by Bryan Bren
The different objectives under the “Conversion” category include increasing the rate of conversion on your website, encouraging users to claim any offers, promoting a specific product or catalog, increasing your rate of engagement for your app, and increasing the number of visitors to your physical store.
Once you select your marketing objectives, the next step is to name your marketing campaign.
Sep four: Budget and audience
There are two things you must do during the step: define your target audience and establish the ad budget. Customizing your target audience is critical. Regardless of how wonderful your ad campaign is, it will not generate the results you expect if it is not directed toward your target audience. You can customize your target audience according to different demographics such as location, age, gender, languages, interests, behaviors, and connections.
Once you select your target audience, you must concentrate on establishing the ad budget. When you are setting the ad budget, you must keep in mind that the amount you set represents the maximum limit you want to spend on the ad. The budget you want to set can be a lifetime budget or a daily budget. The daily budget refers to the average cost you will incur on the ad per day. The lifetime budget refers to the maximum amount of money you will spend during the lifetime of the ad.
Step five: Creating the ad
This is where the fun begins. You can select the images or the video, the header, the text, and the location for the displaying your Facebook ad. The text you want to include in the ad must not exceed 90 characters and will appear in the form of a quick message above the images or video in the ad.
There are two options you can use while creating ads on Facebook. The first option is to use an existing post, and the second option is to create a new option. You must consider which of these options meets your requirements before you decide to choose.
For certain ads, as with boosting posts, you can create the ad by using an existing post which was already published on your Facebook page. If you want to do this, you must click on the “Use Existing Post” option from the dashboard available on Facebook Ads Manager.
The other option you can go with is to create a new advertisement from scratch. Before you can start working on the creative elements, you must decide the format of the Facebook ad. There are five formats you can use for creating Facebook ads, and they are a carousel, single image, canvas, single video, and slideshow. A carousel ad includes two or more images or videos the viewer can scroll through. A single image ad is, as the name suggests, an ad based on one image, and you can create six variations of an ad using a single image. If you want the ad to include just one video, then the ad format you must opt for is a single video ad. A canvas format enables you to tell a story through an amalgamation of images and videos. The slideshow format helps loop video ads using up to 10 images.
The objective that you established in step three will determine the different ad formats available to you.
Once you have chosen an ad format, you must add content to the ad. This is a critical step and whether your ad will stand out or not depends on the content you include. If you want your ad to be successful, you must include appealing and enticing images, videos, or text, or a combination of all these three things. There are certain specifications given by Facebook for the images or videos you want to include in the ads.
The image specs recommended by Facebook are as follows: the image ratio must be 1.91: 1 and the image size must be 1200 X 628 pixels. To improve the effectiveness of the ad, you must avoid using images with text overlay on them. Facebook recommends that the videos you use for ads be in .MOV or .MP4 files format with a resolution of at least 720 pixels. The file size must not exceed 4 GB, the ideal video ratio must be 16:9, it must be at least one second long, and the maximum duration of the Facebook ad cannot exceed 240 minutes. Sound and subtitles are recommended but optional.
Step six: Selecting the ad placement
The ad placement refers to where you want the ad to be shown. Your ads can appear in the desktop News Feed, in the Facebook app News Feed, and the right-hand column. You also have the option of the ad appearing on Instagram. Facebook will recommend that you opt for the default placements based on the objective of your ad. When you select this option, Facebook’s algorithm will automatically optimize the placement of the ads to generate the best results. However, you do have the option of selecting the placement based on what you want.
Step seven: Placing the order
Now, your ad is ready, and you must click on the “Place Order” option. Once the ad is submitted, Facebook will review it before it goes live. You will also receive a confirmation, usually an email, about the ad. Remember to make sure your ad meets Facebook’s requirements as discussed in previous chapters.
Optimizing the Ad Budget
Now that you are aware of how to create an ad, you must also understand how to budget the ad. Are you struggling to decide how to structure your marketing budget for producing Facebook ads? Well, you will learn everything about optimizing the Facebook Ads budget in this section. Simply put, it all boils down to basic mathematics, and it isn’t complicated. Once you carefully go through the information in this section, you will be able to establish a clear Facebook ad budget. Here is a quick overview of the different steps included:
Establishing your campaign goals,
Taking the time to work backward,
Calculating your ideal size of the audience,
Estimating the target impression count,
Estimating your CPM,
Calculating the cost per ad set and
Combining all your ad sets to establish your overall ad campaign budget.
