1. SELECTING THE CORRECT CAMPAIGN OBJECTIVE FOR MAXIMUM RESULTS

When building a new Facebook campaign, it’s imperative that you choose the correct objective to match your campaign’s goals. Facebook’s algorithm will take this information, and begin to gather data related to the desired outcome. This means it ‘Learns’ who is most likely (within your selected audience) to take action – helping to maximise your results.

Do: Select The Most Appropriate Objective Based On The Desired Outcome

Do you want to build your brand name and get it seen by as many eyeballs as possible? Choose an awareness based objective.

Are you looking to increase consideration of a specific product or service? Build a Consideration Campaign.

Do you want your target to take valuable actions on your website? For example, purchasing a ticket to an upcoming event; booking a consultation with your sales team; or downloading a free report in exchange for an email? Then you will want to build your campaign using the Conversion Objective.

Don’t: Select Awareness Or Engagement If Your Desired Goal Is To Generate Leads

Selecting the incorrect objective for your campaign will prevent Facebook from gathering the correct data and result in it falling short before it’s even started!

This step sounds simple, but is also one of the most common mistakes I see when people are creating adverts for their own business.

 

 

2. USING YOUR PIXEL TO BUILD RELEVANT & VITAL AUDIENCE DATA

Each Facebook business account will have its own unique pixel. This short piece of code is an analytics tool, used to measure and track the effectiveness of your campaigns. It collects vital information to help us as marketers, better understand how people are responding to our adverts and actions they take on websites.

Do: Include Specific Events In Your Pixel That You Want To Track

Along with the base pixel code, Facebook also provides a range of actionable events you can track such as: Leads, Purchases, Complete Registrations. Including these specific event codes in your pixel will ensure Facebook can optimise your campaign to find the most likely people to complete this action.

Don’t: Forget To Include The Pixel On Each Step Of Your Funnel

If your specific landing page or web pages don’t have your Facebook pixel code embedded correctly, then the platform will be unable to gather audience and conversion data – negatively impacting the momentum and success of your adverts.

 

 

3. DIVERSIFY YOUR TARGETING

With increased competition in each industry today, it’s more important than ever to ensure you are diversifying your targeting approach. Having a variety of audiences running simultaneously will allow you to cover all bases, and maximise overall results.

Do: Include More Than One Audience In Your Campaigns

When including multiple audiences, it’s important to split each out at the Ad Set level. This will allow you to test each individually, and gain valuable insights to help you better plan for future campaigns.

Don’t: Include All Your Audiences In The One Ad Set

Combining all your audiences in the one campaign will dilute your targeting strategy, making it too hard to be able to extract important insights into who is (or isn’t) responding to your adverts.

Use your custom databases to build Lookalike Audiences: A Lookalike Audience is a targeted audience created from a “source” i.e. emailing list, finding other people on Facebook who are the most similar to the people in the source.

4. BUDGET FOR A RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

Having a budget and bidding strategy is just as important as choosing the right audience or placement. Too little and your campaign won’t have the chance to get off the ground. Too high and you may be throwing money away.

Do: Know Your Average Acquisition Costs And Benchmarks Before Launching

If you know the desired result of your campaign (to sell a ticket to an upcoming event, share a free report in exchange for an email, book in a free strategy call etc.) work out what the average cost per acquisition would need to be for you make a ROI from your ad spend.

For example, if you run a website selling T-Shirts, and the average profit per sale is $30 but the average cost per sale from your campaign is $40, then you will be running at a loss.
Whatever your campaign goal, you need to know how valuable that action is, inorder to help define your ROI.

Don’t: Spend Too Little or Too Much

Facebook uses “Ad Bidding” to deliver ads to its users. This means if your budget is too little it may result in your ads under-delivering, or not being seen at all! On the other end of the spectrum, if your budget is too high, you may be paying too much for your ads and throwing money away.

Anything below $20 per day can be considered too little (depending how narrow your audience/geographical area) while starting ads at $200+ per day can most the time, be far too high.

The sweet spot we use when starting most campaigns is $50 per day. If your budget is higher than this, we recommend scaling no more than 20-25% per day.

 

5. USE CREATIVE TO GRAB ATTENTION INSTANTLY

Do: Use A Mixture Of Unique And Eye Catching Photos And Videos

With an over saturation of ads these days, and an audience that’s more cluey than ever, the use of unique and eye catching ads has never been more important.

We as marketers, have less than 3 seconds to grab the attention of the target, so using stock images and videos won’t do.

Using a variety of custom, branded images and videos, will mean your ads stand out and ultimately, get more customers seeing them!

Don’t: Rely On Stock Images

People can spot stock images a mile off. It will cheapen your brand, and deter your audience from interacting with your ad all together.

If you don’t have any unique, high-quality images for your ads then check out Canva. It’s easy to use and lets you create beautifully, customised images!

 

6. WRITE COPY THAT IS EASY TO READ, INFORMATIVE & HIGHLIGHTS YOUR OFFER

Do: Use The ‘SUP’ Formula To Write Engaging Copy

We created the ‘SUP Formula’ to help us write compelling and engaging ad copy. It includes the 3 mains elements that every ad should have to maximise engagement.

Scarcity – Include an element of scarcity about the product/service. i.e. Only available to the first 50!
Urgency – Having an urgent message will encourage people to act fast! i.e. Only 5 days left to register!

Proof – Include proof that your service or product actually works. This can be in the form of testimonials or real life results. i.e. Using our awesome product, David was able to 5x his sales in 8 weeks…

Keep your headline snappy and concise, with a call to action to capture the audience’s attention as fast as possible.

 

Don’t: Advertise On Discounts Or Sales Too Often

This can cheapen the perception of your brand, and it also doesn’t provide any point of difference for your company.

 

7. HAVE A KILLER LANDING PAGE TO INCREASE CONVERSIONS

Do: Always Use A Landing Page Or Facebook’s Leadform For Specific Offers And Campaigns

The Landing Page needs to be congruent with your advert. Use similar imagery, copy, content and colours.

Keep the landing page simple, clear and concise. Don’t over complicate or bombard the users with unnecessary information. This will make for a frustrating user experience.

If you don’t have a landing page, try using Facebook’s Lead Form campaign objective to capture leads.

Don’t: Direct People To A Website With Too Many Options To Get Lost

Sending traffic to a destination, such as a webpage, with mixed messages, unclear offers and headlines will just confuse and annoy the user, resulting in them dropping off your funnel.