Facebook is an incredibly powerful tool for marketers, offering the most advanced and detailed ways and tools to target, structure, and optimize your campaigns.
If used correctly, it can skyrocket a business from barely surviving to a multi-million dollar enterprise in a relatively short time. Just take a look at Dope Snow and their expansion to $7M+ in 6 months or Ikonick, which generated $15M in sales in their first 2 years.
Advertising on Facebook can be hard, especially when you are just starting out. There is a lot of knowledge to consume and tools to learn, later comes strategy, optimization, scaling, etc. But if you are a beginner wanting to take your business digital – we have a list of 5 hacks to help you crush it!
1. Ensure your account doesn’t get banned in a matter of days.
Photo Credit : Our materials
Facebook has an extensive history of bans, blocks, and disabling accounts. Believe it or not but they can do it even without a reason as an outcome of bot bug or error. This process is fully automatic and rarely requires human interference.
First of all, have a good read through their advertising policies, which you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/. The best way to avoid getting banned is to follow the rules.
Then you need to set up your business manager account. You can easily find information on how to do it on YouTube. Make sure your business information is correct, your email is verified and the business itself (along with the domain) is also verified.
Go over to your webpage and make sure the privacy policy, terms & conditions, and shipping & returns legal pages are there – accessible and readable. Facebook can and most likely will check (crawl) the website you own when you start running ads.
Have your private account setup properly. It means a real name, surname, date of birth, etc. If you got blocked by an accident due to „Suspicious activity on your account” (Nothing could happen really, we’ve been there), Facebook will let your request a review of your identity by making you upload an identity confirming document. Also, if using backup accounts (Highly recommended to have at least 1 backup account), make sure to have normal activity on this account just a real person was using it.
Always delete ads that were disapproved from your account straight away. Share all business assets like pages, pixels, and ad accounts with your other backup accounts, family, or business partners to avoid losing them, in case something happens.
Lastly, avoid having problems with ad payment. It means you must not use any PayPal, Revolt, or other online banking payment methods. Use only a debit card or credit card and make sure the details of the cardholder align with the details you put in your business settings.
Not following the steps listed above will result in getting your account flagged and can lead to a ban.
2. Pixel your site
Photo Credit: facebook.com
Digital marketing or to be more specific performance advertising heavily relies on data. In order to successfully access if your campaigns and efforts are bringing you money, you must be able to collect the data.
Facebook Pixel is a tracking code allowing the data from your website to be migrated onto your business manager and to be accounted for when calculating your results. It is pure basics, but it is surprising how many businesses don’t know what pixel is and how to set it up.
Bare with us for a second of more technical jargon 😉
So how does the pixel work? Let’s assume your ad was displayed by 1000 people, yet only 10 clicked the call to action button to visit your website. It gives ur a UCTR (Unique Click-Trough-Rate) of 1%. Let’s also assume that those people saw your ad for the first time (They can be classified as a COLD audience), so they are not familiar with your brand and are more likely not to notice the ad. A decent UCTR for the COLD ad should be everything above 2,5%.
„What’s the lesson here?” You might ask. If not enough people are clicking on your button it could mean two things. Either your ad creative doesn’t stand out, catch people’s attention and make them stop scrolling or your copy is not engaging enough to create a desire to take the action you want them to take, which is to click the button.
By properly tracking data you are able to know what is working and bringing you money and what is not and should be improved.
3. Test, Test, Test
Photo Credit: stock.adobe.com
In our e-Marketing career, we came across clients who wanted us to sell $100,000 products with 1 ad, 1 copy, and 1 campaign. Unfortunately, we had to drop the account. The problem is that the more expensive the product, the longer the journey a potential client has to come to decide if he or she wants to buy.
When starting out with Facebook Ads, before we structure the campaigns, start building a funnel, or optimize for higher conversions like ATC, we need to test. Test the audiences, the creatives, copy, buttons, landing pages, product descriptions, etc., the list goes on.
