How to run a facebook ad

Formats of FaceBook Ads

1. Photo/Single Image ads: These are also called links ads. You can upload a photo or status and add some text, a headline, and a description or use an existing post or status as your image ad.

Facebook has guidelines which you can check on FaceBook’s help documentation to check character count and image dimensions e.g. your photo’s size should be 1200 by 628 pixels if you want it to also be displayed on Instagram. 

Also, the photo itself can have overlaid text but if it is more than 20% of your image, your ad might be displayed to fewer people, if at all. 

Hint: Research suggests that the best performing images are funny photos or photos with people smiling, babies, pets or special offers e.g. discounts. 

1. Video ads: These tend to perform best as they are more interactive and contain more information. 

Over 60% of consumers are more likely to purchase products they’ve seen a video on. Your video can pop up in a video someone is watching or as a story.

However, your video must be captivating from the very beginning as most people tend to abandon videos after a few seconds. It would probably be helpful to include captions or use videos that are easy to understand without sound as videos do not automatically play with sound (the sound has to be turned on manually by the user).

If you want your video to also be played on Instagram, it mustn’t be more than one minute long.

1. Slideshow ads: Here, you can upload 3-10 photos and FaceBook will turn them into one slideshow for you. 

You can also add sound and text. Slideshow ads loop and while they are similar to videos, they might be a better option for you as slideshow ads are easier to load on slower internet.

1. Carousel/ Multi-image ads: These allow the user to swipe through 2-10 photos. You can add a link and headline to each photo or use one link and headline for all the photos in the carousel. 

You can choose to allow Facebook to automatically show the best performing photo as the first.

1. Collection ads: It is more interactive as users can swipe and zoom in or out.

This ad type cannot be displayed on desktops. In creating this ad, readymade templates are available and optional. 

Disclaimers: 

• Options b through to e allow you to include more information than in single image ads, are more interactive and therefore tend to perform better. They can be used to tell a story about your brand, show a product from multiple angles, display multiple products, explain a process or tutorial, or show before and after pictures.

• Your ads should contain or end with strong calls-to-action e.g. links that say “sign up here” or “get directions” or “shop now”.

• If you’re not sure what format to run with, you can use Facebook Creative Hub to create mock-ups of different formats to help you decide.

There are 14 types of Facebook Ads categorized into 3. They will be listed out for you in the process of setting up the ad. Each type accomplishes the particular objective for which it is named; however, some extra information will be given in this list.

AWARENESS

1. Brand Awareness: In choosing this objective, you should run with a more general audience. You could also use this option to remarket to people who have interacted with your brand before but may not have fulfilled your main objective e.g. subscribing to a newsletter or purchasing a product. It is targeted at people more likely to look at the ad for a longer amount of time.

1. Local Awareness: To publicize to people within a particular area.

1. Reach: To get your ad/page to as many people as possible. Brand awareness is more focused on people who will remember your brand.

CONSIDERATION

1. Traffic: To get people to click on a link. It is ideal for a small budget and works well if you’re trying to get people to read an article of any kind. This can be used to generate leads by driving people to your page. (In tracking the metrics of this, it is better to pay attention to landing page views than the number of clicks because not all clicks mean that someone actually viewed your content/website.)

1. Post Engagement: This encourages people to like your content, view your videos, share your content, comment and engage with your page. The main benefit is that it lends credence to your page so if you’re a new brand or business, with little to no following, you might want to look into this. However, according to Jason Wardrop, this is simply a vanity metric whose target you’ll accomplish anyway if you run conversion ads; so it might be better to save your money on this and put it into a conversion ad instead.

1. App Installs: This encourages users to install and use your app if you have one. This would probably be better suited for businesses like taxi companies, banks, etc.

1. Video views: This is highly advisable, especially for businesses that are just starting out with no audience as video is a high-converting form of advertisement. This gets as many views as possible for the video.

Side Note: After the video has been sent out, you can create remarketing lists of users based on the amount of time people watched the videos for e.g. those that watched for 5seconds, 1 minute or 10%, 20% of the video etc.

