Have you launched a Facebook advertising campaign and you’re struggling to get good results? Don’t worry, you are not alone and your problem can be fixed!

The power of Facebook advertising

Lots of businesses are obsessed with the power of Facebook advertising – how can you blame them? In fact, there are many ways to get the conversions, leads and traffic you are looking for with a relatively small budget thanks to Facebook ads. Running a Facebook advertising campaign can be highly profitable (especially for small businesses) IF you know what you are doing.

We have supported many businesses with Facebook ads over the past 10 years. A common mistake we have seen is the lack of strategic planning ahead of set-up. Most people think that setting up a campaign comes down to simply following the Facebook (built-in) step-by-step process. We are sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but even if you follow the steps perfectly you can’t guarantee the results you are looking for. 

So, how do you set up a Facebook advertising campaign that drives your engagement and conversation rates? 

• To start, you need to be familiar with Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor. You can easily create a ‘test’ campaign and play around with the various features to find out what options are available to you. 
• Most importantly though, you need to have a strategy in place. What’s your objective? What action would you like your customers to take on your website? How will you persuade them to take that action? Which campaign type will allow you to reach your objective? How long should the campaign run for? What budget do you need? 

Out of the many things you should think about ahead of setting up your campaign, these are the 3 essential steps we believe you should take to build a super-efficient campaign. 

Let’s dive in…

Test your Pixel again and again and again. 

Facebook Pixel is a small piece of code that you can install on your website to see how Facebook users interact with your site and what actions (conversions) they complete. Why is it important? Well, conversions are the reason why you set up Facebook ads in the first place, right? Thanks to Facebook Pixel you can see how effective your ads are and you can easily and effectively monitor your results. 

With Facebook Pixel you can track one or more actions on the same page, for example ‘complete purchase’, ‘lead’, ‘add to cart’, ‘complete registration’, etc. The customisation of events and parameters is limitless, and you can adjust these based on your needs. There are loads of great analytics tools out there, but Facebook Pixels give you incredibly detailed information that other platforms don’t track. 

So, before running a Facebook advertising campaign, make sure that your Pixel is correctly installed! Test it again and again and again to ensure it works perfectly and that your parameters and events are being tracked. 

Remember to attach it to your ads as this will help you optimise it for the action you want to take e.g. purchase, register of interest, etc. We often answer marketing-related questions for free and we’d be happy to share more info on this subject! Feel free to drop your question here; we’ll get back to you with our best answer! 

Campaign structure vs strategy. You need to get the latter right first. 

As mentioned before – strategy is essential when setting up your Facebook advertising campaign. Think about this: when you need something and you don’t know where to get it, you’d normally jump onto Google and run your search. Would you do the same on Facebook? No, you wouldn’t. Most people go to Facebook when they have a few minutes spare. They don’t want to shop, they just want to kill some time and maybe catch up with friends and family. Can you see the difference here? People use Google and Facebook with a different purpose and intent. This means that your approach needs to be carefully thought out.  

Unfortunately, you can’t just launch a salesy advert to a cold audience and expect awesome results. You need to engage with Facebook users through several campaigns with differing objectives. You need to get people’s attention first e.g. by solving a problem or making them laugh (perhaps through a brand awareness campaign), then nurture the relationship by giving them a taste of your product or service e.g. a freebie (perhaps through a lead generation advert) and then focus on conversions with an irresistible offer. 

Transforming a stranger into a customer takes time – it won’t happen overnight. But designing your funnel as well as choosing the right campaign types and objectives (awareness, traffic, lead generation, etc.) will help you get the results you are looking for. Our suggestions? Facebook offers a vast range of campaign objectives (see screenshot below). Browse your options within Facebook Ads Manager and create a ‘test campaign’ to try things out. 

Don’t waste budget.

Now you know the secret. To get those results through the door you need to run several campaigns simultaneously. But how much should you invest? How do you come up with the right budget?

You need 3 basic ingredients: 

• Consider your product/service value. How much does your product or service cost?
• What are your sales targets? How much are you looking to sell?
• What is the average conversion rate? Meaning, out of X people that visit your website, how many should convert into a customer?

Do you have a calculator at hand? Let’s do some maths together. 

Say, for example, that the value of your product is £500 and that your objective is to sell 100 items this year. This means that the profit you are looking to make equals to: 

Profit = £500 * 100 (items) = £50,000

You know that out of 1000 people that visit your website, 20 generally buy your product so you can easily calculate your conversion rate:

Conversion rate = (20/1000)*100 = 2%

With these details at hand, you can estimate how many website visits your campaigns will have to drive in order to get the profit you are looking to achieve. For example, you know that in order to make a £50,000 profit with a 2% conversion rate you’ll need:

Website visits = 100 (target sales) / 2% (conversion rate) = 5,000 visits

How much budget do you need?

So, how much will those 5,000 visits cost you? Once you’ve set up your audience and your campaign timeline (i.e. for how long you think your campaign should run), Facebook will estimate the number of people you can reach per day based on the daily budget you decide to set. Your daily budget is the average amount you’ll spend each day to hit your goal. Your lifetime budget is the maximum you will spend over the lifetime of your ad set. Try to write down different figures in the “daily budget” cell to see how much you should spend per day in order to reach 5,000 visits. 

In the example above, with a daily budget of £10 you are likely to reach on average 74 people per day (38+110/2 = 74). To get your 5,000 visits in with this daily budget, you’d have to run the campaign for roughly 67 days (5,000/74 = 67.5). 

So this is how you define how much you should invest in your campaign. But there’s one question left: how much should you be willing to spend for each individual click? Facebook gives you two options: you can adjust your bids manually or you can let Facebook decide what bid will help you get the most results. If you have no experience with bidding strategies, we’d suggest choosing option 2. Alternatively, you can get some professional support (like ours!) to manage your bidding strategy.  

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Conclusion

If you aren’t seeing great results from your Facebook ads, don’t panic. There are loads of things you can do to run a successful advertising campaign – and most of these tactics are easy to implement!

As we said earlier, Facebook Ads are a great advertising tool. This is especially true for small businesses with small budgets and big objectives. However, you need to have a plan (a good plan!) in place.

If you would like to learn a few tricks about…

• building tailored audiences for your ads (e.g. lookalikes and remarketing audiences, excluding users that have already converted, targeting friends & fans to increase warm leads and more!)
• picking the right ad format depending on your product/service and your campaign objective
• choosing the right placement and times of the day to ensure maximum efficiency

…then check our ‘Intro to Facebook advertising’ course!