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FACEBOOK ADS MANUAL
Everything yoo u n e e d t o k n o w y
to get started
Mojca Mars
Table of Contents - Introduction - Data about Facebook Ads - What will you learn from this book? - The foundation of your Facebook Advertising Strategy - But wait … what’s GRAB!? - You You were born born ready! - How to create a Facebook Advertising Campaign - 1. Decide which goal you want to achieve - 2. Pick an objective - 3. Write copy and create visuals - 4. Open your Facebook Ads Manager - 5. Target your perfect audience - 6. Set up and optimise your budget - 7. Launch your campaign - What now? - But how do I analyse my campaign? - Conclusion
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- Bonus chapter: RESOURCES - Ad Ideas just for for you! - Facebook’s Glossary of Ad Terms - How to set up an advertising account - How to implement a tracking pixel (soon to be named “Facebook pixel”) - How to integrate with Facebook for your native iOS app with Facebook’s SDK disapproved? - What to do if your ads are mistakenly disapproved?
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Introduction Just a few years ago you had zero chance of reaching such a narrowed down target audience at the other part of the country for such a low price. The marketing tools we have at our disposal today are more powerful than ever before. You can target your perfect audience with a surgical precision. You can buy ads for an incredibly low price, and if you know the rules of ad-creation, you can leverage your work over and over again. Facebook Ads Manager is one of the most powerful advertising tools ever created. A lot of it has to do with their precise targeting. They collect all sorts of data from their users (they also have other partners who provide a portion of data for them) which means you can make your targeting so precise you’ll reach just 100 specific people. But those 100 people will be insanely responsive to your ads. Here’s Here’s an example: You You can target an 18-year-old male, living within a 10mile radius of San Francisco, who likes Gary Vaynerchuk, uses an iPhone 6 and has just returned from travel 1 week ago.
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Creepy insight for an average user? Maybe. But just think about all the targeting possibilities you can tackle! Maybe you don’t need a well-defined audience like the example above. (That was a little too much, right?) But you have tons of other options you can choose from. Are you a freelancer who would love to sell a service to small E-commerce businesses? No problem — you can target people who own a small business and are early technology adopters. Want to get traffic to your blog post? Target people who are reading about that particular topic already and are apparently actively thinking about it. Want to promote your iPhone app? Just target people who own the latest iOS and are interested in similar services. Are you selling products for young moms? Create a campaign that will target 20-29-year-olds with kids, interested in similar products. And although targeting is what makes Facebook Ads Manager such a powerful advertising tool, it’s not all there is to it. What’s a great targeting without a compelling copy and eye-catching design that will make people stop at your ad. And a campaign isn’t complete without an optimised budgeting system developed in a way to provide you best results for the lowest price.
The best thing of all — everyone gets a chance here, from small companies with tiny budgets to the “big boys” with thousands of dollars investing in Facebook advertising each day. This type of advertising is available to everyone. And the guys with the big bucks don’t always win. The smart ones do, no matter the budget.
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So sit tight as you join me on this journey through Facebook’s Advertising Ecosystem. It is a beautiful place full of opportunities if you only now what to do. And trust me, by the end of this book you’ll be an excited explorer yourself, ready to get some badass experience of your own.
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Data about Facebook Ads Facebook Third Quarter 2015 Results were Results were mind-blowing to a lot of people who were unaware of how big Facebook actually is. Here are a couple of data points you should be familiar with: - Facebook Facebook has 1.55 Billion Monthly Active Users, Users , increased by 14% from a year earlier. (USA has a population of 310+ million people. Facebook Facebook has more m ore than 1 billion more users. Monthly.) - Facebook’s Facebook’s advertising revenue revenue from the third quarter is $4.3 billion. lion. To switch the attention from Facebook as a company to other companies who advertise on Facebook — there are 2.5 million advertisers advertisers now using Facebook’s advertising platform. 93% of marketers swear marketers swear by Facebook. Those aren’t just big companies like you would’ve expected. Even the small ones are generating incredible results such as 4.8X return on investment by ment by Coverbrands, 190,000 new leads by leads by Libelle, 39% increase in leads by leads by
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Sayidaty.net, over 40% of new customers that customers that came via Facebook by Total Immersion Israel. What about solopreneurs, freelancers? If you know how a great Facebook Facebook Ad Campaign looks like, you can achieve similar outstanding results as Brennan Dunn, Dunn, and Kurt Elster did. Elster did. (Note: Detailed case studies coming soon!) s oon!) The beauty of Facebook Ads is in the fact that nothing is stopping you from not trying it out but yourself. Invest a couple of dollars into testing it out for yourself and see what happens. A month from today, you can be nothing more than 30 days older — or you can be on your way to having a successful Facebook Advertising Strategy for your business. You decide.
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What will you learn from this book? When you’re done reading this book, you’ll have a list of actionable items of what you need to do next. You You will know how to reach the results you’ve been trying to achieve before but failed because you weren’t comfortable with Facebook’s Advertising system. You will be more than comfortable now because we’ll create a solid foundation for you to build upon. Not only you’ll have a clear understanding of Facebook Advertising, but you’ll also get familiar with all the tricks of the trade professional marketers use. You will learn how to prepare a goal-oriented campaign and use that skills to your advantage. I’ve been working with more than a dozen companies over the last couple of years, and I can assure you’ll be quite a few steps ahead of them after reading this book. 95% of the companies I’ve worked with had not done Facebook Advertising at all, or their ads were made poorly bey beyond ond imagination.
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You’re getting a unique chance to learn from their mistakes, avoiding doing them yourself. You’ll be left with the good stuff only and improve every step of the way. Let’s Let’s get started!
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The foundation of your Facebook Advertising Strategy Great, you decided to join me on this journey! We’re going to have lots of knowledgeable fun, trust me! But before we dive into all details and technicalities Facebook Advertising system has to offer, you have to answer some questions for yourself. Answering these questions will help you create an outstanding Facebook Ads Strategy. You’ll finally GRAB ! the attention of the right customers or clients, inevitably pulling them towards you and your product.
But wait … what’s GRAB!? GRAB! is an acronym for all the key points to our essential questions. You’re going to be using the GRAB ! technique before every campaign creation. It
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will serve you as an excellent and efficient roadmap that will help you and your campaign achieve the results you’re striving for. If you ever ended up sitting in front of your computer, not knowing where to start your new Facebook Advertising Campaign, those those days are finally over. You’re now armed with a specific s pecific technique that will kickstart your campaign’s creation in just a few minutes. But let’s not waste any more time. Here’s the GRAB! technique revealed. GRAB! stands for Goal, Results, Audience, Budget, Brand. These 5 words are extracted from the 5 key questions you have to ask yourself before creating each new Facebook Ads Campaign.
GOAL: What is my #1 goal? What is the #1 goal you’re trying to achieve? “Brand awareness and maybe some product purchases on the side” is not the right answer. It’s important to stay focused at this point. We’re looking for your primary goal here that will serve as the foundation for your Facebook Facebook Campaign. Why is your #1 goal so important? Because your whole campaign will be created around that goal. Your goal depends on what Campaign Objective we’re going to choose later when we get to the part of creating your Facebook Ads Campaign. Your #1 goal could be anything from creating awareness for your new product, increasing increasing traffic to your blog post, getting new subscribers, increasing purchases of your product or even increasing the number of app downloads.
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But make sure to focus on 1 goal. Sure, your brand awareness will increase even though your primary focus will be on increasing signups to your newsletter, but brand awareness will be a side a side-effect. The main focus should be increased signups. That’s That’s what we’re striving for.
RESULTS: RESULTS: What results do I have to achieve to be satisfied with the campaign? Let’s say your goal is increasing brand awareness. After setting up a Facebook Page Likes Campaign, how will you know you’ve reached that goal? By measuring results. Based on the goal and the budget you’ll set up for your Campaign, you’ll probably already have a particular outcome in mind. 20 Page Likes might not do it for you, but you would be totally happy with 50 Page Likes. Before creating every campaign, write down a specific outcome you would be satisfied with. That will enable you to track the course of the campaign and modify it a little bit to reach or surpass those results.
AUDIENCE: Who is my target audience? You can create the best ads in the world, but if you fail to target the right audience, the ad quality won’t matter because the audience that would engage with the ads otherwise won’t ever be reached. Imagine you’re a successful business owner and you see ads like “Looking for a stable job?” by an employment agency in your news feed. A thing that could easily be avoided with a precise targeting plan can cause the same
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agency quite a bit of trouble. Oh and we shouldn’t forget that a whole lot of money can be spent for 0 results. The importance of correct targeting cannot be stressed enough. The right audience can make a difference between surpassing your goal by 100% or totally failing with your Facebook Ads Campaign. Define your target audience. Who are they? What are sparks their interest? What are they looking for? Be as specific as possible.
BUDGET: BUDGET: What’s my budget? Your budget also plays a vital role in your campaign. Sure, you can’t run a paid campaign with a budget of $0, that’s not possible and you’re aware of that. But that’s also not what I mean. You have to be realistic when it comes to budgeting. You can’t expect to sell $19 ebook for $1 invested in your Facebook Ads. At least not at the beginning. So when you get down to answering these questions, be honest with yourself. Don’t say you want to grow your email list for 500, throw $5 into ads and walk away from Facebook Ads later, saying they’re not effective. Keep in mind that Facebook Advertising is an ever-iterating process. We all start with higher cost-per-click rates but lower the price along the way as we get to iterate the ads and get more familiar with our target audience. The more you polish your campaign, the better your chances of achieving incredible success with Facebook Facebook Ads are. But you can’t polish your campaign along the way if you invest 100% of your budget in the first version of your ads, right? You’ll You’ll also be left without an
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in-depth knowledge about your audience which sucks since that knowledge allows you to achieve better results with less money in the next campaigns. That’s why you’ll implement The Ultimate Budgeting System in your Facebook Ads campaign.
