When starting out with Facebook ads, it's not always clear what steps you need to take in order to begin running relevant and impactful campaigns for your business. After all, there are many factors, tools and tactics to remember, not to mention numerous ad types to choose from and best practices to consider. With Facebook marketing beginners in mind, we've created the following checklist to help you go from a novice to social advertising master.
Ad Creation
Determine which type of ad unit is right for your goals
Decide what you want people to do after they view your ads and choose a corresponding call-to-action (CTA) button, such as Download Now, Buy Now, Learn More, etc.
Install a pixel on your site which will tell you if users completed the desired action after clicking on your ad
If you're an ecommerce or gaming company, learn how ad types like Dynamic Product Ads (pictured below) or Mobile App Install Ads (MAIs) are specifically designed to help you achieve your goals
Leverage tiered Lookalike Audiences so you can target ads towards people who look like your best customers and gain additional reach
Determine which bid type is best suiting for your needs
Explore and implement Facebook’s Partner Categories to expand your ads’ reach and get in front of new users
Ongoing
Set up a pacing strategy so you don’t spend your budget too quickly or underdeliver on volume goals
Explore similar platforms that you can easily expand your advertising to (for example, Instagram is a easy next step after you've gotten comfortable with Facebook advertising)
Swap out old creative for refreshed imagery so users don't develop ad fatigue from repeatedly being served the same ads (see example below)
- See more at:
Decide what you want people to do after they view your ads and choose a corresponding call-to-action (CTA) button, such as Download Now, Buy Now, Learn More, etc.
Install a pixel on your site which will tell you if users completed the desired action after clicking on your ad
If you're an ecommerce or gaming company, learn how ad types like Dynamic Product Ads (pictured below) or Mobile App Install Ads (MAIs) are specifically designed to help you achieve your goals
Leverage tiered Lookalike Audiences so you can target ads towards people who look like your best customers and gain additional reach
Determine which bid type is best suiting for your needs
Explore and implement Facebook’s Partner Categories to expand your ads’ reach and get in front of new users
Ongoing
Set up a pacing strategy so you don’t spend your budget too quickly or underdeliver on volume goals
Explore similar platforms that you can easily expand your advertising to (for example, Instagram is a easy next step after you've gotten comfortable with Facebook advertising)
Swap out old creative for refreshed imagery so users don't develop ad fatigue from repeatedly being served the same ads (see example below)
Are you struggling to find your ideal paying clients on Facebook? Perhaps you’ve tried running ads and they didn’t “work” for you? Or, you have Page “likes” but no one seems interested in your offers?
You have something valuable to offer, yet – for some reason – the pieces you’ve implemented so far are simply not generating revenue fast enough.
This scenario can be very discouraging and frustrating when you see and hear of so many experts and online marketers bringing in hundreds of leads a day.
When you master marketing online, you can then scale from one-on-one dollars-for-hours to building a leveraged business that works for you (even when you are not working).
When I created and launched my first online course, I had a following of just 150 people. In the first 16 days of launching that course, I generated over $100k in revenue. That course has since generated 7-figures.
My primary automated source for new clients: Facebook ads!
If you are struggling, you’re not alone. I connect with thousands of entrepreneurs every month who struggle with finding their people and converting leads into sales online.
Here are the 3 main reasons coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs like you struggle to find their clients online:
Reason 1: Your main product is “YOU”
Do you want to help a thousand people with your expertise or ten? If your vision is to serve a bigger audience, you need a product that delivers results without you delivering every aspect of that product.
You will never be able to scale your business if the main product you are selling is your time.
Your main product needs to be highly leveraged and allow you to serve lots of people without a lot of your time.
This is why an online course works brilliantly as your “main offer.” You create it once and then it works for you. And, it leads your clients directly into working with you in higher end offers such as group coaching, consulting, one-on-one work, membership sites and more.
Here’s what you can do now:
Identify a main offer that…
…is a product your ideal clients want,
…does not involve a lot of “YOU,” and
…has enough value to be priced high enough to monetize your marketing efforts. It takes just as much effort launching a $97 online product as a $997 course. Make the return higher for the effort and you’ll have more room to budget for marketing.
Reason 2: Your offer is not specific enough
Specific sells. To get specific, you have to know the question your audience is asking to successfully market to them.
What question is your audience asking that your offer addresses?
If you are a wellness coach, your expertise might include “gut health”. Most people are not online searching for a product related to “gut health”. Yet, there are many people searching for “How do I get rid of stomach pain after I eat?”
You have to get clear on your client’s question to market effectively.
