5 Success Tips for Getting Started with Facebook Advertising

Many business owners find Facebook ads challenging when they first get started and spend a lot of money on ineffective campaigns. But knowing just a few tips can dramatically improve results. Here are some tips.

1. Choosing Your Objective
Facebook offers several campaign objectives such as conversions, lead generation, engagement, and traffic. The objective you choose can significantly impact your cost per lead so do not always choose the conversions objective.

If you want to get more likes, choose “engagement.” To get traffic to your blog, choose “traffic.” To get list subscribers, choose “lead generation.”

2. Targeting Your Audience
It is important to target the right people with your ads in order to get good conversions. Facebook has very focused targeting options to allow you to do this. Your audience should not be too large. For example, if you sell digital products to a cold audience, target about 500k to 1m people.

A warm audience consists of people who already know you and they are more likely to engage with your ads than people in a cold audience. The warm audience size is derived from the number of people you have as Facebook fans, on your email list, or people getting to your pixeled content.

3. Adding Images
You should test the types of images that work in your ads. Some image types to try include:

1. Images that quickly catch people’s attention because they are surprising or eye-catching, or images with bold designs or colors that make your ad stand out.
2. Images of people (ex. an image of a smiling woman works well).

Instead of using just one image for your ad, you should use up to 6 and split test them. To split test, Facebook splits your audience into segments randomly and shows each segment a version of your ad with a different image.

4. Adding Videos
Video ads can be very effective, especially for receiving engagement. You can optimize for video views, which tells Facebook to adjust the video based on who is more likely to view it.

You can even create audiences based on the length of time that people have watched your videos previously. You can tell Facebook to show an ad to people who have looked at 3 or 10 seconds of your video, or 25, 50, 75, or 95 percent of your video. Lookalike audiences can also be created.

5. Optimizing Your Ads
Facebook needs a chance to optimize your campaign while it is running so do not edit it, end it, pause it, or spend your whole budget before optimization, which takes about three to four days of running your ads. Facebook optimizes ads based on the optimization option you have chosen.

Some of the optimization options are: actions, clicks, and daily unique reach. An example of an optimization is Facebook showing more ads to men in their forties because your ads are doing best with that age group.