to change about the ad. For example, use the same text, but change the graphic. Or use the same graphic and change the headline. Doing two, three or four completely different ads does not test a single variable; and might yield a ‘best ad’ approach, but you won’t know why.

For Delivery Optimization, Facebook chooses who to show the ads to based on your audience definition. It will be very important to be specific about your audience (see audience selection below). I suggest letting Facebook automatically place the ads.

For Audience Testing, you define multiple audiences. For example, you may want to test single moms, or you may want to test parents with children of certain ages.

For Placement Testing, Facebook optimizes the placement of the ads across the family of apps. This includes the Facebook feed, instant articles, in-stream videos, right column, marketplace and stories, as well as Facebook Messenger. You can also include the Instagram feed, stories, and the audience network which targets apps and games. Placement is based on your audience definition, so again, be very specific with your audience.

Defining Your Audience

 

Facebook makes it easy to define your target audience for your ads, they offer the following selection:

• Interests and Brands – pages, events, businesses users follow (e.g. target people who like “Facebook Business page”).
• Life events and some profile status – e.g. people who are recently engaged or have children.
• Age and gender.
• People at a specific location – from an entire continent down to a 1 mile radius.
• People who speak a certain language.
• Lookalike Audiences – Lookalike audiences are a very useful type of targeting where you can request Facebook to serve ads to people who are similar to an audience you provide. This could be a mailing list, or people who like your Facebook page. You can also use a Facebook pixel. A Facebook pixel is a piece of code placed on your website which reports conversions, builds audiences and provides insights about how people use your website.  If you have your own website, you can set-up a Facebook pixel, and you can set-up different pixels for different pages and products. Learn more here.

Facebook Ad Building Tools:

Building ads can be simple if you follow these three steps:

1. Create a concise message
2. Use clean and inspiring creative
3. Have a specific call to action based on your objectives.

You can always use the Facebook tool: https://www.facebook.com/ads/creativehub, but there are a few sites you may want to use as a resource:

Canva

Canva offers Facebook Ad templates as part of their general image builder.

You can create multiple variations of your images to test and they have a large image library with free and paid offerings.

Canva services are free, which is a big bonus.

Crello

Crello offers handpicked video collection with hundreds of movies for every design; animated templates for any social platform, in addition to animated objects. Choose templates already set up for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Upgrade to the Pro-version for $19.99/month.

AdEspresso

AdEspresso offers a selection of services for Facebook ads, Instagram and Adwords using a single dashboard for your business. They have several pricing structures, but their services include:

• A/B Creative and testing
• Audience creation
• Scheduling
• Tracking
• Ad management
• Reporting & analysis
• Training programs including webinars and industry examples
• Asset manager
• and more!

 Promo (Videos)

Create beautiful videos for only $39/month using Promo. Choose from pre-packed videos, add your content and you are done! It’s easy, professional, and videos help draw in customers! They can be used on Facebook, Instagram and your own website.

Free Facebook ad grader.

Do you want to if your ads are effective? Check out this free tool that helps grade your ads so you can maximize your return.

https://www.wordstream.com/facebook-advertising

19 Tips for Maximizing Your Advertising Dollars on Facebook

Now that you know the mechanics for setting up ads, we have put together 19 tips for maximizing your return on your ads.

1. Clearly define your audience

You need to reach the right people. If you have a good amount of followers, we suggest looking at your Facebook Audience Insights and chose the “People connected to your page.” This gives you the demographics for your current followers.
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To check the Audience Insights for your own Page head to: https://www.Facebook.com/ads/audience-insights/ and choose the “People connected to your Page” option.

2.  Tell a Great Story

You only have a few seconds to connect with your customers; therefore, you need to tell a great story. You can use video, animation, narrative sequence or static ads. Animated ads have proven to generate at least 1.5x more click-thru rates than other ads; other studies have proven that narrative focused ads increase landing page visits over static ads by similar percentages.

3. Track the right metrics and optimize performance by adjusting parameters in real-time

Based on your goals and objectives you set in the beginning of the campaign, you need to continually evaluate the performance. Here are few questions to ask:

1. What is your click-through rate, is it above or below your expectations
   • If it is below your expectations, take a look at the audience, the budget and placement optimization.
   • You may have great creative, but you might not be targeting the right people. You may be targeting the right people, but your budget might be too low for expectations.
2. What is your engagement rate? Is your creative targeting the right audience?
   • By engagement, are they converting. Are you getting sales, sign-ups, likes? What were your goals and are you reaching them?
   • Again, look at your budget, audience and placement optimization.
3. What is your reach? If you have low reach, you might not have defined the right parameters.
4. • Look at the reach for your ads by the number of views. If your reach is lower than what Facebook said it would be based on their algorithms, you may not have defined the right parameters for your ideal audience. Or again, it may be too low of a budget.

The key to analyzing campaign metrics most effectively is by aligning them to the campaign goal(s). If your goal was to increase sales by 25%, and you have a 30%  click-through rate, but only a 1% increase in sales, you may need to reevaluate your creative, your messaging, your audience, or your offer.

4. Create Dedicated Landing Pages and Lead Generation tools

While Facebook Business Manager provides a lot of metrics inside Facebook Manager, you should also be directing people to landing pages. This way you can track analytics in both Facebook and using Web Analytics. Even Esty shops allow you track your own Google Analytics. Learn more about setting up Web Analytics for your Etsy Shop here.

You can also build landing pages using a variety of tools, like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Lander, Quickpages, iContact, Leadpages. If you are using a CRM, they often have the capabilities to build landing pages. Some of these tools are free; where other have fees associated with it. You need to decide which is best for your business. Example Landing Page is below: