Today’s blog topic is Facebook Ads – and I’m sharing the secret to getting them right!
I’m on a mission to give you the information on how powerful Facebook ads are, and I really want you to have the absolute best chance of getting more customers, gathering more qualified leads, selling more stuff – whatever will make you more profitable – because that’s pretty much the goal of being in a small business!
If you listen to my podcast, (if you haven’t yet, go check it out!), in Episode 32 I spoke about Facebook Ads, covering the 3 mistakes that we need to stop making. If you haven’t listened to that episode, then I suggest you go back and listen in once you’re done reading this blog.
So today I wanted to dive into the secret to Facebook Ads success. It’s not a HUGE secret but you do need to know it and really understand it to achieve success on Facebook.
And that secret is:
Understanding the Facebook Ad objectives selection.
When you go to create a Facebook Ad, at the very beginning of the process you have 11 choices to make, well – make that 13 if you count that engagement has three choices in one objective!
This OBJECTIVES area is one of your first choices you make, but if you get this wrong there is a huge you won’t achieve your ad campaign goal (and when you listen to Episode 32 and you know how important setting goals are – then set one!).
A critical element of mastering effective Facebook advertising is to know the following:
You can’t change your objective once your ad is live.
I’ll say it again – you can’t change your ad objective once your ad is live!
So, you absolutely must put some energy here to ensure you are nailing the ad objective.
Of course, you can stop the ad if it’s not working for you and you very well should do that if it’s missing the mark, as you can change just about everything else except the objective.
But the secret sauce in this whole Facebook Ad dish is more than that – it’s understanding the following:
The objective you choose must tell the Facebook Algorithm EXACTLY what to do.
And when I say exactly, I completely mean EXACTLY!
I’ll give you an example:
Your objective is Traffic. You want to drive people from Facebook to any URL you choose, such as your website’s landing page, a blog post, app etc.
So, if you select this objective, Facebook will find the people, according to your targeting, who are the people most likely to click an ad with the objective of driving them off Facebook to X – wherever you’ve sent them – blog, website, landing page, sales page etc.
But that’s it. That’s the secret – to know that is all this will do, and that’s all it will guarantee.
So if in response to that statement you just thought, YAY – that’s awesome, this it will give me traffic to my website to buy my product, then you’d be wrong – very wrong.
As a disclaimer, I’m not saying you won’t get sales from this objective, but what I am saying is that Facebook are not necessarily sending traffic to your sales page who are most likely to BUY – they are only sending traffic who are most likely to CLICK the ad and go to the page.
Can you see the difference between those two objectives? Most small businesses with an online shopfront want people to not just CLICK, but to actually BUY from the site. So you need to delve deeper into your objective setup to make sure you are targeting the correct consumers with your ad.
If you want people who are most likely to buy, if you want Facebook to send people who are most likely to BUY, then you’ll need to use the conversions objective. Because that objective is set up to convert people – just like it says.
Of course, that comes with conditions as well, like you need to have fed into your Facebook setup the data regarding who’s most likely to buy and you’ll need the Facebook Pixel in your website or on the page you’re sending them too.
Now, hopefully this is not causing you to feel confused. I can understand that is something that can be hard to wrap your head around. I actually created an online course dedicated to this topic – Facebook Ads for Beginners, so my intention here in this blog is to just share with you some of what I’ve learnt and some of what I know about Facebook Ads to demystify them a little and help you understand them more so you’ll give them a go. But if you need more, then definitely look at investing in my Facebook Ads for Beginners course!
Let’s look further into just how to make the most of Facebook Ads.
If you normally spend money on newspaper ads or radio or tv ads – then I’d like to you consider taking about 25% of that budget and invest it into Facebook Ads and see what result you get.
Yes, that can seem daunting initially, and maybe you will need to do a course like Facebook Ads for Beginners, but I truly believe the return on any investment in this will far outweigh any traditional marketing strategies you might take on such as tv, radio or newspaper. I’m not saying those traditional options don’t work; all I’m asking is that you take a percentage of that budget and give Facebook Ads a go.
Let me give you another example of an ad objective that seems like it’s brilliant and exactly what you need – but it just may not be once you go though the process!
Your objective is Event Reponses. Within the Engagement objective, you have three choices and one of them is event responses. You can run an ad that will give people who see that ad three choices regarding your event: Interested, Going, Not Interested.
If you’re running a business networking event, you might be thinking, yippee, that’s exactly what I want – I want my Facebook ad to be shown to people within my targeting area who’ll come to my event.
But it won’t! (yes, shocking I know!)
The Facebook algorithm will show your ad to people within your targeting who are most likely to “click” on events and “click” coming, not coming, maybe.
But importantly – THIS DOESN’T GUARANTEE THEY WILL COME!
It doesn’t take much commitment to sit on the Facebook app and click “Going” does it. If these people are completely cold traffic – they may never heard of you before, their commitment is low.
Think about it – you see an event, it’s in your area, looks kind of interesting, you click “Going” or “Interested” and continue to scroll. Sometimes, unless you head into your events tab for a look, you might not have much memory about that event you saw and clicked maybe to going.
So how would you do it to increase the chance of these ad clicks being converted into an actual participant at your event?
There’s several ways, one of the best, of course, is the conversions objective. You might do it by running a video ad to cold traffic and building a retargeting audience off that, so target people who watched 50% of that video (which was about the event).
You might run an ad to a blog which talks about the event – using the traffic objective and because you’ve got the Facebook pixel installed on that blog page, you can then run a retargeted ad to them about the event. Again, they would no longer be cold traffic!
So, what’s the secret?
The secret to Facebook Ads is understanding that the Facebook Algorithm will do exactly what you tell it too.
It’ll find the exact people you asked for and get them to do the exact call to action you’ve asked for too.
A vitally important step in creating your ad is to not rush through the first part of setting it up because you think you just want to get to the Ad Set or Ad level where you do all the hard work and make all the decisions – if you do that you’ll have missed the fundamental elements that will help you get your ad in front of the eyes of people who will more likely engage with it.
Decisions made here, on the very first screen – they matter!
They set your ad up for success or no success (we never fail – we just learn for later!)
If you’ve never run a Facebook Ad before OR you have previously but with no success OR you simply get confused every time you try and create engaging, lead generating, sales driven Ad copy then, please download my eBook the Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads.
If you want to learn more, than I can recommend you invest in my Facebook Ads for Beginners e-course. I have had so much great feedback from small business owners who have completed the course, so it’s definitely worth checking out!
Got other questions? I’ve got answers! Let’s continue this conversation in my Facebook Group – Like Minded Business Owners. If you haven’t joined yet, welcome along! It’s another great way to stay on top of what’s going on in the world of social media and marketing!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenn Donovan is a marketing strategist and social media extraordinaire, coach and mentor to savvy business owners. Owner and Founder of Social Media & Marketing Australia.
With a passion for making business simple, because it’s isn’t easy but it should be simple or at least simpler, she’s built a reputation for helping other small business owners simplify their marketing and businesses so they can reach their goals, be more profitable and live the dream (finding the freedom they set out to achieve when they started … the illusive small business owner freedom dream …!)
Jenn believes in giving before asking and that’s why she’s the host of the popular Small Business Made Simple Podcast
I have made some ads on Facebook Ads but engagement is very low (almost 1%) but after reading your explanations I understood better what I have to do to improve results. Very good!