HOW TO RUN FACEBOOK ADS: A GUIDE TO FACEBOOK ONLINE MARKETING

Facebook: A global marketing tool

Marketing is a business strategy that has existed for centuries. Every business man/woman’s goal is to make sales and therefore make profit. Any business that is not interested in making sales will not be able to expand. Marketing used to be tedious and involved face to face interaction with prospective clients/ customers with limited reach. But now, technology has changed all that. You can be in the confines of your house and reach out to hundreds and millions of people via online marketing. Facebook advert is one of such marketing tool.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW WHILE SETTING UP A FACEBOOK AD

When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked.
Are you targeting the right people?
Are your image dimensions to scale?
Are you running the right type of ad?
With more than 2.6 billion people using Facebook every month, and nearly 1.7 billion users every day, Facebook offers up a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their organic efforts.

STEPS TO SET UP A FACEBOOK AD

1.Create an account with Facebook Ads Manager.
2. Start creating an ad through Facebook’s Ads Manager.
3.Choose an objective.
4.Choose your audience.
5. Set your budget.
6. Create your ad.
7.Monitor your ad’s performance.

1. Create an account with Facebook Ads Manager.

Facebook’s Ad Manager is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview of all their campaigns.In order to use the Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll need a Facebook Business Page.This is because you can’t run ads through personal profiles.Then, follow these steps
Navigate to

https://www.facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager

1. Click the button that says “Go to Ads Manager.”
   Confirm your information on the ad account setup page.
   Set up your payment method.
   Save changes.
   Once set up, the Ads Manager becomes the control center for your Facebook ads.

2. Start creating an ad through Facebook’s Ads Manager.

Once you log into the Ads Manager, you’ll see a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be listed including the results they’ve driven for your Facebook page. Unless you’ve already created an ad for your Facebook page, this dashboard will be empty.To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ad Manager, tab over to the type of ad you want to create and click the green “Create” button to far left of these ad types, as shown below.

3. Choose an objective.

Facebook’s Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign.
There are 11 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from general brand awareness, to getting installs of your app, to increasing traffic to your online store.
By choosing one of these objectives, you’re giving Facebook a better idea of what you’d like to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. As shown in the screenshot above, Facebook’s ad options include:
1.Brand awareness
2.Reach
3.Website traffic
4.Engagement
5. App installs
6. Video views
7. Lead generation
8. Messages
9.Conversions
10.Catalog sales
11.Store traffic

4. Choose your audience.

Your next step is to configure your target audience — you can do this for each ad set that belongs to the same campaign. If you’re just starting out with paid advertising on Facebook, it’s likely that you’ll have to experiment with several different targeting options until you reach an audience that fits just right.

To help you narrow your focus, Facebook’s targeting criteria are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This tool — located to the right of the audience targeting fields — takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential reach number.

If you’re wavering between choosing a specific audience over a broad one, consider your objective. If you’re looking to drive traffic, you’ll probably want to focus on the type of people you know will be interested in your offering. However, if you’re looking to build brand awareness or promote a widely appealing offer, feel free to focus on a more general audience.

5. Set your budget.
Facebook allows you to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here’s how they differ from each other:

Daily budget: If you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day, this is the option you’ll want to go for. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. Keep in mind that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD.
Lifetime budget: If you’re looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select lifetime budget. This means Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for the ad to run.
facebook ad budget and schedule page
To further specify your budgeting, turn to the advanced options — this option is linked at the bottom of the screenshot shown above. This section allows you to specify a few things:

Schedule
Choose whether or not your want your campaign to run immediately and continuously or if you want to customize the start and end dates. You can also set parameters so that your ads only run during specific hours and days of the week.

Optimization & Pricing
Choose whether or not you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. (This will alter how your ad is displayed and paid for.) By doing so, you’ll pay for your ad to be shown to people within your target audience that are more likely to complete your desired action, but Facebook will control what your maximum bid is.

If you don’t want Facebook to set optimal bids for you, you’ll want to opt for manual bidding. This option awards you full control over how much you’re willing to pay per action completed. However, Facebook will provide a suggested bid based on other advertisers’ behavior to give you a sense of what you should shoot for.

Delivery
Delivery type falls under two categories: standard and accelerated. Standard delivery will show your ads throughout the day, while accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience quickly for time-sensitive ads (Note: this option requires manual bid pricing).

6. Create your ad.
What do you want your ad to look like? It all depends on your original objective.
If you’re looking to increase the number of clicks to your website, Facebook’s Ad Manager will suggest the clicks to Website ad options. Makes sense, right?

7. Monitor your ad’s performance metrics.
Once your ads are running, you’ll want to keep an eye on how they’re doing. To see their results, you’ll want to look in two places: the Facebook Ad Manager and your marketing software.
According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):

Performance: Can be customized further to include metrics like results, reach, frequency and impressions
Engagement: Can be customized further to include metrics like Page likes, Page engagement and post engagement
Videos:Can be customized further to include metrics like video views and avg. % of video viewed
Website:Can be customized further to include metrics like website actions (all), checkouts, payment details, purchases and adds to cart
Apps: Can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions and cost per app engagement
Events: Can be further customized to include metrics like event responses and cost per event response
Clicks: Can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click)
Settings: Can be further customized to include metrics like start date, end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid and objective
Regardless of which of these metrics you use to measure the success of your advertising efforts, you can find the data in the Ads Manager.

8. Reporting on Facebook ad performance.
You can receive custom reports via email as well. Here’s how to set it up:
Navigate to Analyze and Report through the upper main menu.
Choose Ads Reporting.
Select Create Custom Report.
Select and open a saved report.
Choose Save As next to the save icon. Give your report a name and check Schedule Email.