Facebook ads for beginners

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Facebook adverts are deceptive as they appear easy to set up, but actually they can soon suck your budget dry or the ads may even just stop showing. So this is a quick guide to getting started with Facebook Ads.
To get started with Facebook ads, it’s important to spend time setting up a landing page that will convert visitors into potential leads. Set up a landing page for each product or service you are selling via Facebook. On the landing page – request their email details by setting up an Aweber sign up box or something similar. Offer to give away something of value – whitepapers, discount codes or free P&P vouchers are all beneficial.

Now, when you set up your Facebook adverts you will be able to track conversions – which means you can count the number of signups you receive. In addition, if you are an ecommerce website and are selling a product, you can count direct sales received from your ads.
Facebook advertising only work for certain products or services – normally where it is possible to target a specific group of people. Let’s take golf as an example. When people sign up to Facebook, they express an interest in a hobby such as golf. In addition, they may join groups or fan pages related to golf. Therefore if you have a product or service aimed at golfers, this would be ideal for Facebook.

It will NOT work for general groups, such as Mums. So if you are selling childrenswear, Facebook advertising is not likely to be for you.
To set up an effective advert in Facebook, you will need to have an image sized up to “110 pixels wide x 80 pixels tall and should have an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 16:9. Uploads must be less than 5 megabytes.” It’s imperative you have images designed for you by a professional designer unless you have skills in this area yourself. Don’t even think about launching without an image! Clever images may be just a small banner with a catchy slogan, or they may be an image of your product with a slogan across, or even a smiling image of someone wearing your product might work. The key here will be test different images.
When creating the text for your advert, create your text to grab attention fast – consider asking a question. Ask them to “click here” to maximise Click Through Rate. It is also possible to capitalise a whole word such as buy TODAY.
Add in the interests your visitors will have that make them a suitable group to market to – such as golf.
Make sure you send the visitor to the landing page, NOT your homepage. You should then make sure your bid price exceeds their recommended bid. Your recommended bid will rise rapidly over time. This is why you need to set up new adverts on a weekly basis, otherwise your recommended bid will continue to increase. This is actually due to the “boredom” factor and is due to less people clicking your advert over time as they have already seen it! So you need to keep setting up new ads to combat this. My advice is to set up at least 2 ads per week, per product you are advertising via Facebook. Test the ads against each other and learn how best to word the adverts from viewing your results and examining your Click Through Rates.
Finally, make sure you go into the Tracking section and generate some tracking code. This should be placed onto the thank you page people see when they have successfully signed up for your newsletter, or if they have completed a purchase.
A good Click Through rate in Facebook is actually very low – you might be lucky to get a Click Through Rate of 0.1%.
Do tell us about your experiences with Facebook ads – what has been successful / unsuccessful for you?

Claire

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