The first step is to state your goals. This step is essential when trying to set up a budget for your ads. When your goals are tangible, you can easily determine the costs involved in attaining those goals. The goals for your ad campaigns can be increasing the following areas: your product sales for a given period, the number of leads produced, the engagement rate on posts, RSVPs for events, user responses to a specific offer, video views, and the number of new followers acquired during the campaign. These are merely examples of the goals, and you can go through step one in the previous section to determine what goals to set.
To make things easier for the sake of explanation, we will consider a hypothetical situation throughout the next steps to understand how you can calculate the budget for a Facebook Ads campaign.
Now, you need to start working backward. This means you must start at the bottom and make your way up the conversion sequence.
Let us assume that you want your ad campaign to generate 300 product sales. Ask yourself, what comes before you close a sale? You will need to generate leads. If the rate of conversion is around 30%, then you will need to generate at least 1,000 leads to attain your goal of 300 sales. When it comes to Facebook leads, it essentially refers to your list of email subscribers. To produce leads, you must include the link to a specific landing page in your ad that will encourage the users to sign up for your email list. There are different ways in which you can generate leads (email subscription list), like offering a free eBook or an analytical report in exchange for a user’s email address. However, your work doesn’t end here. Essentially, you will need to work backward until you arrive at the top of your Facebook marketing funnel.
Here is a simple way to go about working this process: Relevant Facebook users > Followers > Leads > Customers. This is the path of how customers can be obtained.
As you start working backward, you will find that you may end up with a couple of different ad campaigns. You can use the “Page Like” campaign for converting your target Facebook users into the followers of your page. To convert followers into leads, you can use a list-building ad campaign. To convert your leads into customers, you need a website conversion campaign. That’s three different campaigns to achieve the one goal of generating 300 sales.
After this, you must calculate the size of your i
deal audience. In the previous step, we assumed that the goal of your ad campaign was to generate 300 sales. According to the rate of conversion of 30%, you need about 1,000 leads. So, what must the size of your target audience be on Facebook to generate 1,000 leads? There are various variables involved here. Consider the following: How many users will view your ads? How many of your targeted Facebook users will be active on Facebook daily? What if your targeted users don’t view the ad event after the Facebook ad is live?
Since you have no control over the number of times Facebook will display your ad to your targeted audience, what will be an ideal ad frequency to attain your goal? This is where you must set some limits and estimations. Some questions you must answer in this regard are: What is the duration of your ad campaign? How likely will your targeted audience be on Facebook during your ad campaign? How likely is it for Facebook to display your ad to your targeted audience?
So, do you plan on running the ad campaign for a week, two weeks, a month, or maybe six months? It is essential that you don’t consider the entire duration of your overall marketing campaign. Instead, you must concentrate on how long you want to run this specific (ad) aspect of the campaign. Once you know the duration of the ad, you need to figure out whether your leads will be active on Facebook at least once during the length of the ad campaign. To determine the activity of your target audience on Facebook, you can monitor the data you gather from Facebook Analytics or even the Facebook pixel. The final question you must answer is whether or not Facebook will display the ad to your target audience while they are online. The higher the likelihood of your target audience viewing your ad, the lower your ad budget will be.
So, to go ahead with the previous illustration, let us assume that the ad campaign is being run for three months, the chances of the target audience being online during the length of the campaign is about 99%, and the likelihood of Facebook displaying the ads to your target audience while they are active online is 100%. So, if these are the numbers, will you be able to generate 1,000 leads? The answer is that you very well might be able to given the fact that you are running the campaign for three months. If you use basic math, then you must be gaining at least 10 more leads to cover the 1% loss in views. It means 1,000 leads divided by 99% gives you 1,010 leads. Usually, for a shorter campaign, you will need more leads.
Now, you will need to calculate the target impression count. To do this, you must use the ad frequency. This refers to the average ad frequency within the length of your campaign. You can optimize the ad campaign for post engagement, the CPC, impressions, and unique daily reach. When you select the option of unique daily reach, it allows you to limit the ad frequency to 1. So, to estimate your budget, you must estimate the average frequency.
To continue the example, let us assume that for a 3-month long ad campaign, you must aim for an ad frequency between 10 and 15 users per lead. So, for an audience size to generate 1,000 leads, and with the estimation of ad frequency between 10-15 for three months, you will have to aim to achieve an overall impression count of anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 leads (multiply the number of leads you want to generate with the ad frequency).
The next step is to estimate the CPM, CPI, or the cost per impression. You need to figure out how much the ad impressions will cost you. CPMs usually differ according to the industry you belong to and your objectives. For instance, if you aim to run a campaign for website conversions, then a $10 CPM is a good starting point. To calculate the total cost of your ad budget, you must multiply the total impressions you want with the average cost of impression and divide it by 1,000.
