So if you have participated in such a conversation, if you were also against Facebook ads, then you will be interested in our opinion.
We are sure that those who blame advertising with Facebook Ads, would have a completely opposite opinion if, after the first failed attempt, they took some time to study how to use it successfully.
But the truth is that searching the internet, we had a hard time finding useful information about Facebook ads.
So we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably not the mindset of those who blame Facebook, but rather the lack of a complete guide, breaking down Facebook advertising step-by-step from experts who want to share their knowledge.
All of you who had the interest to study further, you will see that by the end of this article you will have a deep understanding of how Facebook ads work, and you will no longer feel like you are throwing your money into the ocean!
So let’s see how we can help you!
We will go through the entire process step by step, from research to submitting your ad. We will share all the secrets that the best advertisers around the world use to optimize results.
You can see the contents of the article below:
Why do you want to advertise on Facebook?
What forms of Facebook advertising are there?
What are Facebook’s ad levels?
The mistakes you should avoid
The first step is awareness
The second step is evaluation
The last step is to convert the audience into customers
How to choose an advertising budget
How to make a Facebook ad step by step
What do I do after creating the ad?
What are custom and lookalike audiences?
Epilogue: Are you ready to advertise?
Why do you want to advertise on Facebook?
Like it or not, it is the biggest human interaction platform on the planet and certainly in Greece. Despite its size, the number of active users increases year by year.
Just consider that 90% of global advertisers consider it to be the most effective paid advertising. And this, because if used correctly it can bring huge profits.
Second, the way it works rewards smaller businesses, provided it is used properly.
Finally, the cost of advertising with Facebook Ads compared to that of Google Ads advertising is significantly lower.
But how does it work and why is it efficient?
Facebook has a huge database of its users’ data, their behavior and their interests.
As a result, if you help it Facebook knows who you want to promote your activity to better than you. Even without help, Facebook will find your target customer, but it will cost dearly!
As a result it can deliver highly targeted ads to people who are more likely to buy.
The reason Facebook provides this feature is to give its users a pleasant browsing experience and secondly to make more money from you.
Therefore, it wants to find as many customers as possible for you, so that you will be satisfied and choose it again tomorrow for advertising.
So let’s see how it works through my personal experience:
Recently, I searched for a Facebook page, which is about online piano lessons. Facebook recognized my choice and started sending me similar suggestions that apparently match my interest in piano lessons.
The suggestions that appear during my browsing are so nicely integrated that I don’t get frustrated. Instead, they attract my attention even more.
Unfortunately, for Facebook Ads I did not complete a purchase because I was interested in promoting the page and not the courses. Although I would love to know sometime…
Once he realized I didn’t continue playing the piano, he stopped offering me similar ads and started something different that matched my new interests.
But how do I understand that this is an advertisement?
There are three things that help you know you’re seeing an ad:
- You’ll see the word ‘sponsored’ right below the name of the page you’re promoting.
- You will see a call-to-action button in the lower right corner, prompting you to take some action, such as:
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As you understand, the ads are subtle to the point that many times you don’t understand that it is an ad.
You’ll rarely say you saw an annoying Facebook ad. This means that most of the time you pay commensurate attention to your friends’ posts.
So nothing to do with TV, radio, YouTube or website ads.
Facebook wants to ensure that its users continue to feel good, without being distracted from what they care about and want to spend their time on.
This is its main advantage compared to other means of promotion.
So in simple words, advertising with Facebook Ads means that you pay to present your products or your activity on the home page of specific people you target.
What forms of Facebook advertising are there?
There are five different forms of advertising that you can use in your promotion:
Pictures or Videos
Switching
Collection
Carousel
Immediate experience
Playable source file
To avoid confusion, you will only use the images or videos option to begin with. We’ll leave the rest for later!
As for where you can place them, you also have many options such as:
Facebook home page
Facebook sidebar
Audience network, are ads that are placed within common websites, applications and games.
And Instagram, where it offers a correspondingly beautiful browsing experience like Facebook.
How to manage Facebook Ads?