The Ultimate Budgeting System Who knew budgets for Facebook Ads Campaign can be such a vast topic, right? But this plain and simple budgeting system is here to make campaign budgeting easy peasy. IMPORTANT NOTE: The Ultimate Budgeting System only makes sense in using if you have a budget of $20 or more. If you have less than that, you’ll be playing with pennies. If you have a smaller budget, you can go all in by all means and reevaluate and modify your ads after the campaign is finished . rule. But everyThe Ultimate Budgeting System goes by the 20/30/50 rule. thing starts with defining your budget. 1. Invest 20% of your budget in Facebook Ads After you’ll create your ads and set your budget (we’ll go into full detail about that in the following chapters), invest 20% of that budget in your Facebook Ads. You’re You’re just checking in with the campaign, testing your first ads out. 2. Turn off the ads with lower performance, invest 30% in best-performing ads Because you’ll create different ads for the same objective, some ads will naturally perform worse than others. After that 20% runs out, turn off the ads will lower performance and invest 30% in the best-performing ads. 3. Analyse the data and refine your audience
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In that time and with that budget your audience will get better defined. Maybe you totally nailed your target audience, maybe it was a miss. But that doesn’t matter — you now have valuable data that you can use to your advantage. You’re You’re already ten steps ahead of your y our competition who’s not doing any Facebook Facebook Advertising at all or is doing it badly. When 30% of your budget invested runs out, you’ll analyse the data (all described in the following chapters) and see which people are most responsive to your ads. Don’t worry, Facebook will show your ads to the target audience you will pick out at the beginning, but they will automatically optimise the campaign within that limits for you to get better results. This means if your target audience were to be 40-50-year-old males from San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami who are interested in web development, Facebook would push your advertising message to all of the demographic groups, but they might find out that men from Miami are not responding to your messages. In that case, they might lower the frequency of the ads appearing to that audience and push the ads to the audience that engages with your content the most. But they still won’t exclude the non-engaging audience. Facebook works for you. Facebook wants you to get the best results while still listening to your orders. So what you’ll do when that 30% of the budget invested runs out is you’ll optimise your target audience to get even better results with your Facebook Advertising efforts. That means you’ll exclude the audience that is not responding to your ads so you can reach more people who are interested in what you have to say. By examining the analytics and narrowing down your target market, you’ll also get to know k now your audience a little bit better. You’ll be armed with a price-
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less knowledge you can use over and over again when creating new Facebook posts, campaigns, etc. 4. Invest 50% of the budget in your refined ads Now the final budgeting step follows. After narrowing down your target audience, you’ll spend the remaining budget (50% of it) in your campaign. Your best message will get pushed to the right people. Your Your campaign is now optimised to achieve best results possible. You You did it!
Now that you’re equipped with The Ultimate Budgeting System, you still have to make sure your budget is realistic and in conjunction with your expectations. Expect to pay a little bit more for desired results from the beginning, but be prepared to enjoy the process of ad modification and watching great results unravel before your eyes.
BRAND: What’s my brand voice? Noisy. That’s how I would describe the world we live in today. But instead of complaining about the noisiness we can leverage it to our advantage. When was the last time you stopped scrolling through your Facebook News Feed when seeing an ad? AN ad that was so great and different from others, you just had to click and see s ee what’s on the other side? The ads that have an effect like the one described are not only accurately targeted, but they have a unique brand voice that stands out from the crowd of overly promotional ads. Here’s the harsh truth - the vast majority of Facebook Ads you see every day are too promotional and totally lack a unique brand voice. They fail to
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blend in with the updates you’re seeing from your friends which means you can spot ads from a mile away. And people avoid ads. avoid ads. Mission failed. But that’s what you can use to your advantage. Be different. Dare to show your brand’s personality. Big corporate brand, personal brand, doesn’t matter. Each brand has its own voice. Communicate that voice in a friendly and opened way. That enables you to blend in with the friend updates your audience is seeing. It’s a beautiful paradox: When you blend in, you actually stand out for your audience. Users don’t visit facebook.com to watch ads; they come to see what their friends are doing. Act like a friend. Give value to the user (like friends do!), make them want more.
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You You were were born ready! Woohoo, you are officially acquainted with the GRAB ! technique! You know what that means? No more staring at a blank screen with Facebook Ads Manager opened in front of you, not knowing what to do. You now have a solid foundation and a great roadmap for your Facebook Ads Campaign. You You have nothing to be afraid of, everything you need is right in front of you. We don’t want to waste any more time in theory, so let’s get down to practice. It’s ad creating time!
PRO TIP: Is this your first time creating a Facebook Advertising Cam paign? Grab a notebook, a piece of paper pape r or anything for you to make notes and simultaneously create a Facebook Ads Campaign while reading the following chapters.
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YOU NOW KNOW:
- GRAB! stands for Goal, Results, Audience, Budget, Brand - GOAL: Define your #1 goal - RESULTS: RESULTS: Write down a specific specific outcome you would be satisfied with - AUDIENCE: Define your target audience - BUDGET: Implement The Ultimate Budgeting System (20/30/50 rule) - BRAND: Communicate your brand voice - GRAB! should be used before creating creating every campaign
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How to create a Facebook acebook Adver Advertising Campaign The process of establishing a Facebook Advertising Campaign is actually pretty straightforward! That’s why I set up an easy process for you to follow along. You can come back to this step-by-step process every time you’ll want to create a new Facebook Campaign. It’s evergreen. But before we dive in elbows deep let’s just get ourselves familiar with Facebook campaign structure.
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Each campaign has three levels: campaign, ad sets and ads. Campaigns correspond Campaigns correspond to each of your advertising objectives or that #1 goal we talked about. Each goal represents a different campaign. If you first create Facebook Ads for getting new Facebook Page Likes but later want to experiment with getting new email signups, you are going to have to create a different campaign.
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Ad Sets Sets are found within every campaign, each campaign can feature multiple of ad sets. They can have it’s own budget, schedule and targeting. Advertisers usually use different Ad Sets when they’re testing different audiences. For example: When I created Facebook Ads for this book, I used two different audiences: my email list and my webpage visitors. Creating different ad sets enabled me to keep track of the conversions regarding different audiences, select a better-engaged audience later on and invest more money into that audience. The results were astounding. ads within ad sets. With creating multiple verYou can create different ads sions of your ads, you’ll be able to test the creative, select the ones that appeal to the target audience the most and turn off the rest. Now that we’re familiar with the campaign structure let’s get down to the real deal and see what steps you need to take to create a professional and very efficient Facebook Facebook Advertising campaign. The Process of creating a Facebook Advertising Campaign 1. Decide which which goal goal you want to achieve achieve 2. Pick an objective objectiv e 3. Write copy and create visuals 4. Open your your Facebook Facebook Ads Manager Manager 5. Target your perfect audience 6. Set up and optimise your budget budget 7. Launch your campaign The first three steps are actually of creative nature. We’ll work on the creative part before you start fidgeting and clicking around on Facebook. With taking this approach, we’ll make sure that your creative process stays uninterrupted.
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Creating a brand new campaign is after all something that requires focus, and we’d like to have it spot on for the job at hand if we want to create a badass campaign. I will teach you how to write a compelling copy. We’ll We’ll look into visuals and check the most important of Facebook’s Advertising Policies. We don’t want to get into trouble, do we? When we’ll wrap up the creative part, we’ll dive into the technical aspect of Facebook Ads. That’s That’s when the actual clicking and fidgeting begins. We’ll talk about defining your target audience online and list out different targeting options Facebook offers. I will give you an insight into my recommendations and approaches that worked for me best. Budgeting is another topic we will tackle — how do you set up a budget and optimise it for better performance? We’ll create our whole campaign with Facebook Ads Manager you can find on facebook.com. You might have heard of Facebook’s other tool called Power Editor, but we won’t be using it because of its clunkiness and user-unfriendliness. We’ll We’ll rather invest the time we would otherwise spend on getting familiar with unorganised Power Editor on creating a real powerhouse of ads that will bring you and your business bus iness results you deserve.
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1. Decide which goal you want to achieve Your Facebook Advertising Campaign should be a reflection of a single goal you wish to achieve. Not two different goals, I’m talking about one single goal. goal. In fact, I want you to write your goal down on paper, now. Right this moment. Writing it down will help you keep that one single goal in the back of your mind the whole time. So if you’ll have trouble sticking to it for some reason or if you’ll get tempted to kill two birds with one stone (and totally flunk your first campaign), you can always come back to that piece of paper.
Not sure where to start? Let me help you, y ou, here are a few goal ideas for you:
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- I want to get more subscribers. - I want to promote my new product. - I want more traffic to my webpage. - I want new e-book purchases. - I want to promote my new blog post. - I want to get more likes likes to my Facebook Facebook page. page. Setting that goal in stone will help you pick the most effective Facebook Ads Objective for your goal in the following step. As we’re finalising the details like this one even before we start fidgeting with the actual Facebook Ads, we’re just making sure you don’t get stuck along the way because this is how most of the prospective campaigns fail. Don’t get stuck. Smooth sailing is the best sailing. Have you written down your #1 goal? Great. This is it; we’re starting to build a solid foundation. Let’s Let’s move on.
YOU NOW KNOW:
- Your Facebook Facebook Advertising Advertising Campaign Campaign should be a reflection of a single goal. - Set that that goal in stone and and strive for it.
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2. Pick an objective Let’s stay in this goal-setting mindset a little bit longer. We’re now armed with a laser-focused goal we want to achieve. It’s time to pick an objective that will help us achieve that goal in an efficient way. Here are the objectives Facebook Facebook offers:
Each and every objective is meant for helping you achieve a particular goal. Let’s get familiar with these objectives so you can be confident in your decision about which one you should choose in order to achieve the goal you wrote down before successfully.
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Page Post Post Engagement (Boost your post) po st) Do you have a Facebook page and would like to increase your engagement rate (likes, comments, shares)? This is the objective you should use for achieving that. If you choose so, “Boost post” will deliver your post to other people (for who you set the targeting for), not just your fans. You expand your reach beyond Facebook’s limits. But if you want to reach just your audience in the first place, you can also boost your post just to your fans. Contrary to the popular belief, it’s not smart to boost posts that have an overall lower engagement rate. The engagement rate is low for a reason and throwing money at that particular problem won’t solve anything, especially if you post uninteresting content. Instead, you should use this objective with posts that have a higher engagement rate than usual. That usually means the post is interesting to your fans and will probably attract the attention of other people as well. And here’s a neat (and short!) story that proves this. I had a client and one of their lifetime goals was to increase engagement rate to their Facebook page. We started promoting Facebook posts that we thought should be promoted. There was indeed a slight increase in engagement rate, but nothing even close to what we expected to happen. Right in that time Facebook introduced a brand new feature - a notification that lets you know when one of your posts is performing better than the others. It also gives you an option to quickly boost that post later on. We did just that.
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After doing that, we noticed our engagement rate was increasing like crazy. We generated outstanding results regarding cost per post engagement that ranged from $0.00 to $0.05. This wasn’t even a one-time thing, we repeated that over and over again. If you’re looking to boost engagement rates on your Facebook page posts, this is the objective to choose. It’s also quite effortless to set this up, and I encourage you to try this today! Note: To make use of this objective you have to have your own Facebook page, preferably with some good content already published. Businesses Business es without a Facebook page will not be able to use this. this .