1. Page Likes: It simply gets people to like your page. This also is most useful, in my opinion for gaining social proof as a new page. However, you could also use it to grow a group by inviting the people who like the page to join a group.

1. Event Responses: This gets people to attend your event.

1. Lead generation: These help you gather information from potential clients via lead form ads that open in Facebook itself (not your website). You could also do this with conversion ads but the information gathered with lead generation tends to be more accurate because, in this system, FaceBook automatically fills the blanks with information that the users have already given it access to.

1. Messages: Messenger bots are used to encourage users to chat with you; the bots could also be used to keep the conversation going. It is widely advised for brands that have expensive merchandise; it would give potential customers a convenient way to have their inquiries answered and objections were taken care of so that they can then purchase.

CONVERSION

1. Conversions: This is used to get people to carry out your specified action e.g. making a purchase, filling a form, etc. As mentioned before, conversion ads are also used to generate leads on your website. The differences between these and lead generation ads are that the user has to manually enter the information here and that you have more control over what happens next whether to send the user to some other page.

To use the following two, the landing page should contain a Facebook pixel (which can be put in by you or your web developer) to help you monitor more details of user activities on your site after they use the link in your ad.

1. Catalog sales: This encourages people to shop with you. You can remarket with this; for example, it will remarket a product or a similar product of yours to a person who may have looked at that product but didn’t purchase it.
2. Store visits: This advertises, to people, your branch that is closer to them.

Disclaimer:

• it’s important that you choose the right objective because Facebook will show the ad to the people that are most likely to fulfill that particular action. If you try to get leads with a traffic ad, your conversion rate will be low because traffic ads target users who are likely to click on your link, not users who are likely to fill out a form.

• If you want to run just one ad, choose the objective that is MOST important to you at that time and run with it.

How to ACTUALLY Run Your Ad

You must have a Facebook Account to create a Facebook AD.

You can then create a page in your Facebook account for your brand or business. Use your personal account to create your business page (you can get banned if you try to open a new account for your ads alone therefore it is not advisable).

To start the process of running the ad, you can use Facebook Ads Manager.

ADS MANAGER

Using Ads Manager will show the ad on the page you used to create the ad so if you don’t want your page cluttered with ads, use the Power editor.

1. Go to Ads Manager, on the top right corner of the page, click on ‘Create an ad’.

After loading your account information, it will present you with the list of campaign objectives for you to choose the one you want for that ad. Choose your objective.  T

These are the types of Facebook ads we discussed in the previous section. They determine how you want the users who see your ad to respond and therefore determine the audience that Facebook makes available to you.

Hint: Note that ‘Boost your posts’ will mostly get you likes only.

1. Pick an objective and fill in the follow-up details.

1. You’ll be led to the ad set where you set criteria for the audience you want to reach. e.g. location, gender, age, interests, etc. You can create and save custom audience lists for future use. Fill as desired.

If you’re not sure what the target audience for your product or service should be, a google search could help you figure that out. You will also set your budget here. Facebook can suggest a budget for you and you can give Facebook an amount to spend for you. As discussed above, you can decide if you want your budget to be ‘daily’ or ‘lifetime’.

1. Create your ad: Choose your ad format, select your photo. You will also insert the headline, text, and call-to-action you want to use to communicate your ad to your audience.

1. Click on “Publish” at the bottom right of the page.

1. Track and Measure: Go to your Ad manager dashboard and pick the ad you want to track; When you have on the ad, you’ll see “view charts” Like the image below.

 Click on it and it will take you to a dashboard where you view your ads performance based on your set objectives.

Conclusion:

Facebook ads shelters the largest number of individuals amongst other social media platforms. Running an ad on the platform may seem complicated on the surface but this guide has broken down what you need to know about creating a Facebook ad. From creating a Campaign Manager account to Creating an Ad Set to hitting publish. Feel free to save and reference it anytime. Happy advertising.