Facebook Ads: The Basics for Small Biz

Kaitlyn Hammond — August 18, 2018

— August 18, 2018

geralt / Pixabay

Being the most prominent social media platform around the world, Facebook can’t be ignored when it comes to planning an advertising strategy for your small business. Two billion people around the world use this platform every month, which gives companies a large potential customer base to connect with. The benefits of creating Facebook ads is you can set ad campaigns to any budget, and they can be viewed on any mobile device!

Setting Up Facebook Ads

Business Ads Manager allows even the most novice online user to set up eye-catching and relevant ad campaigns for their customers with these steps:

1. Click on Create New Campaign
2. Select a campaign objective—Decide what the main goal of the ad campaign is so Facebook can optimize features to help you get there, including:
   1. Awareness: brand awareness or reach
   2. Consideration: traffic, engagement, etc.
   3. Conversion: sales or store visits
3. Name the campaign
4. Choose your audience—Choose who sees your ads based on their location, age, gender, language and even interest and behaviors
5. Set up Ad Placement—Facebook has the option to determine where your ads will be shown, or you can decide yourself. It’s important to note that the cost of the ad will vary based on where it’s placed. The options include:
   1. Facebook News Feeds
   2. Facebook Right-Hand Column
   3. Instagram
   4. Audience Network
   5. Instant Articles
   6. In-Stream Video
6. Choose your daily budget and when you want to start/ stop running your ads
7. Add content—Add a video, photos and or text to make your ad go live!

How to Track Facebook Ad Campaigns

Although business owners choose their daily budgets, it can take a significant investment to reach a wide audience on Facebook. As such, it’s advantageous to track the results of the campaigns and see which ads outperform others. Your audience may prefer videos over pictures, or they may respond better to one type of text over another.

Here are the steps to track ad campaign results:

1. Click on Ads Manager.
2. Choose between Campaigns, Ad Sets or Ads to see the analytics for each one
3. Click on Columns dropdown menu
4. Click on Customize Columns and decide what you want to track, such as purchases
5. Click Apply to see results

The great thing about Ads Manager is that it provides options to not only see results but to test your ads and then make meaningful changes to help them perform better.

Finding Your Target Audience

Possibly the most important step in reaching your objective when advertising on Facebook is finding your target audience. You may create the most compelling ad, but if the people who see it have no need for your product or service, they will not buy it.

If you already know the demographics of your customers, Facebook can create a Lookalike Audience of similar people to show the ad to.

If you are not sure who to target, Facebook’s Audience Insights is a great tool. Simply type in an interest or topic close to your field, such as Ford Motors, and you can get information about the people interested, such as their demographics, what other pages they like, where they live, their relationship status and more!

You can then use this information to set up your custom audience on Facebook.

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