There are two tools that give you the ability to manage, Facebook Business Suite and Facebook Ads Manager.
Don’t worry, we’ll leave the Business Suite for the future, because managing Facebook ads is a smoother process.
What are the advertising levels of Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads organizes ads in three different levels.
Facebook Ads campaign
The first stage is advertising and is the most general and vague level of advertising. The only thing you will declare at this level is your goal.
Simply put, why are you advertising. The options you are given are divided into three different categories, awareness, rating for purchase and conversion.
So if you want to find new interested customers, then you will choose conversion!
Advertising set
The next level is ad sets, where you will state the type of ad you wish to run and the audience you want the ads to be served to.
Facebook Ads offer the ability to target people who are in a specific area, with particularly high precision.
Beyond location, you’ll choose the gender and age you’re targeting.
You will choose the special characteristics of your audience so that they are more suited to your ideal customer.
For example, here you will state that your target is women, aged 25 – 45, living in Crete, interested in women’s bags and cosmetics.
For each audience you specify, Facebook Ads shows you the estimated reach your ad set can have.
Attention: It is not the number of people who will see the ad, nor of those who will convert into customers.
Please note that a campaign can have several ad sets.
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The last layer is the ads. At this stage we design the ad and decide its appearance, titles and subtitles, text, images or video, the prompt that the Call-to-action button will have in the lower right part of the ad.
Here you can design several different ads, which will be part of the same ad set.
The reason we give you this option is to test the performance of each ad. More details on this topic can be found below!
Now that we have clarified the stages of advertising, the most basic information that we add to them, let’s look at the points that most people make a mistake.
The mistakes you should avoid
Let’s be clear, Facebook Ads are not Google Adwords!
We can’t think the same way we do in other advertising situations when running an ad on Facebook.
To understand this, just think about what you do when you search on Google. In most cases you are probably looking for a specific piece of information. This is why keywords are so important.
But what do you do when you’re on Facebook?
You want to have a good time, learn about your friends, share something that impressed you, and see news that impressed others.
With this in mind, we understand that advertising with Facebook Ads should offer a corresponding experience to its users, specifically to your interested customers.
So you don’t want to distract them with tacky ads, nor do you want to simply pitch your product just asking them to buy.
This is the main reason why 70% of small businesses fail at Facebook advertising!
Facebook Ads enables you to build a Sales Funnel, a journey that your prospective customer will go through, from the moment they contact you to the point where they complete one or more purchases.
Therefore, you want to take advantage of all the campaign types that Facebook Ads offers you for your advertisement, which as we have seen is awareness, evaluation and finally conversion!
The first step is awareness
Before anything else you want to grab the attention of your potential customers. To achieve this you need to offer content that entertains them, makes them better or helps them solve some of the problems that are bothering them.
The ultimate goal of this step is to draw them to your website and ideally to sign up for your newsletter.
At this point, you are creating something particularly powerful that you should always keep in mind. The audience that visited your page is now recognized by Facebook as an interested customer.
Therefore, he will easily find him to send him the rest of the ads that you implement and intend to evaluate or sell!
This audience for Facebook Ads is the Custom Audience and is essentially the best way to target customers since they are the ones who have shown interest in you.
The second step is evaluation
Having found your target audience, you can send them invitations or offers that will convert them into customers.
Therefore, in this stage you will create advertisements that are directed to those who have visited your website in the previous stage, awareness.
So you can offer them a free guide on how to choose the right product or partner. You mean of course on your subject.
At this point, you want to get their emails at the lowest possible cost!
Your audience targeting at this step should be easy, too. Simply send these ads to the custom audience of past website visits you just created!
The last step is to convert the audience into customers
Having done all of the above, you want to send them your sales pitch.
Your proposal must be particularly attractive, so you should understand the principles of copywriting.
So to recap, your first campaign will connect you with your audience, the second will help them value and trust you, and the third will make them customers.
So let’s see how you will do your advertisement, having all the above as a basis.
How to choose an advertising budget
As you already understand, you should always run more than one ad at the same time.
