Facebook Ads 101

Getting Started

So you decided to jump into the world of digital marketing and concentrate on Facebook ads. Facebook ads can be a fantastic tool if you take the time to learn how to use them and learn a few of the strategies that help you succeed on Facebook.

I won't go into detail on creating the ad using the ads manager; that is a whole other article on its own, and you can find tons of articles on that already.

This article explains why it's the best way to start using the engagement objective and the strategy I use to maximize my budget and get the best results as quickly as possible.

Why the Engagement Objective as a first step.

#1 it's the cheapest way to gather information on your audience.

#2 Cheapest way to see what works and what doesn't work.

#3 Creates Social Proof on your ad.

But why should I start with the engagement objective if I want to sell a product? Why not start with the conversion objective? Facebook recommends that you don't use the conversion objective unless you already have at least 50 conversions occurring within a week in your online store. Besides, the first step in the buyer's journey is awareness. The second one is an interaction or, in this case, engagement.

Also, with engagement, you can evaluate how good or bad an ad you created depending on the people who engage with it or not, and it's the cheapest way to do it.

One of the most important things in online digital marketing is getting to know your audience. What info can you get to know about your audience?

You can get the location (what part of the world or country they are in).

You can get the age range (ages that engage more with your ad).

It also creates social proof. An ad with 1000+ likes will work better than one with ten likes.

The Importance of targeting.

If you don't know anything about targeting, this is also the cheapest way to learn.

Whenever I need to create an ad, I make at least three ad sets, each having a different audience. You can generate more than three audiences, but that's how I start.

If I'm selling cat-related t-shirts, I will create one ad with people who like cats, one with people who like cats and cat food, and the last one for people who like cats and t-shirts, and I would start with that and see how it goes. After getting the best audience, I then variate the pictures or the copy on the ad and see which one works best with the most engagement.

I would then let the ad run and get social proof (engagement in the form of likes and comments); this is also a great way to see if people save your ad, share it, or just like it

After that, I would use the same ad to create a traffic objective campaign. I'll go into detail on another article.

Strategy

The idea of the strategy I use is to get info on the people who are interested and also to create two lists.

#1 all the people who interacted with a post or ad.

#2 a look-alike of those people.

"#1" is a great starting place to start narrowing an audience down and start refining the audience.

Look-Alike

Facebook grabs any audience and creates another bigger audience of people similar to your first or audience. Facebooks look alike audience works best when the original audience is significant, at least 500+. The bigger the original audience gets, the better the look-alike audience will become.

Getting post engagement grows your engagement audience and feeds the look alike. It automatically updates it each few days.

Budget

It will depend on what country you are running your ads but to be honest, you can start with as little as 1 dollar a day. 1-10 dollars a day will be enough to run any engagement ad. Be sure to only increase your ad budget by 20% so you dont get facebook to reset its learning phase.

Remarketing

When you create the post engagement audience via Facebook of all the people who interacted with your ad, you can create one specific ad targeting only those who interacted. This will be a tiny audience at first, but you will be targeting people who have already shown interest in your product.

This is a great way to start playing around and working with Remarketing to your audience.

Frequency

Frequency is the amount of time that your audience saw your ad. If you have a frequency of 5, your audience has seen your ad five times. What is the best frequency to kill an ad?

In my experience and from a few courses I've taken, you want to turn the ad off after 12 frequency. Just remember to test this out. Maybe for you, It can work with a higher frequency, but after 12 frequency, it's a great place to start turning your ad off.

Summary

The engagement objective is a perfect way to get started with Facebook ads. It's the cheapest way you will learn.

Be sure to subscribe so you can get the following articles where I talk more about the other objectives and how to use them more efficiently.