Page Likes (Promote your Page) If you’re looking to grow your Facebook Page’s audience, look no further. This objective is the perfect one for you to achieve just that. Increasing your Facebook Facebook Page Likes with this objective will enable you to grow your audience, meaning you’ll have a bigger group of fans to communicate with organically. That said, you have to be truly careful with your targeting. For example — targeting 3rd world countries can result in a dramatic increase of your Page
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Likes, but those people will not engage with your content. That nullifies what you were trying to achieve with Page Likes Campaign and triggers all sorts of other consequences. Because those new fans from 3rd world countries will not engage with your content, your engagement rate will drop, and Facebook Facebook will be positioning your page lower in the News Feeds of your fans. That’s because the information Facebook will have regarding your Facebook page (your low engagement rate) will tell them your content is not interesting for your users. And we don’t want that to happen. But the good news is you have nothing to worry about. You can prevent that worst-case scenario with a badass targeting (which we will describe in the upcoming chapters) and grow your audience in a way you’ll have a big group of incredibly engaging people to communicate with on a daily basis. Best thing of all? The ads will be automatically optimised to reach the people most likely to like your Facebook Facebook Page!
Clicks to Website Website (Send people to t o your website) Sometimes all we need is a little bit of website traffic increase, am I right? This objective will help you achieve just that. When creating ads within this objective, you’ll be asked to use a custom URL. That That might be the link to your online store, resources resources page, contact page or even a link to a specific blog post. Wherever you’re looking to increase your traffic to.
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My clients use this objective to promote and present their new products. I use it to promote my new blog posts or my general homepage to boost brand awareness a little bit to people who might be interested in my services.
Website Website Conversions (Increase (I ncrease conversions on your website) Do you strive for better conversions? Is that the goal of your campaign? Then you are going to love this. This objective has one purpose only — helping you increase your conversions, whatever they may be. The first thing that comes to mind is probably a purchase. But don’t forget about other conversions such as successful opt-ins to your mailing list, or prospects sending you contact info through your webpage. Maybe even a survey completion. These are all conversions that go perfectly hand-in-hand with this objective. For this objective, you’re going to need to install a tracking pixel to your purchase information page. You You can read more about setting up your tracking pixel in the bonus chapter at the end, but here’s here’s what will happen next. That tracking pixel will enable Facebook to track your conversions and optimise ads in a way they’ll reach more people that are more likely to convert. It’s a win-win situation you don’t want to pass — users get what they were looking for, and you increase your conversions. It’s almost like magic.
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App Installs (Get installs of your app) app ) If you’re creating an advertising campaign for your mobile or desktop app, you should look into this ad type. It allows you to promote and track installs of your app easily. After launching a Facebook Ads campaign with this objective, Facebook will optimise ads in a way they’ll reach people who are more likely to install your advertised app. The installation of your app gets pretty easy for the end user if you use this objective. That’s That’s why these ads are quite popular with app creators. But keep in mind that if you’ll want to measure the success of your ads and track installs (which is what you should do), should do), you’re going to have to integrate your app with the Facebook’s SDK. No worries, I got you covered. You can read more about this in the bonus chapter at the end. P.s. Don’t forget to update your app before running this campaign!
App Engagement (Increase engagement in your app) What if you already have an app and instead of driving new installs, you want to increase engagement within the app? This objective is your perfect option. With creating this type of ad you can send people to a designated area in your app, making it possible for them to engage with it successfully. Here are some of the examples of what you can do: - You can send people people to your online store - You can increase engagement in a bonus level of your game - You can introduce a new feature to your users
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The options are limitless, and everything depends on the nature of your app and the goal you want to achieve. If you want to track your ads success, don’t forget to integrate your app with the Facebook’s SDK.
Local Awareness Awareness (Reach people near your business) Choosing this objective will make the most sense to local business owners looking to increase in-store sales or foot traffic. It will help you reach people that are physically near your business. In this case, Facebook sets a radius around your business and helps you target those in the proximity of it. That said you probably already figured out that it’s not perfect for all businesses, especially not online ones. But if you’re a hairdresser, dentist, coffee shop or any other brick and mortar store that sells in-person, these ads are perfect for you to try.
Event Responses (Raise attendance at your event) Choose this objective if you’re organising an event and you want to inform people about it and raise your attendance. A Facebook Facebook event has to be created in advance if you want to use this ob jective. Users can then respond respond to the invitation right from their news feed. It’s very native and easy for users to respond to and, as a result, you’ll drastically increase your chances of better attendance.
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Important Note: Using this objective does not guarantee people responding to your event ad will attend it. It just guarantees they will respond to your ad, even if that means they’ll pick a “not coming” option. But it’s definitely nice to know we have this type of ads at our disposal. I’ve seen great things done with it by my colleagues, and I truly recommend them for event organisers.
Offer Claims (Get people to claim your you r offer) Facebook offers are coupon codes that you can set up for your products. They were a big hit a while back, but the hype eventually wore off. You can still find some companies using offers and getting great results from it! If you’re interested in trying that out, take a look at this ad objective. If you created or are thinking of creating a Facebook offer and want to boost your results (get more people to claim it), you can use this objective to achieve that goal. You will create an ad for a coupon, discount or any special deal, decide how many people can claim your offer, offer, run it and see what happens. This objective is great for any businesses bus inesses with special deals they can offer. Offers can be redeemed at your physical store, online or both, but it is vital for you to have an interesting product or service to offer.
Video Views Views (Get video views) You have probably heard this one before, but video is booming on Facebook. If you still haven’t tried posting a video directly to Facebook, you’re missing a
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ton. Engagement rate usually goes through the roof and with using this ad objective you can increase your video views even more! Let’s say you post a video update and you really want people to see it. You can rely on your organic reach and the fact that Facebook is pushing videos higher in the News Feed than any other content or you can assure yourself that video will get watched with using this ad type. The ads created with this objective include an embedded video users can watch and interact with. They get optimised for views. This objective is perfect for you if you’re a business with lots of video content such as updates, funny videos, storytelling, etc. Don’t miss out and play with it a little.
COMING SOON: Lead Ads If you want to start collecting email signups today, you can choose between two objectives: Clicks to Website and Website Conversions. But this is going to change soon, and you’re going to love this update! Recently, Facebook introduced Lead Ads to the public. This ad format is going to enable you to collect email addresses with just a couple of clicks! No more redirecting to your webpage, making them subscribe through forms. Users will now be able to subscribe with just a few taps. Lead Ads are currently available only via Power Editor, but they’re soon coming to Facebook Ads Manager as well. Read more about Lead Ads.
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I know what you’re thinking. There are so many ad ad objectives to choose from, where do you begin? Before your head explodes from all the different possibilities you’re thinking of right now, let’s step back a little. Remember that goal you wrote down in the previous chapter? Go back to it. That’s why we wrote it down in the first place. That goal is there to remind you which path you’re on. And right now it should give you a pretty clear sense of direction or in other words — which objective you should choose. Your goal has to align with one of the objectives we talked about, such as “Send people to your website” or “Increase conversions on your website”. website”. But while you were reading other ad types this thought probably crossed your mind: “Wow, so many of them! What if I never put in use all of them?” And that’s totally fine. Please keep in mind that there’s there’s nothing wrong with not using other ad objectives at all. To be honest, my clients never put put all of them in use. There are just several that fit their needs, and we play and improve our game on those. Do you have a clear knowledge of which objective you are going to choose for your campaign? GREAT. Let’s move on and get our creative cells going!
YOU NOW KNOW:
- Each objective objective is meant for helping you achieve a particular goal.
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- You can choose from different objectives, but focus on the one that will help you reach your goal.
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3. Write copy and create visuals This is it. This is your ultimate chance to grab users’ attention and make her click on that ad of yours. Excellent and, more importantly, effective copy and visuals are the result of knowing your target audience well and the more you know them, the better your campaign results will be. After reading this chapter, you’ll have a clear vision of what to do and not to do in your creative process. There are so many things I’ve learned in the past few years of working in this field and I’m happy to share all of my findings with you. We will also look into Facebook’s Advertising Policies and list out all the rules you should follow for your campaign to get accepted. Here is your blueprint for successful ad creation!
The Fundamentals Your ads will be different from one campaign to another. You will test and experiment with different ideas, figuring out what works best. You will learn along the way and adjust your future campaigns according to your newly gained knowledge. That is how you will approach will approach advertising from now on. But there are some basics you should know and consider every time you sit down to create a new campaign.
Solve their expensive problem (and communicate that!) Let’s say you’re a social media consultant and your #1 ad campaign goal is to get new subscribers to your free email series. Your target audience are small
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and medium-sized enterprises. Because you’re good at what you do, you’re familiar with your target audience and you know they want to start with Facebook Advertising, but don’t know where to begin begin.. There you go, that’s their expensive problem. problem . Because you’re familiar with their problem, you already have a solution for them — you created a short email course where you teach them how to over series of emails. There’s your create their first Facebook Ads campaign campaign over solution. solution. Here comes the important part: You have to communicate the solution to their problem in a crispy manner. Don’t beat around the bush, get straight to the point. Show them what kind of value they’ll get if they do what you want them to do (sign up, like your page, whatever your goal is). is ). Here’s Here’s how you can do that in 2-steps: - Remind them about the problem they have, - Offer them a sweet solution. Your text can go something like this: “It sucks to work so hard on your FB page but gain so little. But there’s a solution …” And here’s an idea for your headline and text in the link: “Supercharge your FB page” “Get 5 lessons with more than 20 steps on how to effectively improve your Facebook presence and reap tangible results in 10 days!”
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Start here Here’s Here’s a short template for you to list out the expensive problem and the solution you offer: I’m a (occupation (occupation)) who helps (target (target audience) audience) that have a problem with (expensive problem). problem). I’m solving that problem with ( solution ( solution). ). When you are be creating a new campaign, reach out for this template. Hook them with a picturesque description of their expensive problem. Offer them a sweet solution they can not refuse.
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You should fill out this template every time you’ll start creating a new campaign. You’re solving different problems and offering different solutions with each ad objective and each campaign. Here are 5 examples to help you get started along with the objectives that are a perfect fit: 1. I’m a social media consultant who helps small and medium-sized enterprises that have a problem with setting up their first Facebook Ads Campaign. I’m solving that problem with an email series to which they can subscribe s ubscribe through my landing page. Objective: Increase conversions on your webpage 2. I’m a graphic designer who helps beginner designers that have a problem with finding good resources on how to design mobile apps. I’m solving that problem with regularly publishing posts on my blog. Objective: Send people to your website 3. I’m an owner of an online store selling eco-friendly baby-shoes who helps young moms that have a problem with finding good deals on eco-friendly shoes online. I’m solving that problem with regularly updating my Facebook Page with the latest discounts. Objective: Promote your page 4. I’m a WordPress consultant who helps small businesses that have a problem with setting up their professional webpage. I’m solving that problem with a productised service offering to which they can order from my webpage.
