Do Facebook Ads Still Work? A Guide to Profitable Campaigns

With over 2.3B people using Facebook each month, and almost 1.6B users each day, Facebook provides a unique chance to augment your organic efforts. The problem is, with an investment of money and time involved, there isn’t a lot of room for oversight.

Here’s the Proper Way to Run Facebook Advertisements

Facebook provides various paid advertisement placements and options, yet all advertisements may be broken down into 3 elements:

1. Campaigns. Campaign houses all your assets.
2. Advertisement sets. If you are targeting different audiences with various characteristics, you will require an individual advertisement set for each.
3. Advertisements. Your actual advertisements live inside the advertisement sets. Each advertisement set may hold various ads which differ in images, copy, color, etc.

With this terminology in mind, let us cover ad creation.

Start making an advertisement through the Ads Manager on Facebook

It’s possible to create a paid advertisement on Facebook with the Ads Manager.

Once logged into the page, you will see a performance dashboard in which all your ad sets, campaigns, and ads are listed, which includes the results they have driven for the Facebook page. Unless you already have created an advertisement for your Facebook page, the dashboard will be empty.

In order to create a new ad set, campaign, or ad via the Facebook Ad Manager, tab over to the kind of advertisement you wish to create then click the "Create" button to the far left of those advertisement types, as seen below:

Pick an objective

As with most social media ad platforms, the Facebook Ad Manager is made with your campaign goal in mind. Before you get started, Ads Manager prompts you to select a goal for the campaign:

There are eleven different goals to select from. The list involves all things from getting app installs to general brand awareness, to boosting traffic to your store online.

In selecting one of those objectives, you are giving the Facebook platform a better idea of what you would like to do in order for them to present you with the best-suited advertisement options. As depicted in the above screenshot, Facebook's ad choices include:

• Store traffic
• Catalog sales
• Conversions
• Messages
• Lead generation
• Video views
• App installs
• Engagement
• Website traffic
• Reach
• Brand awareness

For the sake of this post, let’s say you want to drive more traffic to your site. When you choose this option, Facebook prompts you to enter the URL you want to promote. 

Once chosen, Facebook then will show the ad option which makes the most sense as far as accomplishing this objective goes.

Pick your audience

The next step includes configuring your target audience – it’s possible to do that for every ad set which belongs to the exact same campaign. If you are just starting out with paid Facebook advertising, it is likely that you will need to experiment with different targeting options ‘til you reach an audience which fits properly.

To assist you in narrowing your focus, the targeting criteria of Facebook are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. The tool -- on the right of the audience targeting fields – will take all your chosen properties into account to come up with a possible reach number.

If you are wavering between selecting a certain audience over a broad one, think about your objective. If you want to drive traffic, you probably will want to concentrate on the kind of folks you know will be curious about your offering. But, if you want to promote a widely appealing offer or build brand awareness, concentrate on a more general audience.

The built-in targeting on Facebook is vast, which includes options like:

• Connections
• Behaviors
• Interests
• Life Events
• Politics (only U.S.)
• Parents
• Generation
• Ethnic Affinity
• Home 
• Financial
• Work 
• Education
• Relationship 
• Languages
• Gender 
• Age 
• Location

Set the budget

Facebook permits users to either set a lifetime budget or daily budget. Here is how they’re different from one another:

• Lifetime budget. If you want to run the ad for a specified time length, choose lifetime budget. That means Facebook paces your ad spend over the period of time you set for the advertisement to run.
• Daily budget. If you want the ad set to continuously run all throughout the day, it’s the option you should choose. Utilizing a daily budget means that the Facebook platform will pace the spending per day. Remember that the minimum daily budget for one ad set is $1 and has to be at least two times (2X) your cost per click (CPC).

In order to further specify the budgeting, turn over to the advanced options -- that option is linked at the lower part of the above shown screenshot. This part enables you to specify a couple of things:

Schedule

Pick whether or not you want the campaign to run continuously and immediately or if you need to customize the end and start dates. You also can set parameters in order for the ads to only run during certain days of the week and hours.

