Read: 4 minutesWith roughly 1.79 billion active users, Facebook is the party everyone wants to be at and the one everyone is invited to. This “party” does not only continue to grow, but has largely influenced the way people communicate with each other and the way businesses communicate with consumers. Having the ability to advertise to 1.79 billion people is definitely promising and exciting, but it can feel overwhelming too. Before you begin undertaking this task, take a moment to really think it through.
Here’s where to start:
Know Your Objective
Too often marketers believe the mindset “I’m just going to see what works” is appropriate when it comes to finding audiences and creating content that resonates. Although some of Facebook advertising does fall into the “see what works” category, to begin a successful Facebook strategy this way can be detrimental.
Like the Cheshire cat said to Alice, if you don’t know where you want to go, then it doesn’t matter which path you take.
Figure out the end game for your Facebook ads or boosted posts. What do you want to accomplish? It’s easier to know what path to take when the desired results are in mind. Take a moment to really hash this out. Trust us. It’s important.
Start with Audiences You Know
Eventually advertising to people who don’t know you is important, but starting off this way will be extremely frustrating. In social media you have to earn the right to disturb your followers. So before disturbing random users as they scroll through their feed, figure out what people who already know you WANT to be disturbed with.
Begin with audiences such as your website visitors and fans. Facebook’s targeting options are incredible. Seriously though, we could spend a whole blog post talking about them. But start with people who know you, trust you, and have given you the green light to show them content. Their response to your ads will help shape your strategy for when you do expand to audiences who don’t know you such as lookalike audiences, lookalike audiences layered with other targeting options (ex: interests, gender, locations) and etc.
Starting off with website visitors and fans is low hanging fruit. These people like you already, and they’re more willing to give you feedback on the ads you’re showing.
Organize Like It’s Your Job
There’s no such thing as being too organized in Ads Manager. In life, really. (The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 97th Floor. But try organizing your room. I’m sure you’ll agree.) As campaigns are created, separate them by objective and audience. Ad sets should also be separated by audience. That means if a whole different campaign has to be created for only one ad set, then so be it. It might be more work upfront, but it’s worth it in the end.
Pick a naming convention and stick to it. At some point there will be several ads in one ad set and if they’re all named Shoe Ad you’ll have to go through each one and figure out what the difference is between them. Luckily, if you don’t take the time to create one, Facebook has a nifty feature in power editor that will do it for you. Click on the campaigns, ad sets or ads you want to name and select quick edits and edit name.
You can choose what properties to include in the name.
Test, Test, Test
I’m sure this has been said before and it needs to be said again. Test everything. Test audiences, test content, test landing pages and yes, even test objectives. But why would you test a conversions campaign when the objective is clicks to a website? Sometimes audiences and Facebook can surprise you, as we found out recently.
We set up a purchase lookalike campaign for a client to get more traffic to their website. Out of curiosity, we set up another campaign with the same audience and same ads, but instead of clicks as the objective, we set it to conversions and let both campaigns run against each other for a week.
The results not only showed more conversions on the conversion campaign, but more clicks as well, which was the goal all along.
Become A Historian
Keep a detailed record of the account. The more detailed the better. Use some kind of digital platform and keep it organized. Separate each campaign and ad set and record when you test something, the results and possible theories as to why that happened. Being able to look at past performance will help you make educated decisions for even better, future performance.