But how much money will you invest in each of them?
To answer this question you must first think about the cost of the product or service you offer, the number of sales you want to achieve and the conversion rate of the audience that showed interest into customers.
So let’s say your product value is €1,000 and you want to sell 10 products, meaning you aim to have a total revenue of €10,000.
If the conversion rate is 2%, you will need 10 sales / 2% conversion rate, which equals 500 hits to your page.
So what you want to know is how much it will cost to get those 500 hits.
So this should be the number of customers that Facebook Ads calculates that you will acquire during the period of time that the ad is running. Therefore, you will set the budget that gives you the desired number, according to the previous reasoning.
You have two options for your campaign budget, daily and one-time budget. To begin with, you will choose the daily one!
Having selected a daily budget, Facebook Ads will not allow you to set an ad schedule. Don’t worry about this at first, since Facebook does a great job of finding your audience.
In addition to your budget amount, you’ll need to set the campaign bidding strategy you want Facebook to charge you for. At this point we will start with the “lowest cost” option and when you gain enough experience you will choose one of the remaining options.
Attention: It is better to check our ad budget in the next step, in the ad set options. Therefore, we recommend disabling the option in question.
The above choices will be made at the campaign level.
Next, we’ll move on to ad sets where you’ll choose how you want Facebook Ads to optimize ad delivery.
So you’ll choose whether you want it to work for conversions, link clicks, or impressions.
How to make a Facebook ad step by step
To be able to use Facebook Ads, you must have created a Facebook page.
To get started you will need to go to Facebook Ads management.
Select create a new campaign and select the desired campaign objective, as discussed above.
Turn off the campaign budget so we can control the cost of each ad set individually.
And proceed to the next step, which is to create the campaign ad set, by selecting the “next” button at the bottom right.
Here we will initially select the time frame we want our ad to be active.
Set a small amount of money to start with so you have better control over the results.
Regarding the expiration date, you can leave it blank or set a duration of one month.
And then, we choose our common goal, just like we analyzed before.
The estimated reach you want the ad to have after the adjustments you make to determine your audience should be 100,000 to 500,000 people.
To achieve this, we will narrow down our audience based on the characteristics we think are most meaningful. If it’s age then we’ll narrow down the age range, if it’s location we’ll narrow down the area.
In each case we need to select their interests, with detailed targeting options, to match what we offer.
In special cases, when we want to reach an audience that is in one region but speaks another language, as for example happens with tourists during the summer, you can choose it.
At this point, you may see that the estimated reach will be less than 100,000. To increase it, you can add regions.
If that doesn’t make sense, and you think that’s how you should proceed, then leave the audience as it is.
Next, you’ll need to state the medium you want Facebook Ads to place your ads on. Select manual placements and select the media you wish to view.
For starters, we recommend Facebook and Instagram!
You are given the possibility to choose in even greater detail the display points on each display medium.
Next, you’ll indicate how you’d like Facebook to optimize the delivery of your ads. Depending on the goal you have set you should adjust it as we saw above.
In the cost control option we suggest you leave it blank.
Then select the “next” button at the bottom right.
The next stage is the creation of the ad, where we will define its appearance and content.
First, you will choose the format of the ad you want. In your first steps in Facebook Ads advertising we suggest you choose an image and a video.
After all, for starters we want to understand how ads work, so they should be as simple as possible. So a picture!
So choose the image you want for your ad by selecting add image.
Two points that you should pay attention to when choosing the image to use, are the simplicity of the image and its dimensions.
In other words, choose a simple image (ideally with a face) and don’t write a lot of text on it!
And second, choose dimensions according to Facebook’s image dimension specifications.
The next information you need to add is the text of the ad, its title and description.
Remember that you need to devote enough energy to this point because it is crucial to the effectiveness of the ad. Read more information about what copywriting is and you will be surprised by how much improvement you will notice.
In short, you want your headline text to catch your readers’ attention enough to make them curious enough to open the description.
In which you should mention useful information, which will make them choose the call-to-action button you have chosen.