Pricing and Optimization

Pick whether or not you need to bid for your impressions, clicks, or objective. In doing so, you will pay for the ad to be shown to folks inside your target audience who are more likely to complete the desired action; however, Facebook controls what the maximum bid is.

If you do not want the Facebook platform to set optimal bids on your behalf, you will want to choose manual bidding. That option awards you complete control over how much you are willing to pay per action that is completed. But Facebook provides a recommended bid based upon other advertisers' behavior in order to give you a sense of what you ought to shoot for.

Delivery

Delivery falls under standard and accelerated categories. Standard delivery shows your advertisements all throughout the day, while the accelerated option assists you in reaching an audience rapidly for time-sensitive advertisements.

Create the advertisement

What do you want the ad to appear like? That depends on your initial objective.

If you want to increase the quantity of clicks to your site, the Ad Manager will recommend the Clicks to Website advertisement options. That makes sense, right?

This advertising option is broken down into Links and Carousels formats. Basically, that means that it’s possible to either show one image advertisement or multi-image ad that has 3 - 5 scrolling images at no extra cost.

A Links advertisement will be shown like this:

A Carousel advertisement will be shown like this:

Once you make the decision between the two, you must upload the creative assets. For each kind of ad, Facebook requires people to adhere to specific design criteria.

For a single image ad, Facebook asks that people adhere to these design suggestions:

• Image resolution (which includes CTA): 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Image ratio: 1.91:1
• Advertisement Headline: 25 characters
• Text: 125 characters

For a multi-image ad -- also referred to as Carousel Ads -- Facebook gives these design suggestions:

• Link description: 20 characters
• Headline: 40 characters
• Text: 125 characters
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Suggested image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels

The image might not include over 20 percent text. 

Remember that those are the advertisement options for the "Traffic" goal

If you chose "boost posts," you would be presented with various ad options such as the Page Post Engagement: Photo advertisement. This advertisement has a unique set of design suggestions. 

Once you choose a type of ad, Facebook’s Ads Manager prompts you to identify how you would like to display the ad. The options provided include: Desktop Right Column, Mobile News Feed, and Desktop News Feed.

Here is how each advertisement would appear:

Desktop News Feed

Mobile News Feed

Desktop Right Column

Keep in mind if your advertisement is not related to a Facebook page, you only will have the ability to run Desktop Right Column advertisements. 

Report on the advertisements' performance.

Once the ads are running, you will want to keep a close eye on how they are doing. To check their results, you should look in two places: your marketing software and the Facebook Ad Manager.

The Facebook Ad Manager

It’s a sophisticated dashboard which gives users an overview of all of their campaigns.

Upfront, the dashboard spotlights an estimate of how much you are spending every day. The dashboard gets organized by columns, making it convenient to filter through your advertisements so it’s possible to create a customized view of your results. Key figures such as frequency, cost, and reach, are readily available, which makes performance reporting a no brainer.

Here are the key metrics to search for, according to Facebook:

• Performance. May be tailored further to include metrics such as impressions, frequency, reach, and results
• Engagement. May be further customized to include metrics such as post engagement, Page engagement, and Page likes
• Videos. May be tailored further to include metrics such as average percent of video viewed and video views
• Website. May be further customized to include metrics such as adds to cart and purchases, payment details, checkouts, and website actions
• Apps. May be customized further to include metrics such as cost per app engagement, mobile app actions, credit spends, app engagement, and app installs
• Events. May be customized further to include metrics such as cost per event response, and event responses
• Clicks. May be customized further to include metrics such as CPC, CTR, unique clicks, and clicks
• Settings. May be customized further to include metrics such as bid and objective, delivery, ad ID, ad set name, end date, and start date

Marketing Software

While there certainly are lots of details to keep up with while planning a paid Facebook advertisement, it is vital that you do not lose sight of the bigger picture. Reporting on conversions and clicks from Facebook is critical, however, if you are using URLs that have unique UTM codes, you have a chance to measure your advertisements' full-funnel effectiveness utilizing your marketing software.

Keeping track of URLs helps your marketing software track how many leads, or even better, how many customers you have gained from your ad efforts. Those details are helpful at figuring out the ROI of this source, and also can be utilized to inform your overall marketing strategy on Facebook.