Here’s what you can do now:
Pay attention to the questions your audience is asking you (including your current clients). Look at your tweets, DMs, Facebook comments, posts and messages, other social channels, emails and more. If you’re still not clear on the primary question you audience is asking, consider conducting a survey.
Reason 3: You are not specific enough around the people you are targeting
To determine the question your audience is asking, you will need to get clear on who you are targeting. The more specific you are with your audience, the more easily you will find them.
Let’s say you are marketing a knitting course. Instead of “women, age 18-65″ who like “Martha Stewart”, challenge yourself to dig deeper and find niches where your people hang out. A target audience of “women”, “age 45-55″ who like “Knitty” and who also like an online knitting supply company like “Yarn.com” are much more likely to be your people.
Here’s what you can do now:
Compile a list of Facebook Pages that your people like, experts they follow, publications they read and more. You’ll use this data to target them using Facebook ads.
Conclusion
The time to think about how you market is before you start to create the product.
A mistake a lot of coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs make is to create an offer and then try to figure out how to market it. When you design your courses, programs and other offers working backwards from what your people want, you are guaranteed success.
I’m a huge fan of how easy Facebook has made it to advertise on their platform. You can create a campaign with zero experience and have it submitted to Facebook Ad Approvers within minutes. It’s truly a powerful time we live in.
Want to know what’s not amazing? The fact that there are some incredibly profitable elements that 99% of Facebook Advertisers don’t know about. In this post, I’m going to help you:
Find the ads that work best for you
Find the audience segments that work best for you
Spend your money in the smartest, most strategic way possible
Improve your interest targeting
With these tips, you’ll be able to eliminate the unprofitable parts of your campaigns, find the hidden gems, and massively improve your targeting.
Split Test Your Ads for Maximum Profit
Want to run the same campaign but double your results? Then you better be split testing your ads. The visual nature of Facebook can cause one ad to perform very differently from another ad.The above screenshot is a 7-day period from an ad set using all the same targeting for the same product. The only difference between ads A, B, and C is the image itself.
The results are three ads that performed incredibly different:
Ad A: Photo of a model wearing the product: 5.0% CTR & $4.74 CPA
Ad B: Photo of the product against white background: 5.4% CTR & $10.01 CPA
Ad C: Split photo of model & product: 3.0% CTR & $6.65 CPA
Had I just launched one ad (Ad B), my CPA would end up being more than double my best ad!
Want to find the perfect combination of ads that will give you the lowest CPA and highest profit?Here’s how we do it at Search Scientists:
Start with at least five images per ad set.
Write at least two ad texts
Write at least two headlines
From here, you’ll have 5 x 2 x 2 = 20 ads.
Check your Facebook Reporting every 24 hours, and begin pausing ads with the lowest performing combinations.
It takes time to optimize this way, but you can see from the example, the results can be incredible if you take the time to create ads in this manner.
Segment Your Reporting Data
When it comes to optimizing paid traffic accounts, I like to follow a simple (and fairly obvious) rule: Do more of what works, and do less of what doesn’t work.
It’s a simple principle that can have a massive impact in your Facebook Ads Account when applied consistently.
Let’s say we had a target of $75 cost per website conversion in the above campaign. When we open up the data for the campaign, we see a $106 CPA, should we give up and pause the campaign? Not without digging deeper!
Navigate to Reports > Breakdown. Here, you can discover the easiest way to find opportunity in your account. Turn off the poor performing areas, and allocate the budget towards the profitable parts of your account. In the example above, I’d be turning off several age groups, and would instantly be at my goal CPA.
Other great questions you can answer with the “breakdown” tab on Facebook reports
Age (What age is connecting with your ads?)
Gender (What gender is buying your products?)
Age & Gender (Is there a combination that is most profitable? Maybe 18-24 year old guys aren’t fans of the product, but 18-24 year old women are)
Country / Region (What geographic region is most expensive to advertise in?)
Placement (Do my ads work better on mobile, desktop, or right-hand side?)
When you begin exploring the inner workings of your account, you’ll start to discover that campaign-level summaries don’t tell the whole story.
Build Campaign Priority Lists
When it comes to Facebook Ads, not all campaigns are created equally.
There are campaign strategies that should receive more of your attention and budget, and other campaigns that should be created only after developing a strong foundation.
Advanced marketers develop Campaign Priority Lists to allocate their funds to the best strategies first. Before you approach challenging campaigns, be sure to capitalize on low-hanging fruit first.
So where should you begin?