So, (total impressions X CPM)/ 1,000 = total cost.
The final step is to calculate the cost per ad set. Now you have to follow the formula mentioned above. Using the formula, your cost per ad set will be: (1,000 impressions X $10)/1,000 = $100. It essentially means you need about $100 to convert 1,000 leads into 300 potential sales over three months.
Chapter Nine: Facebook Analytics
Facebook Analytics
If you want to make the most of all the analytical data provided by Facebook, then you must start using Facebook Analytics. Facebook Analytics is a brilliant tool that enables marketers to understand the journey of a targeted user across different Facebook channels and their path through the sales funnel or the path the customer takes toward purchasing the product.
This is a free tool and is designed to optimize the working of Facebook ads. According to the previous algorithms of Facebook, Facebook only allowed you to view the last touch point in the sales funnel. For instance, if a user interacted with six of your Facebook posts but only made a purchase on the seventh interaction, then all the credit was given to the final interaction and not previous ones. Now, with Facebook Analytics, you can see the entire path stretching from interaction to conversion instead of just the last point.
As soon as you open Facebook Analytics, you will be able to see an overview of all the data. Facebook Analytics has artificial intelligence capabilities, and it will display important data or insights like the users who engage most frequently with your content. It also provides omnichannel analytics, which helps you view all the users who switched from the Facebook app to your website or from your website to the Facebook app before conversion. It provides customized dashboards where you can view all the important data at once. It also enables you to create event source groups from the Analytics dashboard, thereby permitting you to segment and retarget all those users who followed a particular path of events on your page.
The information available is seemingly endless, but it will be useless if you do not know how to properly access and evaluate the data.
Step 1: Accessing Facebook Analytics
Go to the Facebook Analytics dashboard. You must install Facebook Pixel if you want to access this dashboard. Once you install the pixel and allow it to run, your Analytics dashboard will be full of analytical data.
When you open the dashboard, you can see the overview of all the data. Click on the “Dashboards” option, and you can see the custom dashboards as well as the omnichannel dashboard. If you want to learn more about the analytics related to a specific set of users, funnels, purchases, or anything else, then you must click on the “Activity” option. You can start adding any relevant charts to the custom dashboard; this will give you easier access when searching for data.
You can also pin any important data onto your dashboard. To do this, you must click on the icon “Pin to a Dashboard” that is present on the chart you want to pin. You can also pin a chart to a custom dashboard. To do this, you must either select an existing dashboard or opt for the “Create a New Dashboard” option. Once you do this, you must type the name of the chart you want to pin and click on the option “Add to the Dashboard.”
Step 2: Reviewing activity reports
The activity reports form the basis of this analytics software. They help you understand all the collected data according to your needs to help make better decisions. The Analytics dashboard has comprehensive reporting features. You can delve as deep into the data as you want, and you can also view micro-conversions along with the global events and demographics.
For instance, if you are an owner of an e-commerce store, and you wish to determine the users who are converting from Facebook then you must go to Choose Activity Revenue, and it will provide a report of all the data related to purchases. To further filter the data, you must select an option from the “Show By” drop-down menu displayed. You can click on the “Traffic Source” option from the drop-down menu to view all the conversions according to the traffic source.
Another brilliant aspect about Facebook Analytics is you can design cross-channel funnels to decide on the interaction paths reporting the highest rate of conversion. If you wish to create a funnel, you must click on “Activity” then open “Funnels” and select the option “Create Funnel” present on the page. Here are a couple of examples of funnels you can use:
Users who installed your ap
p and then used your website to make a purchase.
Users who used your website to make a purchase but messaged your Facebook page before making the purchase.
Users who interacted with a specific Facebook post before making a purchase.
Users who reacted in a specific manner while interacting with a post before making a purchase.
You can make the funnel as detailed or as simple as you want it to be.
Step 3: Using Facebook Analytics data
The real advantage of using Facebook Analytics is that it provides you with all the data you will need to make better and more informed decisions for your business. It is essential that you understand the data to improve your Facebook ad campaigns.
For instance, if one of your Facebook ad campaigns encourages users to click but not to convert then the users might start to interact with a retargeting campaign that is showing better conversions. Without the first campaign, you will not be able to reach the point that finally led to conversions.
So how can you use all this data to your advantage? You can identify the funnels that are showing a good rate of conversion and then concentrate your efforts to increase the flow of users through that funnel. For instance, if you observe that most of the users convert after messaging your Facebook page, you can start using Messenger chatbots to engage with those who like your page. Or if you notice that users are converting better after interacting with your posts, you can take steps to improve the chances of such interactions.