How To Properly Structure Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

?WARNING - 4 min read, not for the faint hearted!?

So, you've ran a Facebook ad or two, or three, or four, but for whatever reason, they didn't bring you the results you were promised, or help you to win more listings.

In fact, all you achieved was a few more likes, video views, clicks to your website, or a couple of 'leads' that aren't looking to sell anytime soon.

Look, it's annoying when you see so many agents out there that seem to be growing their business effectivey using a medium that doesn't seem to work for yours, no matter what you try...

It's even more annoying to find something that holds so much promise in your search for ad that convert, only to find it's another attempt to sell you on a product or service, in the disguise of value.

So my promise to you, in this article, is that I won't try to sell you anything at the end, but rather, show you EXACTLY how you should structure your Facebook ad campaigns, so you can find winning ads, and get the results you desired.

But before we begin, there's something you need to know...

Not all ad campaigns are created equal. In fact, if you only have one ad, targeted at one audience, in the campaign you created, you'll most likely find your ad is lacking so much in superiority that you may aswell gift the quality vendors & landlords in your market to your biggest competitor

That won't happen if you know this:

The image above shows you how to structure your campaigns, and the levels involved every time you create a new campaign.

Initially when creating an ad in the ads manager, you select your objective, this is in the 'campaign' level, as seen below.

Once you've chosen your objective, the next level is the Ad Set.

This is where it gets interesting...

It is here you will determine the audience you are going to run your ad to, based on age, location, interests although in 99% of cases I wouldn't dive into targeting my ideal clients based on their interests as Facebook doesn't always get it right.

You will also notice on the screenshare above that there is an option for a custome audience.

You can create custom audiences from people in your CRM, on your email list, website visitors using a Facebook pixel, people who have engaged with you on Facebook or Instagram, have interacted with one of your ads before or those who like your page to name but a few tasty targeting options.

You also determine where your ad will be shown on Facebook's various platforms and your budget. In many cases, all you need to do is tick only Facebook & Instagram feeds, especially if you're new to running ads.

After this, you'll go to the 'Ad' level, where we can choose the copy (text part), our image or video, our headline, our link and our leadform if we're advertising for traffic or leads.

Then once you've completed your setup, you click publish, your ad goes out and it starts bringing you more leads than you can handle!

But that didn't happen, because like too many agents out there, you tried to run one campaign, to one audience, with one ad angle...

You see the problem with this is that there are many people in your market, all at different stages of the home moving process, and they may know who you are, or they may not.

This is why it's crucial to create multiple ad sets, with multiple ad angle as seen in this image

Now, I want you to duplicate your ad set

To do this, find your campaign, select it, then slide across to the ad set section, press duplicate & create a copy of the ad set in your campaign as seen in the screenshots below:

Once you've duplicated the ad set, you'll go back to the 'Ad Set' level in ads manager, and have the opportunity to change your targeting.

For example if you ran your ad to a cold audience, you may want to select the custom audience option, and run it to an audience of people who have visited your website in the past 6 months. You may find you have a lower cost per action as these people have already taken a look at who you are & how you can help them online.

In the screenshots, the campaign shown was a video ad on the local property market to a cold audience. For vidoes you would typically advertise for 2 second continuous video views, but people may not watch much of our video, so we created another ad set, and advertised for Thruplay, which is 15 second views.

The ad was 55 seconds long, so with the new ad set we can rest assured every time we get a view it will be for a fair portion of the video, and the people that saw it will have invested more time into the value we gave them, making them more familiar with us when we re-targeted them.

In this campaign, we followed the duplication steps above at the 'Ad' level aswell, because we wanted to test our videos, and also our text.

We had 4 ads running, two to each ad set, one ad being short form copy, one being longer with more info on the property market, so we could see clearly which one maintained and converted people's attention better, leading to more views on our videos.

As you can see here, there was a clear winner: Advertising for 15 second video views, it was our ad that had shorter copy that gained 497 thruplays, compared to 277.

When re-targeting all of our viewers, we found that people who were targeted for 2 secind continuos video views weren't as willing to become a lead, probably because they didn't watch as much of our video.

So what do you do when you have an ad set and an ad that is a clear winner?

You KILL the others!

Show no mercy, run them for 7 days maximum to give them all the best chance of success, then when you can see one that clearly converts better than the others, turn all of the others off - they're wasting your money.

Money that can be put behind your winning ad to bring you more actions at a lower cost.

If you haven't found a winner, repeat this process.

Create more ad sets, test your ads against different audiences, and test different ads against those audiences until you do.

P.S. Many agents out there are risk averse, they won't experiment in their marketing, so they'll always be searching for something that works, and be stuck with the same old, same old.

Luckily for you reading this, these agents are most likely to be your competitors who didn't get this far, and never create an ad that actually works.

This lack of testing, combined with a resistance to change is why suppliers like Rightmove can swallow up a market, and hold it's customers to ransom, because they know the people they serve are unlikely to try anything new themselves, and you don't want to be stuck complaining about Rightmove's fees, do you?