Top Priority: Users Who Are in Buy Mode
Targeting Strategy: Retargeting Product Viewers
After you installed your custom audience pixel on all of your pages, you can begin creating segmented retargeting lists. People who have already viewed your product pages have already completed all the hard work to make it there. They found your content, opted in, and viewed your product. These people are ready to buy. Give them a gentle nudge to convert, and you’ll start Facebook Ads with a high converting, low-cost masterpiece of a campaign.
Pro Tip: Serve these ads with a high bid 72 hours after viewing a product page.
Mid-Priority: Users Who Know Your Brand
Targeting Strategies: Retargeting Website Viewers, Fans, Email Lists, Friends of Your Fans Who are Fans of Competitors
After targeting product viewers, let’s take one step up to a mid-priority campaign strategy and capture the users who already know about your brand.
Imagine you sell wedding invitations. A soon-to-be bride may look at seven different websites in a week. Just because they left your site without converting doesn’t mean they’re not ready to buy. Creating campaigns to target users who already know your brand but haven’t purchased yet is another low-cost way to capture the attention of users deep in the sales funnel.
Low-Priority: Users Who Have Never Heard of You [Interest Targeting]
After you have patched holes in the deeper sections of your sales funnel using the high and mid-priority targeting strategies, it’s time to open up the floodgates of traffic.
Targeting users that haven’t heard of you or previously looked at your products are less likely to convert than the previous campaigns I mentioned. However, that doesn’t mean you can build wildly successful campaigns targeting completely cold traffic with interest targeting.
To make interest targeting successful, remember to advertise appropriately. Someone who hasn’t searched for your product may not be ready to take out their credit card and spend money. However, if your target appropriately, you may be able to add value to their lives without asking them to buy anything. At this stage of targeting, you’ll want to use engaging landing pages and utilize a sales funnel to nurture the lead over time. This way, when the person is ready to convert, they do it with you.
Campaign Priority Wildcard: Lookalike Targetting
When it comes to Facebook ads, one of my favorite campaigns to run is a lookalike campaign. It works like this:
-Person completes certain action on your site (purchases, adds to cart, is on email list, etc..)
-Facebook then finds demographic data about that person and finds other people are similar
The reason these lookalike campaigns are a wildcard is simple: Facebook Lookalike Targeting isn’t perfect. For example, if you upload a sample list of 1,000 people, Facebook may spit back 2.5 million lookalikes.
When Facebook provides you with a lot of potential lookalikes, combine it with another targeting method. You can target fans of “Social Media Explorer”, only if they are on my lookalike list. Stacking these two kinds of targeting allows you to zoom in on the precise person you’re looking for.
Leverage Boolean Operators
One of the biggest, most impactful mistakes I see when it comes to Facebook Ads is a train of thought you have surely practiced.
Let’s do a little experiment and fire up the audience builder in Facebook.
Suppose I want to target runners who like technology.
First, I type in runners:
Wow, 33,000,000 people!
Now let’s narrow it down by adding the interest “technology”:
Uh… Wait a second…
Wait a second. How did the audience size increase? Wasn’t narrowing down my targeting by finding only the subgroup of runners who also like technology?
Unfortunately, no you weren’t.
Instead, we’re targeting people that like to go running, as well as a completely separate group of people that like to like technology.
This principle is so important when creating your ads, and it’s worth repeating for clarity. You are targeting two separate groups: Technology followers are your first group, and runners are your second group. There might be some overlap, but, for the most part, these are separate buckets. This is why the audience size increases when we add new interests.
Think about it: If you’re targeting a subgroup, the more interests you add – the audience size should get smaller. It doesn’t. The more interests you add, the larger your audience gets.
I typed in even more interests, and my audience only grew:
Facebook hides this little fact from most of its documentation. When selecting interests, you are using an “OR” variable. In the example above, we’re targeting runners OR fans of technology. We are not targeting “People who are runners AND like technology readers.”
So how can you improve your targeting, zooming to the audience you truly want to target?
The first is the segmentation of your campaigns. In this example we’ve been using, you would create one campaign targeting “surfers” and another targeting “technology.” It’s not perfect, but the goal here is to determine which interest is more profitable for you and optimize accordingly.
The second way to serve ads to the audience you intend is to use the Facebook Ads API.
If you’re not a developer, have no fear. There are many applications that handle this for you. Ad Espresso and Qwaya are two of the big names in this space. At Search Scientists, we use Ad Espresso, and it allows us to hit the center of the Venn Diagram for our clients.
See in the example above, I’m using the “and” variable. This time, I’m targeting people who are interested in running AND technology.
This time, when I enter all of those extra targeting methods, my audience zooms into the smallest level, only 6,000 users.
With the ideal targeting your ads will take off like never before. It’s all about finding the most ideal audiencepossible.