Generalizing: On some audiences, an emotional copy with storytelling might work better on other lifestyle photos of the product followed by a quick caption and later a retargeting series with product benefits. If we are advertising let’s say motivational, modern canvas prints, we have to test if people who are young and interested in home decor will be a better audience or people who are interested in Gary Vaynerchuk, motivation, and entrepreneurship.
So, how to test? This short article is not enough to explain the whole strategy but we can touch upon some key points.
First, get your research and foundations in place. It means creating customer avatars, marketing angles, problems & benefits list,s and other aspects of marketing analysis. Based on that prepare creatives, using multiple angles, forms, and mediums like videos, carousels, static images, etc. Then it is time for the copywriting, the same formula applies. After you have multiple well-thought-out pieces of content and copy, research your targeting. You can use a tool from Facebook called Audience Insights, it can be found in your Business Manager. A complete Audience Insight tutorial can be found on YouTube. A huge advantage to this tool is that it analyses the criteria you put in and then suggests other fan pages where your audience can be, the industry they work in, etc. Then in your COLD campaign, test the aspects listed above with the PPE objective. Analyze which ads and audiences (ad sets) bring you the best and cheapest engagement, CPM’s, best click-through-rates, and maybe even some conversions. These will be the most important KPI’s in your first testing phase.
Bonus tip: Here is a little bonus tip if you made it this far. When you create an audience in Audience Insights, go to your audiences, and edit the audience. This way you can reach more interests like people who like particular fan pages, are engaged shoppers, or even live in the most expensive postcodes (applies to the US).
4. How to spy on your competitors?
Photo Credit: Our materials
How many times have you wondered „If I could only see what my competitors are using in their ads” or „I don’t have any idea on how to create an ad that will work. What can I do?”? We have some good news.
There is actually a tool from Facebook itself, which lets you literally spy on your competitors and see their ads. It is called Facebook Ads Library and you can find it here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/.
Go there, choose a country, and type your competitor’s Facebook fan page name in the search bar. The service will show all the active ads and inactive ads they ever ran. From there, if any particular ad interests you, click „see details” to check the variants they used and or even on what of Facebook’s platforms family the ad is displayed.
It’s a really simple yet powerful tool!
5. Set up your KPI’s properly (Key Performance Indicators)
Photo Credit: stock.adobe.com
How do you know if your advertising efforts are bringing in revenue? From the data, you gathered by installing the Pixel.
How do you know how to set up, organize, and analyze this data? By setting up the KPI’s inside Facebook Ads in the right order.
Okay, so let’s jump straight into it. KPI’s or Columns as they are called in the Facebook advertising platform, should represent a given funnel and be structured in the same way. They must allow you to track the funnel from the moment a prospect enters the funnel, through their action on your website to the moment they become customers and more.
So how to set up columns properly? We’ll give you a hint on how we set up columns for ultimate funnel overview and control. Please note that we use multiple presets for an in-depth understanding of the account and data, this is just one of them to get you started.
How do we set up columns at AdScope Digital on one of our presets (demo version):
- Campaign name and delivery
- Result
- CPM
- Impressions
- Video plays
- CTR’s
- Conversions
- Leads
- Messaged
- Costs
- Frequency
- Spend
- ROAS and PCV
- Dates and results rates
- Quality rankings
Bonus hack: Use „Unique” values in a given preset to have more accurate data in your preset. Unique values do not count data based on the frequency of an event happening but rather on the number of people who „fired” a particular event.
What does it mean? That if somebody clicks the „Add to cart” button 50 times, your data won’t be confused with 50 add cart’s and the system will count all the ATC’s made by this person as one.
What’s next?
If you made it to the end we want to thank you for having your attention for those few short minutes. We hope the hacks provided in this guide will help you start off with Facebook ads or achieve better results if you are already an active advertiser.
These tips were purposed for beginners only, but if you learned something new or maybe skipped some of these crucial techniques during your learning process we are thrilled to help.
If you need any further assistance with developing your business in the digital world, don’t hesitate to contact us. Coffee is on us!
To your success,
Martin Bujacz
Managing Partner