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Objective: Increase conversions on your webpage 5. I’m a modern barber-shop owner who helps local bearded men that have a problem with finding a good local barber with quality service. I’m solving that problem with a professional barber-shop down the street. Objective: Reach people near your business
Don’t be overly promotional Sure, Facebook Ads can and should be used for selling something, I do it all the time. But don’t make the mistake a lot of businesses do. Don’t be overly promotional. There’s a big difference between being promotional and creating value. Being promotional is not thinking twice about your target audience, their needs and the solutions you can offer. Creating value is the opposite — knowing and providing them with what they need when they need it the most. If you follow the template used in the previous chapter, you have nothing to worry about. People don’t go to Facebook every day to see ads with “SALE! SALE! SALE! 20% OFF!” written all over their News Feed. If they would want that, they have tons of other webpages to pick from. Instead, they come to Facebook to connect with their friends and see what’s happening. If they get significant value out of that visit (if you’re in the right place at the right time), even better. Speaking of friends …
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Communicate your brand voice Do you remember that paradox we talked about in the earlier chapters? Let me refresh your memory: “When you blend in, you actually stand out . out .” We already talked about being overly promotional, standing out from the crowd, consequently making it easier for users to spot your ad from a mile away and ignore you from there on. Blend in with the audience if you want to attract the attention of the users. Make them say: “Wait, who is who is this?” And that who is who is important. If you have a well-developed brand voice, you know your brand’s personality in detail. And if you communicate it effectively, it will blend in successfully with other users, making it hard to distinguish it from friends’ updates. And that is a big win. PRO TIP: If you have an option, try using human faces in your ads. Preferably yours. The results from using my face to promote my book were vastly better than the ones where I just designed a banner with some fancy graphical elements. Using real human faces is a big b ig steps tepup for companies, take full advantage of it.
Make sure you have a good Facebook page presence Here’s the thing. With the majority of ad types Facebook offers you have the option to connect your Facebook page with your ads. You should totally do this since this enables your ads being shown in the news feed (which is the placement users engage with the most). m ost).
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That’s why it is crucial you have a good Facebook page presence. I could write an entirely new book on how that looks like, but here are a few short tips: 1. Have it up-to-date. up-to-date. Don’t just post something, leave and come back the next month. Be consistent. 2. Create value. value. Yep, we’re at the value again. It’s all about the value. Don’t try to close too quickly, don’t try to sell all the time. Create valuable content that users will strive for every day. company . Share photos of your team. Share 3. Humanise your company. videos from your personal life. Connect with your audience on an entirely different level. We’re all humans after all, and we engage the most with humanly content like that. updates. Share premium updates with your audience. Take 4. Share updates. them behind the scenes and share content they won’t find anywhere else. Hook them. 5. Offer support. support. Does anyone need help? Offer a quick reply with a crispy solution. Show that your customer service is stellar and that you care about your users, clients or prospects.
Practice Let’s be totally honest. Writing copy and creating visuals is one of the most creative steps of making a campaign. It is also a point where lots of people get stuck because this process seems too complex for them. This is something advertising agencies used to do, right? “How on earth am I going to make this right?”
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But here’s the thing. You ou know your business the most, you you know your customers, clients and prospects. You are ou are aware of their expensive problem and you and you know know how to solve it. You’re the perfect person to help them find value in what you do with writing a badass copy and creating eye-catching visuals. There is nothing to be afraid of. What’s the worst it can happen? You can lose a couple of dollars, but learn from your first mistake, make the second campaign so campaign so much better and and get ahead of your competition in no time. If your first campaign is a fail or a win, remember this: You’ll get better with every campaign. The very first campaign I did was totally awesome; the results were stellar. The second one? Fail. But I knew where I missed, I knew what I did wrong, and I never did it again. I just lost a couple of dollars but gained a lot of new knowledge from that. You didn’t get better at your business by observing from the sidelines. You experimented with different things, different approaches and got better with practice. The same will happen here.
BONUS: Make eye-catching visuals I’m a big believer in the importance of good copywriting. But we can’t deny that visuals play a significant role in campaign creating process. You have to be able to attract the attention of the users while still not being obviously promotional or use a click-baiting technique. Here’s a tip that always brought always brought good results from my advertising efforts and what I want you to do if you have the chance: Use faces on your visuals. visuals .
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That’s right. No matter how fancy my design was, faces always brought the best results. And not just any faces, but my face. So if you have the opportunity to use that to promote your Facebook page, your product or anything else, I encourage you to do it. There’s There’s just something about seeing a human face in your news feed. This This approach actually brings the best results if you advertise to the people that know you — your email em ail subscribers, page fans, website visitors, you name it. But what you have to avoid at all costs are stock photos. Ugh. Ugh. Stock photos just scream “advertising” and that eventually turns people away from you. Don’t be that guy. Instead, if you don’t have the skills to design visuals yourself, you have an enormous amount of other solutions at your disposal. One of my favourite ones is Canva Canva.. Canva is a great online tool for creating eye-catching visuals for your marketing materials. In addition to other templates, they also offer dimensions and templates for Facebook Ads! Canva is an excellent way to put your foot out the door as soon as possible without getting stuck at this point. “ I don’t know how to use design tools, tools ,” is not a valid excuse anymore. Use Canva until you know how to make custom designs yourself. Disclosure: I do not have any business connections with Canva. I mentioned this tool solely on the fact that I use it at times and comes in handy when I don’t have the time to work on custom designs. I get 0 financial benefits from mentioning them, same goes for every tool/resource mentioned in this book. book.
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Facebook’s Advertising Policies Facebook is a huge player in the advertising department. To keep everything in order, order, they had naturally set up quite a few restrictions on what you can and cannot do with Facebook Ads. An entire book could be written about their policies; there are a lot of them. But you only have to care about these (others are just edge cases you don’t need to worry about):
20% text rule You have to meet certain limitations when it comes to creating copy for your ads. The majority of the core text can be just 90 characters long. That’s why people were trying out different workarounds, one of them was a pretty obvious “text on image” hack. That’s when Facebook flashed a red light and introduced a 20% text rule. From From then on text on ad images cannot cover more than 20% of the image. “Fine. Then I’ll just upload our logo and make it extra big, so we’ll attract attention.” Stop right there. That policy also includes logos, watermarks or other text overlays. But if you’re featuring a photo of a product that contains text on the actual product? Or an embedded text on the photos of apps or comics? Not a problem by Facebook’s standards. As long as you don’t use that as a loophole in their policies. PRO TIP: Not sure when more than 20% of your image is covered with text? Be sure and check it out with their grid their grid tool. tool.
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No nudity or sexuality This is an obvious one, right? True, Facebook is not a porn site, so any adult content such as nudity, sexually provocative images or depictions of people in explicit or even suggestive positions is forbidden. But it gets complicated. I had a client who owned a fitness supplement shop. We used photos of a fit woman lifting weights in a sports bra for our ads. They got declined all the time, unjustly. I was in contact with Facebook’s support. Our ads got re-approved at times or just plain rejected in other situations. So let me be frank — if you have a fitness shop yourself, and you take a similar approach I did, you might run into some trouble. It all depends on what person will approve your ad. Read about how you can contact Facebook’s support if you get into trouble in the final section of this chapter. chapter. But otherwise, there’s there’s nothing to be worried about if you have an average business.
Age-restricted material If you have a liquor shop, you have probably already met all kinds of restrictions when advertising. Facebook Facebook is no different. Ads that promote or even reference alcohol must comply with local laws, industry codes, target only adults (age depends on the country you target; there are some countries that you cannot advertise alcohol in) and comply with all sorts of other rules. That doesn’t go only for alcohol either. You might have some problems if you’re working within the pharmacy, gambling, lottery, lottery, dating, supplement or even some subscription service industry.
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How to mention Facebook Facebook You can mention Facebook in your ads, but there are certain rules you y ou have to be familiar with if you’re planning on doing that. You have to write Facebook with a capital “F”, but you cannot use Facebook’s logo in place of the word “Facebook”, make Facebook plural or use an altered version of their logo in your ads.
No shocking photos Stay away from images that are scary, disrespectful, shocking, gory or sensational, even if the context of the ad is entirely different.
Before/After body images Facebook doesn’t like images that emphasize an ideal body or body parts. Your ad also won’t get approved if you use photos of unlikely results such as before/after images.
FOR FUN (but needed): Bad grammar or punctuation This one is fun and smart! and smart! Facebook can disapprove your ad if you use bad grammar or bad punctuation. You You also cannot use two punctuation marks one after another so … no smiley faces. :(
What happens if an ad gets declined unjustly? It might happen that your ad will get rejected without a good reason. Maybe a sportswoman was wearing a sports bra, and they wrongly assessed that was
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nudity. Or maybe you showcased a screenshot of your app, and they mistakenly disapproved your image for containing more than 20% of the text. Don’t give up. If you know you are right, do not throw in the towel, but contact Facebook’s support instead. It never is fun knowing you’ll have to deal with this instead of reaping the results of your amazing campaign, but I must say I have quite pleasant experience with their support. They are keen to solve your problem fast if you reach out knowing you are right. Reach out to Facebook’s support team anytime. team anytime. Tips on contacting them and hearing from them back as soon as possible: - Be polite. - Be as descriptive as possible (attach (attach a screenshot or or a video if you have the option to do so). - Show your professionalism and thank them for their help. help.
In case you want to know everything about Facebook Advertising Policies, check their official policies page page for more detailed info. It’s very nicely explained in case you get stuck s tuck or want to know more.
Image dimensions and text limits We have clarified what a good creative is, and we have peaked at some of the relevant Facebook Advertising policies so you won’t get into trouble. But there’s one more important aspect to the creative part of making your Facebook Ads Campaign. And that’s image dimensions and text limits.
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Image dimensions and text limits vary, depending on which Facebook Ad objective you choose. Don’t worry, I got your back. I’ll present you with a list of every ad objective and its guidelines in one place. But first, here’s here’s the definition of some expressions we are going to use:
PRO TIP: When designing images for Facebook ads, always upload a .png version to Facebook if you’re using any graphic elements on the actual image. That image format will preserve the crispiness of the photo while .jpeg can corrupt it.
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Page Post Engagement There are no guidelines for this type of ad because you promote your published post. Do whatever you y ou want.
Page Likes - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: (only shown in in the right column) 25 characters characters - Image size: 1200 x 444 pixels
Clicks to Website Multiple images: - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 40 characters - Description: 20 characters - Image size: 600 x 600 pixels Single image: - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 25 characters - News Feed Link Description: 200 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
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Website conversions Multiple images: - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 40 characters - Description: 20 characters - Image size: 600 x 600 pixels Single image: - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 25 characters - News Feed Link Description: 200 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
App Installs Mobile app: Multiple images: - Text: 30 characters character s - Headline: 40 characters - Image size: 600 x 600 pixels Single image: - Text: 30 characters character s - Headline: 30 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
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Desktop app: Multiple images: - Text: 30 characters character s - Headline: 40 characters - Image size: 600 x 600 pixels Single image: - Text: 30 characters character s - Headline: 30 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
App Engagement Mobile app: - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 25 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 characters
Desktop app: - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 25 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 characters
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Local Awareness - Text: 90 characters character s - Headline: 25 characters - Image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
Event Responses - Text: 30 characters character s - Image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
Offer Claims This type of ad promotes your Facebook offer (similar to a “boost post” option), so there are no guidelines.