Finally, you’ll select the prompt that appears above the call-to-action button.
Remember that the most effective call to action is “learn more”, so we suggest you make the most of it.
Once you’re done with all of the above, select the “publish” button at the bottom right.
Facebook will evaluate your ad and send you a notification when it is accepted and goes live.
What do I do after creating the ad?
Go to your ad set and turn it off. Select edit and go to ad set placement options.
Our purpose in this step is to place the ad set in a single medium and spot so that we can check its performance.
Therefore, we remove from the options all the rest so that we only have the Facebook Ads updates in the “feeds” option. If you think your ad would also fit on Instagram then choose the Instagram feed as well.
As you can see, we have limited where our ad will appear, but for starters this shouldn’t concern us.
Create two more ad sets for A/B testing
At this point you need to pay special attention!
An options window will appear where you will need to define the reason you are copying.
Choose to create a test to compare a new ad set with the original. Select two (2) copies at least.
In the window that opens (advertising set) choose a different placement for each.
This way you will know in which placement your ad brings the best results.
A/B testing of ads
Similar to ad sets we will do the same actions for ads. But now we are not interested in the placement of the advertisement but its appearance!
The only thing we will change in the two ad sets we just made are the ad photos. Nothing else!
This step will help us choose which one works best for this campaign.
A great option to design images to Facebook’s dimensional specifications is to use Canva or Adobe Spark.
After you are done with the photo changes, choose to publish the ad sets.
Finally, enable the original ad sets and ads to run together!
Wait at least 48 hours and make decisions
Facebook Ads will take more than a day to understand your audience and optimize your ad delivery.
After this period of time has passed, you review the results of your ads. The ones that don’t perform well, you disable them and leave the most effective one for each ad set.
If you notice a drop in ad performance, it’s most likely because most of your audience has seen it and is no longer interested. At this point you should change the image again.
Increase the budget
Now that you’ve optimized your campaign, try increasing your daily budget.
At this point, of course, you should consider your ability to interact with the people who will be contacting or buying from you. Otherwise, advertising will consume money without you being able to use it.
What are custom and lookalike audiences?
So far what we’ve done has been about a new campaign, in which we’ve adapted a new audience that we’re targeting.
But there is another option, which is much stronger!
To create our audience, select the “audience” option in the Facebook Ads advertising management menu.
Then select create audience and then custom audience.
You can choose different sources of information that Facebook Ads has stored for you.
The customer list option allows you to upload a list of your customers’ addresses or phone numbers.
This option is especially effective because Facebook Ads can evaluate your customer profile and find matches based on their interests and the problems they want to solve.
For website selection, you must have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website.
Keep in mind that you can identify your audience that interacted with you, and retarget them to promote or remind them of something they care about.
Epilogue: Are you ready to advertise?
If you’ve made it this far, you’ll have a deep understanding of how Facebook Ads work. After all, it’s not that hard to make use of it, right?
Now you know that those who don’t appreciate, probably haven’t understood how it works and at the same time you have a guide to implement your ads step by step.
If you still think it is too difficult for you, you can contact us for more information or to take over the promotion of your activity.
Remember how important choosing the right partner is to your successful online journey.
We would love to hear how you used this advertising guide and share your experience with our readers.
How hard is it to advertise on Facebook?
It’s easy, as long as you know the methodology to follow and understand the users’ way of thinking.
How much will I spend to advertise with Facebook Ads?
It depends on your level of knowledge! If you use it according to the given guide, you will see that the cost is reduced dramatically. Most of those who accuse it, have tried it without caring to learn about Facebook ads.
Why do campaigns, ad sets and ads exist?
The main reason is to allow control and optimization. The campaign simply defines the ultimate purpose of the ad. Ad sets and ads allow you to test, choose and optimize your campaign.
What’s the biggest mistake that makes Facebook Ads fail?
Most people treat Facebook ads like a search engine like Google. As a result, instead of offering a pleasant experience to Facebook users, they try to use Google Adwords-like tactics.