New to Facebook Advertising: Here’s what you need to know

Is it worth spending your marketing dollars in Facebook advertising?

In this article, instead of bombarding you with a checklist of to-dos as a Facebook Ad newbie, let us work backwards and touch on these points.

1 – Are my clients on Facebook?

2 – How will I know if Facebook Ad works for my business?

3 – What is one thing that you would tell companies new to Facebook advertising?

4 – How will I know my Facebook ad is profitable? 

5 – How do I control what I spend on Facebook advertising?

6 – Important tips when starting on Facebook Advertising 

Are my clients on Facebook?

Facebook has a massive number of active users.

As of May 2020, they had 2.60 billion users worldwide; therefore, the likelihood of your Facebook audience is very high.

Facebook currently ranks as the second “most widely used social media platforms among U.S. adults.”

In the United States, Pew research said that “around seven-in-ten U.S. adults (69%) use Facebook.”

Although many people use Facebook to connect, according to GlobalWebIndex, “Social media is deeply embedded in the purchase journey–most noticeably in a discovery and research setting.”

So, there’s no question that if you want to stay top of the mind, I highly recommend Facebook. And yes, organic Facebook marketing (not paid advertising) still works, not just Facebook advertising. But that is another topic.

How will I know if Facebook Ad works for my business?

It all begins with these questions:

• Why are you running Facebook Advertising?; and,
• What success metrics would you use to determine if your social media marketing advertising is a dud or a success?

Your metric could be any of these:

• Downloads
• Facebook likes
• Engagement so you can re-target later
• Video views for awareness
• Attendance to an event
• App installation
• Membership to your group
• Your ROI

Let’ say you are running a webinar and you were targeting to get 20 leads, but your sign up is 30. You exceeded your goal by 50%. We can take this a step further below when calculating cost.

You could use either of these as indicators to measure your Facebook Ad success.

What is one thing that you would tell companies new to Facebook advertising?

Split-test your Facebook advertising before investing a huge chunk of your advertising budget in it.

You’d think split-testing Facebook ad is an expense, but savvy social media marketers and companies understand how it can help the company save on marketing budget and other resources in the long run.

Split testing your ads can dispel assumptions about what your audience likes or does not like.

Split testing your Facebook advertising will help you understand what combination of Facebook advertising elements works best for your company.

You can check how others are split-testing their ads by visiting the FB Ad library.

Here is an example of an ad that an automobile manufacturing company is doing on Facebook. Read closely what is trying to split-test. Can you see it?

What can you split test?

• Ad description
• Graphics
  • its background – people or not
  • the texts on the graphics
  • with texts, or no texts
  • graphics color
• Messaging/verbiage you use
  • description of your post
  • what your texts say on the graphics
  • headline
• Demographics
  • test one demographic at a time
• Call to action
  • with or without
  • what type
• Ad placement
  • newsfeed
  • instant articles
  • right column
  • marketplace
  • interstitial videos

You can tweak your marketing strategies and step up your game or move on to a new social media platform where your business can profit more.

Always be flexible to changes and don’t stop until you get the right combination of marketing goals, strategy, content, and approach. 

To find out if it “works” or not for you, the key is really to try Facebook advertising.

But then, to know “what works” means to you and your team, you really need to define what that phrase means before you sit out running ads.

How do I know my Facebook Ad is profitable? 

Years ago, people didn’t use social media to buy products. They use social media to connect with family and friends and to discover new people.

Forrester  studied the purchase path of online buyers last 2012. In their report, fewer than 1% of transactions are traced back to social links among 77,000 orders made online. 

Fast forward to today, Facebook is a social media platform that companies now use to boost brand awareness and conversion.

If your company is new to Facebook advertising, but you have been doing business for a while, I bet you already have benchmarks of what your average costs are for marketing.

However, for those that have nothing to use as benchmark, Integrated Marketing Association’s information could be a good reference for you. According to them, the average cost per a B2B can be as low as $16.00 U.S. and go as high as $370.00 U.S.

The cost per lead varies depending on the industry.