Video Views Views - Text: 90 characters character s - Aspect ratio: at least 16:9 - Video format: .mov of .mp4 - File size: up to 1.75 GB
Best advertising practices, Facebook’s policies and ad guidelines, everything can sound a little too overwhelming, right? But in reality it truly isn’t. Let’s simplify it again, let’s reassure we’re on the right track. Take a look at that goal of yours once again. You have the goal written down, laid in stone.
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You know which objective you are going to choose, you’re familiar with your target audience, you’re aware of their expensive problem and the solution you offer. Now it’s time to do some serious work. First, you know how a good ad looks like, you’re familiar with the guidelines. Create your first ad and do some variations of it. I usually test 3-5 images with 3-5 copies. Don’t overdo it, we have to be able to measure it later without being too overwhelmed by different options. When you’re done, come back. It’s time to get out hands dirty with Facebook Ads Manager.
YOU NOW KNOW:
- You have to write compelling copy and create eye-catching visuals if you want to grab users’ attention. - The fundamentals of successful ad creation are: - Solve their expensive problem and communicate that. - Create value instead of being overly promotional. - Blend in to stand out. - Have a good Facebook Page presence. presence . - Practice! You’ll get better with every campaign. - Create eye-catching eye-catc hing visuals. visuals . Try using faces. - Follow Follow Facebook’s Facebook’s advertising policies policies and if the ad is still wrongly wrongly rejected stand your ground and contact support.
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- Create ads that comply with Facebook’s Facebook’s image dimensions and text limits.
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4. Open your Facebook Ads Manager We’re familiar with our #1 goal and we know which objective to choose. We have written our ads copy and created some neat visuals. We’re 100% prepared to do this. A lot of business owners come to this point unprepared. They stare at the starting screen for minutes, thinking about what to do next and if there’s another way of doing this. A more planned and strategic way. It is. Our way. Coming prepared gives us a competitive advantage. We know what we’re doing and which way to go next. You’re using a system I tested and improved over and over again to the point it generated outstanding results for my clients and me. Let’s put this advantage in action together.
Visit Facebook Facebook Ads Manager As I mentioned before, we are going to use Facebook’s native tool for creating ads. It’s widely used and easy to navigate through, unlike other tools. Visit facebook.com/ads/manager facebook.com/ads/manager to access your Facebook Advertising Account. (Your advertising account still hasn’t been set? Read how to do that in the bonus chapter of this book.) Next up we are going to choose the advertising account you’re going to advertise from (choosing is only necessary if you have more than one) and click on “Create Ad” to start creating your Facebook Campaign. Choose the objective like we discussed before. If you’re using the “Boost post” objective, choose the post you want to boost. If you’re using the “Promote page” objective, select the page you wish
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to promote. If you’re using the “Clicks to website” objective, choose the website you want to get clicks to. And so on … And now … (drumroll) … it’s it ’s targeting time!
YOU NOW KNOW:
- You should approach Facebook Facebook Advertising Advertisi ng in a strategic way. It gives you a competitive advantage.
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5. Target your perfect audience If you don’t already geek over all the targeting opportunities Facebook has to offer, you’re going to love this part of our journey. Not only you’ll get to learn about all all the targeting options available, but you’ll also walk away with a bunch of immediately actionable ideas for your next campaign and the campaigns that will follow. There are so many different different things you can try and experiment with. This is going to be lots of fun. Facebook’s Facebook’s targeting makes their advertising platform the powerhouse of paid marketing as it is. They collect massive amounts of data from their users (demographical data, places they travelled, websites they visited, interests they have, occupations, cars they drive, etc.) so marketers and business owners like you and I have the opportunity to use them to our advantage. They also don’t collect data solely on their own but have contracts with other partners that provide additional data for them. Some people might be creeped out knowing what Facebook knows about them, but think of it this way. This is your chance to create ads with such an advanced targeting that people will be thankful to see. You’ll bring them value because you’ll show how you’re familiar with their current needs. In that case, such a detailed marketing is desirable. If only you would see ads for the things you actually care of, right?
FUN FACT: Want to know what Facebook knows about your preferences and interests? Check them out here here!! P.s. You can also edit them for Facebook to show you more relevant ads!
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Targeting is probably my favourite part of creating a new campaign. I’m always discovering new targeting options and getting new ideas for narrowing down my target audience even more m ore to the point, where I’m targeting people that are genuinely and profoundly interested in my services. But before you begin with targeting, you have to get familiar with your target audience. Since you’re a professional, I’m pretty sure you already know some of their characteristics and interests. If your target audience is very welldefined, even better. But if you have trouble with narrowing it down, Facebook Ads can help you with that.
PRO TIP: But what if you have absolutely no idea who your perfect audience might be and who’s interested in your services the most? Check the “Audience” section in your Google Analytics. This serves as a great stepping stone to figuring out and narrowing down your audience. This way you’ll see where’s your target audience coming from, what are their interests, what technology they use, etc. Work from there on.
After every ended Facebook campaign, you’ll check the analytical results. You’ll be able to break down your results based on gender, age, city and other data. After analysing your campaign, you’ll get a better perspective of your
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target audience which will help you with targeting in the future. It’s all about learning and getting better on the go. But before we dive in all the nitty gritty and fun details, I have a task for you. Go back to that #1 goal you have set up for your campaign and that template we talked about. Here’s a reminder: I’m a (occupation) who helps (target audience) that has a problem with (expensive problem). I’m solving that problem with (solution). (solution ). Each campaign has a different goal. And each goal has a different target audience. What target audience does your goal have? You You can derive that target audience with the help of that template written above. You already have some data about your target audience (location, age, occupation, interests). interests). List them down so you’ll come back to that later. Be as specific and narrowed down as possible. The more specific you get, the better your chances are of reaching that perfect group of people that will engage with your ads like crazy. After you list those characteristics of your target audience, get back here. I’ll show you other fun targeting options Facebook has to offer so you’ll be able to pinpoint your audience even more.
Targeting by demographic data Let’s start with the basics. Demographic data is as basic as it gets and pretty self-explanatory. You can target your audience based on demographic data, such as: - Location - Everyone in this location
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- People who live in this location - People recently in this location - People traveling in this location - Age - Gender - Languages - More Demographics - Relationship - Interested in (Options: Men, Men and and Women, Women, Unspecified, Women) - Relationship status (Options: Single, In a Relationship, Married, Domestic Partnership, Widowed …) - Education - Education level (Options: Associate degree, degree, College grad, Doctorate degree …) - Fields of Study (Custom input) - Schools (Custom input) - Undergrad Years - Work - Employers (Custom input) - Job Titles (Custom input) - Industries (Options: Management, Sales, Nurses, Nurses, Computer and Mathematics …) - Home - Household Composition (Options: Family-based Family-based Households, Housemate-based Households)
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- Ethnic Affinity Affinity (Options: African American, Hispanic, Asian American …) - Generation (Options: Baby Baby boomers, boomers, Generation X, Millennials) - Parents Parents (Options: Expectant parents, parents, (0-12 months) New New Parents, (01-02 years) Parents with Toddlers …) - Politics (US) (Options: Conservative, Liberal, Moderate …) - Life Events Events (Options: Anniversary within within 30 30 days, Friends of Newlywed, Upcoming birthday …) The categories are self-explanatory, but here’s something worth mentioning. When it comes to locations, you can include or exclude countries, states/ provinces, cities, ZIPs, DMAs or addresses. When picking out an address or city, you can also choose between “Current city only” option and “Cities within radius” that lets you choose between 10-25-mile radius. We’re only scratching the surface of targeting here, but you’re probably already getting the feel of the big advertising machine this is. Yep, you saw that right, you can target friends of newlyweds. Or Expectant parents for example. But this is only the surface. Imagine the good things coming next!
Targeting by interests Here’s where stuff gets fascinating. Demographics is one thing. Targeting those characteristics sure helps you narrow down your target audience for starters, but the actual power of reaching the audience, interested in what you have to offer, offer, lies in the “Interests” department.
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Facebook lets you target your ads based on audience’s interests. Those might be things that people share on their Timelines, apps they use, Pages they like and other activities on and even off Facebook. So the first ideas that might come up are (if we use the case of social media consultant again) targeting interests such as “social media”, “social media advertising”, advertising”, “social media management” and so on. But you can get even more precise. You You can target people that had shown interest in a particular online publication, media outlet, a company (hint: your competition) or even people. For example, that same social media consultant can target other things, such as “Social Media Examiner”, “Gary Vaynerchuk”, “Buffer”, “HootSuite” etc. You can type just about anything in the placeholder and suggestions will pop up. Try it! Keep in mind that these interests are not excluding themselves. themselves . So, in that case, a social media consultant mentioned above is targeting people who like Gary Vaynerchuk OR people who like Buffer OR people who like “HootSuite” and so on. Same goes with any type of targeting — demographics and behaviours as well. So keep an eye on that Potential Reach later on! Now imagine the power of Facebook Ads you unleash if you combine the targeting by demographic data above and targeting by interests. But wait, it gets better.
Targeting by behaviour Targeting by interests is one thing, but we’re entering an entirely new realm of possibilities with behavioural targeting.
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Maybe your target audience uses a particular operating system. Maybe they post a lot of photos on Facebook. They can also be commuters or small business owners. Whatever their so-called behaviour is, Facebook can target it with this type of targeting. Here’s Here’s a list of behaviours you can use in your next campaign: - Digital activities - Canvas Gaming - Console gamers - Event creators - FB Payments (All) - FB Payments (Higher than average spend) - FB Payments (Recent) - Facebook Page Admins -
Internet Browser Used (Options: Chrome, Safari, Firefox …)
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Operating System Used (Options: Primary OS Mac OS X, Primary OS Windows 7 …)
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Photo uploaders
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Primary email domain (Options: AOL Email Addresses, Gmail Users …)
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Small business owners
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Technology echnolo gy early adopters
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Technology echnolo gy late adopters adopter s
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Unity Plugin
- Expats (Options: (Options: All, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea Korea …)
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- Mobile device user -
All Mobile Device by Brand (under this section you’ll find a breakdown of mobile devices by brand that you can choose from later)
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All Mobile Devices by Operating System (Options: All Android devices, All iOS devices, Windows Phones)
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All mobile devices
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Feature phones
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Network Connection (2G, 3G …)
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New smartphone and tablet owners
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Smartphone Owners
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Smartphones and tablets
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Tablet Owners
- Seasonal and Event -
Baseball 2015
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College Football Football (US)
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Cricket 2015
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Fall Football (US)
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Professional Professional Football Football (US)
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Rugby (2015)
- Travel -
All frequent traveler
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Business traveler
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Commuters
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Currently traveling
-
Frequent International Internati onal Travelers
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-
Returned from trip 1 week ago
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Returned from trip 2 weeks ago
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Used travel app (1 month)
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Used travel app (2 weeks)
The breakdown of this category is just staggering. You might get a little bit creeped out knowing what information Facebook collects about you, but, on the other hand, this opens up a world of possibilities. Now you finally have a way of showing relevant ads to people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. But there is another, a more promising audience who might just help you overcome your potential and maximise your ads to the fullest. And targeting them with Facebook is as easy as it gets. We’re We’re talking about your about your audience. audience.
