The Complete Guide to Facebook Ads SOP
Optimize and manage your online presence with Facebook Ads SOPs
Don’t fumble around attempting to find the right course of action for Facebook Ads. This complete guide lays out the process from start to finish, leaving no stones unturned.
Why Facebook Ads Are Right For Your Business
Facebook advertising offers many advantages over other platforms. For example, you can target users based on their precise interests, not just their demographic information. Facebook also enables you to engage with potential customers in a manner that is more conversational than with Twitter or Instagram. Your ads can link directly to landing pages where visitors can sign up for newsletters and download white papers without ever leaving Facebook. And thanks to Facebook’s extensive profile information, as well as its extremely precise targeting capabilities, using ads is an efficient way of reaching your target market at a low cost per click (or whatever unit of measurement makes sense for your campaign). In short, Facebook ads are a powerful tool that should be part of every serious business’ social media marketing strategy.
Facebook Ads are a powerful marketing tool and one of the few ways you can reach customers at scale, both paid and organically through Facebook itself. To maximize your reach and effectiveness with Facebook Ads, it is important to consider your target audience, budget, and time constraints, as well as create custom audiences that you can leverage in the future. If you are looking to get started with Facebook Ads but do not know where to begin, this complete guide has everything you need to know about Facebook Ads SOP.
Choosing an Ad objective
Selecting an Ad objective is the first step in the Facebook Ads creation process and is important for the overall success of your ad campaign. There are three options that Facebook provides you to choose from. Awareness, consideration, and conversion. When you choose an ad objective, Facebook will show your ad to people who are more likely to fulfill your desired action.
Awareness
Awareness campaigns is the first step in a marketing funnel. The goal is to have potential customers learn about your business and the offerings you have. In addition, awareness campaigns allow you to perform valuable market research to enable effective targeting. In fact, you can later attribute remarketing ads towards audiences who responded well to your awareness ads. Although it may be tempting to jump directly into conversion ads, return on marketing will be higher if you run awareness ads at the start of your campaign.
Consideration
Consideration ads are the second step in the marketing funnel. These types of ads are targeted towards people who interacted with your awareness ads, visited your page, or website. The goal with this type of advertisement is to generate more traffic towards your site or page.
Conversion
Conversion ads are the last step in the Facebook ads marketing funnel. These ads are differentiated from awareness and consideration ads as they target the viewer to act. Whether it is filling out a form, making a phone call, or completing a purchase, these ads are targeted towards people who are more likely to complete the prescribed event.
Selecting an audience
There are three main types of audiences we will be covering in this guide, saved audiences, custom audiences, and lookalike audiences.
Saved audiences
With this type of audience, ad managers can target users based on key demographics like age, location, interests, gender, and a myriad of other options. By creating a target segment and sculpting your ads towards that audience your ads will be more relevant and more likely to convert.
Custom audiences
Custom audiences allow the user more control over who the advertisement is targeted to. Facebook provides the option to create an audience from customer lists, people who engage with your page, website traffic and other custom-made lists. Improved targeting will increase your chance of engagement and conversions, boosting your ads success.
Lookalike audiences
Lookalike audiences are based on the custom audiences that you created. Facebook will attempt to build a profile of people that are similar to your existing audience. This option will allow you to expand the reach of your ads and build interaction with people who are unfamiliar with your brand.
What Ad Placement is Best for Me?
There are a wide variety of options available for ad placement. Each option provides different advantages and disadvantages. It is up to you to assess a few different ad placements to see which one provide the best results. Below is a list of the most popular ad placement options offered through Facebook.
Facebook Feed: Your ads appear in the Facebook feed on mobile and desktop
Facebook Marketplace: Your ads appear in the Marketplace home page or when someone browses Marketplace
Facebook Video Feeds: Your video ads appear between organic videos in video-only environments on Facebook Watch and Facebook Feed
Facebook Right Column: Your ads appear in the right column on Facebook.
Stories: Your ads appear in people's Stories on Facebook
Think about where you want your Ads to appear, consider your target audience and where they are most likely to engage with your ads. There is no “best” option, but data shows that in-stream videos and the Facebook feed provide the best options in terms of click-through rates. Run a few different ad placements for a couple of weeks and then make decisions as to what performed well and what did not. Do not get discouraged if results in the beginning are slow, the longer you stick with it the more data you get about your market and the better you can position yourself.
Setting your Ad Budget
The two budget management options that Facebook provides are Daily and Lifetime budgets. Daily budget sets will seek to spend an average amount of money on each ad set per day, never going above 7x your daily spend in a week. Lifetime budget sets operate in a comparable manner, but instead of determining max spend on a weekly basis, it does so for the entirety of the lifetime of the ad. This can be a bit confusing so let us break it down with an example.
