However, a lot has changed since Facebook first entered the marketing scene. Today, the world’s largest social network can do things many of us would never have dreamed of 10 years ago: host 360-degree videos, sell products via a chatbot, or even serve as a top news source for two-thirds of the adult population.
Facebook has 1.56 billion daily active users . Let’s put that in perspective. That’s nearly 5X the population of the United States, 20% of the world population … and still climbing.
So imagine the social influence achievable through Facebook in terms of your peer effects, ecommerce business, referrals, customer relationships, reputation, brand awareness, and much more (let alone, in combination with other social media platforms you market through).
It’s not only the sheer number of people but the amount of our attention Facebook owns. Globally, the average user spends almost an hour per day on Facebook. Considering the average person sleeps eight hours a day, that means about 7% of our waking hours is spent with our eyes glued to the social network.
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The first step in the Facebook advertising checklist is to understand the terminology. In Facebook, all paid advertising can be broken down into three elements:
When you create your first advertisement, Facebook offers two choices of editors: the Ad Manager and the Power Editor. The Ad Manager is a great choice for most companies, while the Power Editor was created for larger advertisers who need precise control over a variety of campaigns. For these instructions, we’ll use the Ad Manager. To find the Ads Manager from Facebook, go to your homepage and find "Ads Manager" from the left-hand menu.
Before you create an ad, you need to choose an objective. Facebook provides 11 to pick from, broken into three categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
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Once you select an objective for your campaign, Facebook will walk you through a few steps to define the audience, budget, and schedule for your ad set. If you’ve used Facebook’s advertising tools before, you can select a saved audience here. Otherwise, specify demographic information like location, age, gender, and language.
You can then make your targeting more specific in the detailed targeting box. Choose one of Facebook’s pre-made categories, or type in the name of a specific business Page your audience may have liked. For example, you can target people who are interested in women’s clothing and the store Anthropologie.
In the “Placements” section, keep the “Automatic Placements (Recommended)” selected.
Then choose your budget and schedule. Facebook offers the option of setting a daily budget or a lifetime budget:
Depending on which option you choose, you can pick the appropriate schedule for your ad set. Decide if you want your ads to start immediately, or at a later time.
With your ad set options selected, click “Continue.”
Now that you’ve designated your campaign and ad set, it’s time to create your ads. In this section, you’ll select the format, media, text, and links to create one or multiple ads.
First, Facebook will give you two ad format options:
Once you decide how you want your ad to look, upload your creative assets and write a clickable ad headline. For each format, Facebook will provide some design recommendations, including image size, headline length, and more.
In the past, if 20% or more of an ad’s image was text, Facebook would deny the ad. Facebook has since adopted a new system, but it still favors images with minimal text. Now, ads with higher amounts of text will receive less or no delivery at all. Check out this tool to test your images.
Finally, tweak your text and preview your ad for desktop or mobile viewing. Then, place your order.
Now that your ads have been released into the world, you’ll want to keep an eye on how they’re performing. To see the results, go back to the Facebook Ad Manager. If you have ads running, you’ll see an overview of all your campaigns.
At the top, the dashboard will highlight an estimate of how much you’re spending each day on ads. The dashboard is broken down into columns to make it easy to filter by results, reach, or amount spent.
There are a lot of metrics to consider when determining the success of your ads, including reach, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and more. However, here a few to pay particular attention to:
To export your data, look for the drop-down menu on the right side above the results.
Facebook and HubSpot teamed up for a video series on how to grow your audience faster than ever using Facebook ads.