Custom audiences This is where the power of Facebook targeting lies. It’s the creme de la creme of targeting. There’s simply nothing better or more efficient than targeting your audience, audience, whether those are your subscribers, website visitors, application users or others. You already know that it’s easier to engage with or sell to the people that already know you than to reach the same results with people who are seeing you for the first time. You have already built a relationship with your fans/ users; you gave so much value to them. So when you appear in their News Feed, they’ll be familiar with your story, and your message will resonate with them that much stronger.
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It’s all about reaching the people that know and care about you and your business the most. Let’s dive in custom audiences a little bit deeper.
There are a few audiences you can target with custom audiences: - Custom list (email lists) - Website traffic (website visitors) - App activity (app users)
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- Lookalike audiences (people that share share characteristics characteristics with a specific audience)
Custom list If you’ve been steadily building your email list, this might be the first and best option to experiment with at the beginning. Custom list targeting is targeting based on the emails you provide Facebook with. Facebook Facebook looks for those emails within their user database, matches them with emails you provided and delivers a new audience for you.
You can provide Facebook with your emails in three different ways. You can:
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- upload a file (has (has to to be .csv format) - copy/paste emails - import email from Mailchimp
Note: You have to have a minimum of 100 emails. Facebook isn’t able to match all of your emails with their email database simply because some users used different email addresses to sign-up to Facebook. Hence the minimum. But let’s talk about results for a moment. m oment. That’s That’s what we’re here for, right? This is the moneymaker right here. These are the people that know you, and you’re suddenly reaching them in a totally different environment that
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they’re used to. When on Facebook, they’re in a different, more accepting mindset. They’re virtually amongst friends, so they’re relaxed. Use that to your own advantage. My clients and I had been generating outstanding results with targeting users on our email list, like 300% ROI when we announced a new product on Facebook with this tactic. The tool is here, ready for you to put it in use and reach those amazing results yourself.
Website traffic Another thing Facebook Custom Audiences offer is targeting your website visitors!
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By implementing a tracking pixel on your webpage, you can now reach your website visitors outside your webpage. Those users might not be as familiar with you or as engaging as your subscribers, but it’s better to do this kind of targeting than to shoot blanks simply because you didn’t know where to begin. Keep in mind that your website visitors already made that first step and showed interest in your offerings by visiting your page. If you keep them close and create value for them through your Facebook Ads, you will slowly but surely pull them towards that conversion point that you had set up.
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App activity App owners, you are going to love this. Another thing you can do is target your audience based on the actions they’re taking in your app.
Let’s say a user just started using your app. They played with it for the first day but haven’t come back after 15 days. You can create an ad for those specific users. Or maybe they have left the app without a purchase or without taking a specific action you’d like them to take. With this type of targeting, you can reach them users incredibly simply s imply on Facebook. If you have an app, I strongly encourage you to experiment with this ad objective a little bit. But to use it, you have to add App Events Events to your app.
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Don’t forget to update the app before launching an advertising campaign with this option, but the upsides of this will be immense.
Lookalike Lookalike audiences Let’s say you have an email list that you uploaded to Facebook’s Ad Manager. You created a new campaign that targeted those people, and the results were astonishing. Unfortunately, you turned off those ads because the frequency got too high. Maybe the list was too small, or you have been running ads for quite a long time. Anyway, you didn’t want to annoy people that haven’t engaged with your ad. They probably have a reason, right? You got what you wanted out of that first fi rst step, but now you want more. A next logical step would be to start targeting people that have similar interests to the ones that bought your product or interacted with your app, right? But you don’t have that information. Yes, you can analyse the data from your ads and check who’s been interacting with them the most, but that’s a hell of a lot of work. And you have to keep in mind that Facebook will only share a portion of data with you. But what if you can leave that part of the job to Facebook? What if you can target people who have for example similar characteristics to people on your emailing list with just a click, without analysing anything? That’s where Lookalike audiences come in. Remember, Facebook collects all sorts of data from their users — age, location, interests, behaviour, etc. You might not have access to that data from your analytics tool, but Facebook does. Lookalike audiences are just that. Facebook can automatically analyse the audience you want them to examine and creates an entirely new audience
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that is similar to the one you have chosen by characteristics, interests, demographical and other data. You can create an audience that is similar to: - your Facebook Page fans - the people who made a specific conversion (email list signup, product purchase, etc.) - your website visitors - people on your email list - people who installed your app. Targeting people who already know you and your business is one thing. But when you want to reach new people that will engage on a similar level, it’s best to target individuals with similar interests and demographical characteristics. It’s hard to find them if you do everything by hand, but if you let Facebook do the job for you with Lookalike Audiences, this becomes easy peasy. Because Facebook collects so many data from data from their users, they’ll be able to truly pinpoint the audience you’re trying to reach. Guessing times are over; this is something you should try. Let’s check how you can create your fist Lookalike audience. How to create a Lookalike audience? When you’re in Ads Manager, Manager, click on “Tools” and select “Audiences”. Click “Create Audience” and choose “Lookalike Audience”.
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You’ll probably have some options you can choose from after clicking on “Source”. You can select your Page, or maybe you have some conversion pixels installed which you can choose from or even an email list. PRO TIP: You want to create a lookalike audience of people who converted on your page based on your conversion pixel, but you don’t see that option? Think again - you might not have a conversion pixel set up. (Read about the conversion pixel in the bonus chapter of the book.) Choose the audience from which you want to create your Lookalike audience from. Because Lookalike audience can only include people from one country at a time, pick a country you want to target. PRO TIP: Check the location of the people who interacted with your ads the most and pick that country. If you haven’t advertised before, check your webpage analytics with Google Analytics to get a better sense of demographical profile of your readers.
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Next up you have to choose your Audience Size. It can range from 1% to 10% of the total population in the chosen country. Choosing 1% will find people that will most closely match your source.
Trust me, magic happens in the Custom Audience department if and when you make good use of it. There are so many opportunities and ways of ways of reaching that highly-engaged audience that will find your message valuable. It’s a win-win situation — you’ll get great results with your campaign, and your target audience will get high value from your ads. There are just a few steps separating us from finally finishing this campaign. With full steam ahead! First, do you remember that list of your target audience’s characteristics we made at the beginning of this chapter? Now that you’re familiar with all the different interests, behaviours and other things you can target, fill up that
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list in a way you’ll reach a very well-targeted audience that will engage with your ad.
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But be careful and don’t get overwhelmed by all the targeting options. You’ll be able to test and try out those options gradually so don’t make a mistake of trying everything out at once. If you do that, you’ll have trouble with measuring and making sense out of that vast collection of data. Instead, keep an eye on the potential reach you’ll be able to observe when creating ads.
Potential Reach Potential reach is the number of monthly active people on Facebook that match the audience you’re trying to reach. That That number gives you a pretty decent evaluation whether your audience is too narrow, narrow, too broad or just right. When the indicator is on the green colour, it means your audience is welldefined. In other words, you are good to go. I try to keep my potential reach under 300,000 people, depends on the objective I choose and the campaign I prepared. If I want to show my ads to a very well narrowed down audience, I’m going to lower that number even more. That way I’ll also be able to measure my results efficiently and come to conclusions on what worked and why faster.
If you still don’t have your targeting audience ready, this is how I usually tackle this part of the process: 1. Define your target audience based on the goal you want to achieve. (If your target audience are people you’re going to reach with Custom Audiences, you can stop here. You You know who your target audience is, you can go and set that up in Ads Manager now.)
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2. Write down your target audience and note some of their key characteristics. 3. Input the key characteristics in Facebook while observing the Potential Reach. 4. Go over the list of targeting possibilities and narrow down your audience with defining Interests and Behaviour. This is a bulletproof system that makes planning the targeting for your next campaign as smooth and effortless as possible. Now let’s put some money into this campaign!
YOU NOW KNOW:
- Pick your targeting targeting options carefully; do not get overwhelmed. - Narrowed down audience is usually usually the most engaged. engaged. - You can target by: -
Demographic data
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Interests
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Behaviour
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Custom Audiences (Custom list, Website traffic, App activity, Lookalike audiences)
- You have to observe your potential reach at all all times. - Plan on getting to to know your audience with each and every campaign.
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6. Set up and optimise your budget How much should I invest in my Facebook Ads campaigns? Do I go all in? Do I wait? What’s the system here? When it comes to budgeting, a lot of people get lost pretty quickly. It’s totally understandable since a lot of us weren’t even doing advertising before digital (especially Facebook) advertising started to take off and became available to all of us, not just big advertising agencies. But this is the reality now, and we have to adapt. Budgeting isn’t that complex. It’s all about adjusting your budget based on your results, not spending it all at once.
Reminder: The Ultimate Budgeting System Do you remember The ultimate budgeting system we discussed at the beginning of this book? That’s the system that will make your budgeting very simple from the start, s tart, and that’s what we’re going to use. For a more detailed explanation, visit the chapter at the beginning where we talk about our GRAB ! technique and read everything there is to it. But if you just need to refresh your memory, here are the basics examined in bullet points: The Ultimate Budgeting System (or the 20/30/50 rule): 1. Define your budget (after (after creating creating your ads) 2. Invest 20% of of your budget in the first phase of a campaign campaign 3. After 20% runs out, turn off the ads with lesser performance 4. Invest 30% in other, other, best-performing ads
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5. After 30% runs out, analyse the data from from your ads (the details about analysing your campaign are described at the end of this book) 6. Refine your target audience based on that data 7. Invest the rest rest of the budget budget (50%) in the updated ads
We refreshed our memory. It’s time to talk about important stuff. We have the system already figured out, but that first step in that system is the hardest. How do you even define your budget? What should your budget be?
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Defining your budget There is no ultimate answer, no “one-size-fits-all” “one-size-fits-all” tip when it comes to defining your budget. But there is one rule you should remember and define your budget upon. Your budget depends on your #1 goal you’re trying to achieve.
You cannot expect to sell a $1,000 worth of consulting services with just $5 invested. So if your goal is selling a high-value consulting slot, keep in mind that your budget should be higher than if you’re trying to get a few likes to your Facebook Page. If you still have trouble with defining your budget, here’s an example of a budget scale with a few different #1 goals in mind. You can achieve the first goal with the lowest budget, but the budget gets higher for every next point. (Note: This is just an example for you to get a better feeling for this; I used the most commonly chosen #1 goals.): - Increase engagement on your Facebook Facebook post - Get page likes - Increase video views - Increase webpage traffic - Email signup (with a great landing page page and a freebie freebie offer) offer) - Increase your free mobile app installs - Short ebook purchase - Consulting hour purchase - Etc.