Daily Budget
Let us say that you set up an ad campaign with a daily budget of $20. Each day Facebook will seek to spend $20 on your ad sets. Some days it will spend more and some days it will spend less as the opportunity for your ad sets are variable. However, at the end of the week the Ad set will not have spent more than seven times the daily budget.
This type of Ad budget is more suitable for businesses who wish to spend the same amount every day, this is useful for projecting costs associated with advertising.
Additionally, Daily budget allows for more flexibility in the cost and length of your ad campaigns. If you are evaluating out new strategies and need to be able to update your ad spend and duration of advertisement, daily budgets are a friendlier option.
Lifetime Budget
Lifetime budgets operate slightly differently. Instead of the ad spend being determined daily, the ad spend is evenly distributed over the selected lifetime of the Ad. You set an overall budget for the lifetime of the advertisement and Facebook will automatically decide when to spend and when to hold back. This type of budget works best when you are confident about the length and spend of your ad, as changing those variables will affect the performance of your Ad.
Campaign Budget Optimization
CBO is a system implemented by Facebook that uses machine learning to maximize the potential of your ad sets. Under a regular Ad set budget you will assign set budgets to each ad iteration. The advantage in utilizing CBO is that some ad sets will perform better than others at separate times, Facebook will automatically manage the spend to redirect to the highest performing ads.
Bidding Strategies
A bid strategy is the formula for how you approach spending in Ad auctions. Finding the right strategy for your goals is integral in success with Facebook Ads. For this, Facebook offers three options: spend based, goal based, and manual.
Spend Based
This type of strategy will focus on spending the entirety of your Ad budget. Inside this strategy you can choose from highest volume or highest value. Highest volume will allow you to maximize your ads reach so your ad will be seen by the largest audience possible. Highest value will attempt to direct customers towards more expensive points along your product line. Choosing which one is right for you is dependent on your individual goals.
Goal Based
A goal-based bidding strategy will seek to bid in a way that meets either a desired cost or value point. The two options Facebook provides are “Cost per result” and ROAS goal. Cost per result will seek to keep the cost per conversion at around the same amount per conversion. This strategy is utilized as an effective way to manage ad spend and maintain profitability. A ROAS goal or return on ad spend goal, will aim to manage an average return on investment throughout the lifetime of your campaign.
Manual Bidding
Manual Bidding is an effective way to control how much your ad auctions can bid. By implementing Bid caps, the user can set the maximum bid allowed, instead of letting Facebook dynamically spend your ad budget. This type of strategy is best fitted for users who understand the auction process and can calculate appropriate bids. If you are just recently starting your journey with Facebook Ads, this strategy may be unadvisable
Choosing a Format
Facebook offers a wide selection of formatting options for ad creation. Below we will break down each option and explain its intended usage so you can better understand what format is right for your advertisement.
Image
Images are an effective way to highlight your brand or product.
Video
Videos provide an effective way to quickly inform customers about your product, promotions, or values. Additionally, videos are shown to have the highest level of engagement with users on social platforms. Providing a 2x increase in CTR and a 20-30% increase in conversions when compared to images. However, video ads are more complicated to put together and are more expensive to produce than traditional image ads.
Carousel
Carousel ads provide a format that allows users to add up to 10 images/videos per ad, each one with a separate headline, description, link, and call to action. This ad format can be used to display many distinct products, tell a story, explain how your business works, and highlight multiple features of a product or service.
Instant Experience
Instant experience is an ad format that creates a full screen experience after someone clicks your ads. Since it works with image, video carousels and collections it is easy to turn your existing ads into an instant experience.
Collection
Collection ads are a cover image/ video followed by three product images. This format is geared towards retail and provides a seamless conversion experience for customers. Additionally, when a user interacts with a collection ad, the ad opens into an instant experience which has been shown to drive engagement.
Facebook Pixel
Before running any ads to your website , it is important to set up a Facebook Pixel. The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that will allow you to track data between your advertisements and website. Capturing and measuring this data will help you understand where your ads perform the best, what actions your ads drive, and help you narrow in on your target market. Setting up the Facebook Pixel is a straightforward and quick process, so there is really no reason not to do it. Click here for a comprehensive guide on the process.
Conclusion
Facebook Ads are a valuable addition to any businesses marketing toolbox. When effectively implemented they can increase your awareness, drive conversions, and boost revenue. It is important to remember that just like other ad platforms, it takes time to evaluate different strategies and collect data. If you do not see results quickly, do not become discouraged at a lack of results, broaden your time horizons, and let Facebook Ad optimization run its course. At the very least, most ad campaigns need a few weeks before they start to show solid results. By reading this article you have gained the insight around Facebook Ads SOP necessary to stand up your first ad campaign and start generating more revenue.
At Further Insights, we have years of experience and success running Facebook Ads in full scale for a variety of different industries from real estate to music festivals. We know what works and what doesn’t, so if you are looking to expedite the process and take the guesswork out of the equation, click below, and get started today!