Industry	Low	High	Average
Financial Services	$44	$272	$160
IT, Technical Services	$39	$370	$208
Industrial and Manufacturing	$33	$235	$136
Telecom	$24	$182	$105
Business Services	$39	$225	$132
Healthcare and Medical	$36	$286	$162

If your cost per lead when running Facebook advertising is less compared to cost (per lead) when running Google and LinkedIn advertising, or even when purchasing leads, then you know where to spend your marketing advertising dollar.

The key here is you have something to compare costs with.

If none, then you would need to monitor cost yourself using Facebook advertising report and decide what is an acceptable cost to you and your business context.

How do I control what I spend on Facebook advertising?

Facebook gives its advertisers, like you, leeway in controlling how much money you spend when running an ad.

It all depends on how you set it up.

So controlling how much you spend on Facebook and to not overspend, you can set up a daily budget when setting up the ad. You can enter the amount you want to spend.

You can spend as low, or as high as you like.

On top of controlling the cost, you can, also, set a start and end date for your Facebook ad. In that way, you would not overspend, for sure.

Important tips when starting on Facebook Advertising 

1 | Have a specific business goal

Based on your goal, you can choose one or several Ad Types provided by Facebook.

For instance, you can reach more people and achieve higher engagement by boosting a post on your page.

You can also get more people to visit your website by sending them to a specific URL – your website or a blog post.

Having a concrete goal will make you more intentional in designing content that works. With that in mind, it is also easier to track your success metrics.

Facebook offers clear-cut advertising objectives for companies that reflect what marketers would often call as marketing funnel – awareness, consideration and conversion.

2 | Higher quality ads perform better

You can use Facebook’s ad relevance diagnostics as your guide to see if there are low-quality attributes affecting the performance of your ads.

Note, however, that according to Facebook, “Achieving high ad relevance diagnostics rankings should not be your primary goal, and doesn’t guarantee an increase in results.”

On that note, I had ads that didn’t meet Facebook’s quality diagnostic but still performed well.

Hence the best way to find out if an ad will perform better for your target audience is by split-testing your ads.

You do not have to cross your fingers and hope that the ad will work because you already know which ad has better results.

Before designing your Facebook Ad, read Facebook’s Low Quality or Disruptive Content policy or their publishing best practices. 

Here are some specifications that you need to know when posting images, videos, carousel ads, and slideshows.

• Image ads:
  Size: 1,200 X 628 pixels
  Ratio: 1.91:1
  Text: 90 characters
  Headline: 25 characters
  Link description: 30 characters
• Video ads:
  Format: .mov or .mp4
  Ratio: 16:9
  Resolution: at least 720p
  File size: 2.3 GB max
  Thumbnail size: 1,200 x 675 pixels
  Text: 90 characters
  Headline: 25 characters
  Link description: 30 characters
• Carousel ads:
  Image size: 1,080 x 1,080 pixels
  Image/video ratio: 1:1
  Text: 90 characters
  Headline: 40 characters
  Link description: 20 characters
• Slideshow ads:
  Size: 1,289 x 720 pixels
  Ratio: 16:9, 1:1, or 2:3
  Text: 90 characters
  Headline: 25 characters
  Link description: 30 characters

These specifications are to ensure that each of your Facebook ad copy is optimized well for the platform and for its audience.

3 | Not sure how to maximize your budget across your ad campaigns?

Use Facebook’s Campaign Budget Optimization (BCO) to ensure efficient use of your budget while getting the best results.

Whether you have a lifetime budget or a daily budget, you can use CBO to find the best active opportunities for your ad sets.

If you have multiple ad sets, CBO may not spend your budget equally for each ad set.

A bigger percentage of your budget will be allotted to ad sets that will probably have the lowest cost per action (CPA) or highest ROAS (return on ad spend).  Learn more about CBO.

It’s A Wrap!

No matter how small or big your budget is for Facebook advertising, focus on getting the most of every ad campaign you post.

Create. Manage. Optimize.

Monitor your ongoing Facebook campaigns, run ad experiments, create audiences, and don’t forget to watch your ad results.