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Have realistic expectations and don’t go all in the first time around. It’s like driving a car — you’ll get the hang of it soon ,and you’ll be able to put it in automode later on, but you’re going to have some systems and procedures in place for the first couple of rounds.
How to set up a budget in Facebook Ads Manager? The theory is one thing, but let’s put that to practice! First, let’s let’s check out what you need to know about Facebook’s Facebook’s budgeting setup.
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Facebook budgeting setup 1: BUDGET Here’s where you’ll choose your budget type (Daily or Lifetime), the amount you want to spend and your schedule. You can decide between a Daily (how much m uch you will spend per day) and a Lifetime budget (how much you’ll spend in a lifetime of a campaign). Daily works best for longer campaigns with well-defined daily spend. With setting up a Daily budget, you can also choose between running your ads continuously or setting a start and end date. PRO TIP: Running your ads constantly for a longer period without changing and optimising anything is a bad practice. Your target audi-
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ence will get used to your ads and consequently stop engaging with them. In that case, get ready because the cost-per-click and other metrics (depends on which objective you chose) will go up. If you want a steady stream of great results instead, I suggest you have shorter advertising sprints with small optimisation in between, just like we discussed in the previous chapters. I mostly use a “Lifetime Budget” option. If you choose a Lifetime budget, you will have to set up a start and end date for your campaign and Facebook will try to distribute the budget evenly and in a way you’ll get the best results from your ads. After choosing the option that works for you best, you’re going to input the budget you decided to go for and continue with optimising your ads. 2: OPTIMISATION Here’s where budgeting gets fascinating. Facebook gives you all sorts of options for optimising your ads. Your optimisation will determine how you’ll pay for your ads and who your ads are going to be served to. Possibilities for optimisations differ as you change the objectives. Here are all the possible optimisations listed out by objectives: Boost post - Post Engagement (serving your ads to the people people who are are more likely to engage with your post) - Daily unique reach (serving your ad to people up to once per day) - Impressions (serving your ad to people as as many times as possible) - Clicks (serving your ad to people who might click on your ad)
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Promote your Page - Page Likes (serving your ads ads to people people who are are more more likely to like your Facebook Page) - Clicks (serving your ads to people who might click on your ad) Send people to your website - Link Clicks to Website Website / Pay per Impressions (Facebook (Facebook will deliver your ad to people who are more likely to click the link in your ad, you’ll pay per impression) - Link Clicks to Website / Pay per Link Click (Facebook (Facebook will deliver your ad to people who are more likely to click the link in your ad, you’ll pat per link click) - Daily unique reach (serving your ad to people up to once per day) - Impressions (serving your ad to people as as many times as possible) Website conversions - Website Conversions Conversions (serving your ad to people who are more likely to complete an action on your website webs ite - Clicks (serving your ad to people who might click on your ad) - Daily unique reach (serving your ad to people up to once per day) - Impressions (serving your ad to people as as many times as possible) App Installs - App Installs / Pay Pay per Impressions (serving your ads to people who are more likely to install your app)
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- Clicks (serving your ad to people who might click on your ad) App Engagement Engagement - App Engagement / Pay Pay per Impressions Impressions (serving your ads to to people who are more likely to engage with your app) - Clicks (serving your ad to people who might click on your ad) Local awareness - No optimisation options Event responses - Event responses responses (serving your ads to people who are are more likely to be interested in your event) - Daily unique reach (serving your ad to people up to once per day) - Clicks (serving your ad to people who might click on your ad) - Impressions (serving your ad to people as as many times as possible) Offer claims - Offer Claims Claims (serving your ads to people people who are more more likely to claim the offer) - Clicks (serving your ad to people who might click on your ad) Video views views - Video Views / Pay Pay per Impression Impression (serving your ads to to people more likely to view your video, you’ll pay per 1,000 impressions)
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- Video Views / Cost per view (serving your your ads to people more likely to view your video, you’ll pay per 10-second video view) - Daily unique reach (serving your ad to people up to once per day) With every chosen objective, you also have two Pricing options. You can: 1. Get more more likes/clicks/conversions/etc. likes/clicks/conversions/etc. at the best price 2. Set the bid you’re willing to pay per per like/click/conversion/etc. like/click/conversion/etc. I would advise you to stick with the first option for the first couple of times just to go a little more hands-off as far as Pricing options go and to see how good of a job Facebook will do with your optimisation. Hint: They usually do a pretty great job, and you can focus on optimising other aspects of your campaign such as targeting instead. As you progress, you can start playing around with the second option as well. The bidding system makes a little bit more sense when your campaigns are well defined regarding budgeting — for example when you know how much you can spend per signup to your email course because you have calculated the lifetime value of your customer. 3: AD SCHEDULING Ad scheduling is different from the Budget scheduling described above. You have two options when deciding for Ad scheduling: 1. You can run ads all the time (Facebook will run ads according to daily/lifetime schedule you selected above)
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2. You can run ads on schedule (you choose the days and times times when Facebook should show your ads to your chosen audience; works only with lifetime budgets) I work most with the first option, but the second one comes in handy when you want to reach people at a particular hour in their local time. 4: DELIVERY TYPE The last optimisation is regarding delivery type. This This is just a cherry on the top of every little optimisation we discussed in this chapter. chapter. You can choose between two different delivery types: Standard and Accelerated. Standard Delivery Type will show your ads throughout the day while Accelerated Delivery Type Type will show your ads as quickly as possible. Standard Delivery is … well, standard. My clients and I use it 100% of the time. But if you want to show your ads to your target audience as quickly as possible instead of using the budget pacing control that comes with the standard delivery, Accelerated Delivery Type is the type you should choose. This type works best if you have to align your ads with live events, special announcements or to advertise limited-time sales.
Best practices you should start with There are a bunch of optimisation options you can choose from and experiment with, but I don’t want you to get decision-fatigued in this phase. To make sure that doesn’t happen I listed out all the best optimisation practices for starting out with Facebook Facebook Advertising and an explanation why: 1. Lifetime budget
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Lifetime budget works best with The Ultimate Budgeting System. It also ensures you have short, but controlled advertising sprints with optimisations in between that will help you achieve those great results you’ve been wanting and working for. And you deserve them. I advise you select a Lifetime budget and define the ad schedule (day and time) that applies to your campaign. We’ll go into details about how to incorporate that into The Ultimate Budgeting System a little bit later. 2. Optimise for your goal When you select your Facebook Ad Objective at the beginning, Facebook automatically pre-selects the type of optimisation for you. That default selection Facebook makes, usually brings the best results for the objective you chose.
To have as less friction as possible at this stage of your campaign creation, I warmly suggest you continue with the default suggestion. Same goes for pricing optimisation. Let’s leave the default selection (“Get most likes/clicks/conversion/etc. at the best price”) on for now. That will bring you more of that what you want at best price. You can play with bidding later on. 3. Run ads all the time Again, we don’t want to be slowed down at this point so we’ll continue with the most practical solution.
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To create as less friction as possible, I strongly suggest we move on with the option “Run ads all the time”. Your ads will still get delivered to the people, who are more likely to engage with them. You don’t need a separate Ad Schedule at this point. 4. Standard Delivery Type Accelerated Delivery Type is meant for very specific campaigns with very specific goals. Sticking to the default “Standard Delivery Type” option here is the best you can do for your campaign. Your ads will get delivered throughout the day, using the budget pacing control. Note: A lot of people may be thinking “Oh, I’ll just choose an Accelerated Delivery Type to get my ads approved more quickly.” It doesn’t go that way. You ads will go through the same exact process than process than the ads with Standard Delivery Type.
Step-by-step: Implementing The Ultimate Budgeting System We got familiarised with the best budgeting practices, but here’s here’s how you can combine them with The Ultimate Budgeting System to assure your success. s uccess. Remember, The Ultimate Budgeting System only makes sense if your budget is $20 or more. 1. Define your budget based on your #1 goal Be realistic when setting up your budget. Too many people get quickly discouraged when they’re not able to sell a $1,000 worth of consulting for $50 or less in the first try. “Delusional” is the word I would use for describing them. Don’t be like that. 2. Split your budget into percentages
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The Ultimate Budgeting System is founded on the 20/30/50 rule. Split your budget according to those values. The first phase will include 20% of the budget, the second one 30% and the third one 50%. 3. Plan your campaign Create a timeline for your campaign. How long will you run the first phase of it? The second? Third? When will you iterate the ads and how fast? The timeline depends on the budget you have and the goals you want to achieve in a certain time-span. But whatever you’ll end up choosing, I don’t recommend you go hands-free on your ads. Forgetting about your ads for a longer period might result in result deterioration when we are trying to achieve the exact opposite of this. 4. Use the “Lifetime budget” option When you come to the point of setting the budget in your Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll be choosing the “Lifetime budget” option when optimising your ads. That is if you want to make full use of The Ultimate Budgeting System. First, you’re going to use 20% of your budget so keep that in mind when defining your budget in Facebook Ads Manager. Set the timeline for the first phase of your campaign. Finish the rest of the optimisation and continue. 5. Set a reminder Based one the timeline you created in step 3, set reminders for each phase of the campaign. Facebook Facebook will notify you when the first phase will end, but I always create a separate set of reminders just to make sure I’m on top of things 100%. 6. Iterate the ads and update your budget when the previous phase ends
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After each phase ends, you’ll iterate the ads just like we talked about, but you’ll also have to update your y our budget and timeline.
Even if budgeting isn’t the most important part of creating a campaign, it shouldn’t be something you’d want to cross over from your list as soon as possible. Planning ensures you don’t get stuck during the process and makes goal-tracking even easier. You have certain expectations now and you know what to do to reach them. We’re just one short chapter away from finishing this Facebook Advertising Campaign! Are you ready?
YOU NOW KNOW:
- You shouldn’t spent the whole budget budget at once. - Have realistic expectations. - Your budget depends on your #1 goal you’re you’re trying to achieve.
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- You can choose from from multiple optimising optimising options, but you should keep it as simple as possible at the beginning. Sticking with default options sometimes works best.
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7. Launch your campaign Our objective is chosen, our targeting set and our budget all figured out and planned. All we now need to do is to enter our texts and visuals that we have prepared into our Facebook Ads Manager, and we’re ready to go!
Wait Wait … what are Ad Placements? Now is the perfect time to present you with different Facebook’s Ad Placements and give you some tips on what works best. Placement is a place where your ad will be shown. You can choose between four different placements: Feed : Your ads will be shown in the news feed on - Desktop News Feed: users’ desktop
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Feed: Your ads will be shown in the news feed on - Mobile News Feed: users’ mobile phone - Desktop Right Column: Column : Your ads will be shown in the column on the right - Audience Network: Network: Your ads will be shown in other mobile applications connected with Facebook’s advertising system Users are used to seeing ads in a Desktop Right Column. That That area doesn’t attract eyeballs anymore so I avoid that placement by default. It never brought me any significant s ignificant results. I also played with Audience Network several times before, but never got any tangible results. I turn that placement off as well and focus on the other two. I would suggest you choose Desktop News Feed and Mobile News Feed. These two placements get incorporated into users’ news feed which means you have the opportunity to blend in with the audience. Remember our paradox? That’s That’s why the results are better with choosing these two placements. P.s. When I launched the book, Facebook just released an update with an additional placement - Instagram. You might find that in your Ads Manager. However, we are focusing on Facebook Ads and I suggest you turn Instagram as placement off.
Have you entered text and visuals into Facebook Ads Manager? WELL DONE, MY FRIEND. Our work here is finished! Now press the big green button and launch that campaign of yours that you have worked so hard for! DO IIIIT!
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NOTE: Every campaign, every ad you create goes through an Ad Review Process. That means your ads won’t start running immediately after creating and launching a campaign. campaign . That said, typically most ads are reviewed within 24 hours. My ads are usually reviewed within 1 hour. Facebook will let you know over email and notification centre if your ad has been approved and if it hasn’t been, it will notify you which policy you haven’t haven’t followed and what you have to update .
YOU NOW KNOW:
- Some ad placements work work better, better, some don’t. don’t. Nothing’s Nothing’s wrong wrong with turning some off. - You should stick with Desktop News Feed and Mobile News Feed Feed placement by default.
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What now? Congratulations! You have launched your campaign, your ads got approved, everything runs as smoothly as it can. What now? Does your work end here? Is this it? This is only the beginning. The serious work starts after launching your campaign. First, you’ll have to optimise the campaign like we discussed, using The Ultimate Budgeting System. And when that campaign is finished, your mission is to examine the whole campaign, results of it and learn from it so your next one will be even better. better.
But how do I analyse my campaign? As you can see, Facebook truly is a powerful advertising tool. But not only that - Facebook also offers a deep insight into your ads performance, the audience that engaged with your ads the most and other important metrics you should know about.
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All of your campaigns, as well as analytics, can be reached at this link. link. Click on the campaign you would like to examine. From here on you can see a bunch of data, broken down by ad sets and if you dive in deeper, even specific ads. Your data will be broken down by three key indicators: - Performance - Audience - Placement
Performance In the Performance section, you’re able to observe general data, such as likes/ clicks/conversions, reach, the amount spent. By moving your cursor on the timeline, you can observe the progress of your campaign — did your results improve or worsen over the time?
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You can even customise your reports based on the metric you want and need to observe to get better next time.
Here are some of the key metrics you should be carefully observing: - Results (depending on your objective) - Reach - Amount spent - Actions - Frequency - Cost per result
Audience Gone are the days of guess-working your audience. You You now have the perfect opportunity for getting to know your real audience.
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Which demographic group was the most acceptive to your message? That information itself can give a pretty decent foundation for you to build upon the next time you’re going to start a Facebook Ads Campaign or even a Facebook Page Strategy. The data can be found under the “Audience” section. They They did a great job of visualising those results as well! You You can see very clearly who engaged with your ad the most and who to target next. You can also adjust the metric you want to observe if you’re looking for any specific deviations.
Placement Some placements always perform better than others, and you’re able to observe all that in the “Placements” section. I usually avoid “Desktop Right Column” placement. “Mobile News Feed” and “Desktop News Feed” placement works best for my audience. But we don’t want to guess when it comes to Facebook Ads. So with “Placement” section you have the opportunity to observe the actual results of your placements so you can decide with which you should go next time around.
Want to breakdown even more? If you’re a data nerd such as I am when it comes to analysing Facebook ads, you can break down your data even more. m ore.
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Below these sections you can find the options for breaking down the results even more to dive in the data a little bit deeper. You can observe the following data in the columns: - Performance (Default) - Delivery - Engagement - Video Engagement - App Engagement - Carousel Engagement - Performance erforma nce and Clicks - Cross-Device But here’s what you can break down your ads by: - By Delivery -
None
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Age
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Gender
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Age and gender
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Country
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Region
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Placement
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Placement and Device
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Product ID
- By Action -
None
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Conversion Device
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Destination
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Video View Type
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Carousel Card
- By Time -
None
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Day
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Week
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2 Weeks
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Month
Observing the analytics and making sense out of all that data is a science by itself. Explaining everything in detail would lengthen this book by at least 500% and your work and knowledge still wouldn’t end here. You learn the most and get the best results by putting everything discussed here into practice. Your work doesn’t end here. Soon you’ll realise that doing analytical observations is one of the best parts of creating a Facebook Ads Campaign. Each time you’ll learn something new about your audience, about Facebook and about Advertising itself. You’ll You’ll get better every time. Keep learning about your audience and how you should communicate with them. Observing analytics is laying out a solid groundwork for all the work you’re going to do in the future, not only in the Facebook Ads sphere but Facebook Page Page Management and general social media marketing as well.
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A good marketer is a person who’s driven by a constant urge to improve his/hers marketing skills. With Facebook Ads Analytics, you have a powerful tool in hands. Unleash that urge and make outstanding things happen. You’re You’re a marketer.
YOU NOW KNOW:
- The work begins after launching launching your campaign. - It’s vital for your success to keep keep learning about your audience and your performance so you can improve with every ev ery step.
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Conclusion Word “Advertising” is met with disgust. People imagine you, the advertiser, as a salesperson who goes door to door, selling vacuum cleaners for 70% off. Big red signs with lots of exclamation marks included. But what we’re doing here is completely different. We’re not trying to force a product into the consumers’ hands. We’re finding people that need our help; we’re focusing on that audience alone and bringing the solution closer to them. We’re connecting. We’re helping. Advertising is about people. It’s about you, showing your human face and communicating your unique brand voice when talking to your audience. It’s about the people you’re going to advertise to — finding their expensive problem, helping them solve that problem, and creating a win for them and yourself. You’re a marketer now. This book has provided you with information on everything you need to know about Facebook Ads. It has given you a blueprint of the things you have to do and actions you have to take to finally reach those amazing social media results everyone has been talking about. It revealed you a step-by-step process of creating a super successful Facebook
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campaign that is going to skyrocket you hundreds of steps ahead of your competition. What you’re holding in your hands is a map that has a starting and an ending point with a planned out path in between. You know which steps you need to take to get to that finish line successfully. And most importantly, you have a step-by-step process that will help you plan the next, even more successful trip. Now get to work and finally reach the results your business deserves.
You got this.
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Bonus chapter: RESOURCES In need of in-depth explanations, researches, and other resources? You’ll find them here!
Ad Ideas just for you! So you read this book, got super excited, but you still don’t know where exactly to begin. Your idea machine (brain, doh!) has left you clueless. You need some ideas for ads to point you in the right direction. Here’s a short list of a couple of ideas for your next campaign. Use it as you wish!
Promote your page to your email e mail subscribers Trust me on this one: A lot of your email subscribers aren’t fans of your Facebook Page Page even though you’ve included the link to your page several times in the newsletter you sent. A lot of them are just too lazy to click through.
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No worries! If you want to get more Facebook Page Likes for a very low cost, advertise your page to your subscribers! They already know you and your work. Getting them to like your page is going to be easy!
Someone didn’t purchase your product? Remarket them with custom audiences! A person might be checking your product online, thinking of buying it, but left without a purchase. This is a very common occurrence. The funny thing is, these people usually need just a slight nudge in the right direction, confirming that buying your product is the right way to go. You can give them that nudge with Facebook Ads. Set up a tracking pixel on that product page and remarket your visitors. Find them on Facebook, offering them your product again and giving them another reason to purchase.
Promote your new blog posts to your website visitors Your webpage visitors already showed interest in your content. Why not offer them a quick access to your newly published blog posts via Facebook Ads? My advice is you put a retargeting pixel on your webpage and target all the people that visited your webpage before. It’s better to advertise to the people that already know you, than to experiment with an unknown audience.
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Promote your info products to your subscribers Launching new info products usually requires quite a bit of marketing. You create all these email campaigns, reminding your subscribers to buy your info product for a discounted price, and then let it all go. But what if you could target those same subscribers on Facebook? You just need to catch them in a different environment and remind them of what they’re missing out on. I did that with this book, and the results were fantastic! The ROI was +300%, I sold quite a few books and got some Facebook page fans as well! Custom audiences truly are a moneymaking machine if you do it right. You have the blueprint, use it!
Facebook’ acebook’ss Glossary Glossary of Ad Terms Terms CPC, Conversions, Impressions, Impressions, Reach … numerous terms just to get you confused, right? But trust me, once you’ll get to know these words, everything will make a lot more sense. If you want to deepen your knowledge a little bit, Facebook has a handy glossary of terms you need to know about. Read More
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How to set up an advertising account If you want to play with Facebook’s paid advertising (and of course you want to, you bought this book, didn’t you?), you have to set s et up your Advertising account. Facebook makes this really easy for its users; you’ll be done just in a few minutes and you enjoy the benefits years to come. Read More
How to implement a tracking pixel (soon to be named “Facebook “Facebook pixel”) If you want to track conversions and website visitors, you will need to install a tracking pixel to your webpage. While this may sound like a tricky mission for a non-techy person, it really isn’t. is n’t. You can find a detailed explanation below. And if you still don’t know how to do that yourself, call a developer to help you out. They’re able to fix it for you in a couple of minutes. Read More
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How to integrate with Facebook for your native iOS app with Facebook’s SDK Looking into and experimenting with Mobile App Install ads makes a whole lot of sense for mobile app developers. Gone are the days of awareness campaigns for your mobile m obile app, generate new installs instead. But if you want to use this functionality, you’re going to have to download and integrate your app with Facebook SDK and update the app prior launching your campaign. Here’s how you can do it. Read More
What to do if your ads are mistakenly disapproved? Ah geez, here we go. First of all, it happens to the best of us so you shouldn’t worry. Secondly, Secondly, there is a way to solve this. You’re going to contact Facebook via this form. form. Fill out the form according to your situation and follow these guidelines for contacting Facebook: - Be calm and polite. - Provide Provide them them with screenshots and videos if possible. - Explain in detail why your ad is following following all the guidelines and and policies and how important it is for you to get it approved as soon as possible.
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- Let them know how much you appreciate appreciate their work. - Sign with your real name. Even though Facebook is an enormous company with a vast number of people on support, they still care whether you’re polite or not. And trust me, you’re going to get things sorted faster if you act like a reasonable person.
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Come say hi. Thank you so much for reading. I would love to hear from you. Email me on
[email protected] or tweet my way @mojcamars. <3
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