After you set up your custom audience and are ready to retarget, you need to actually create the ad. This will involve taking a few more steps and then thinking creatively about what is likely to encourage people to buy and what will actually make you a profit.
The next question you’ll be prompted to answer is regarding Facebook ad placements. In other words, where are the ads going to appear? If you are new to Facebook advertising, then you can simply select automatic placements, which will put your ads in the most optimal positions.
Note as well that Facebook is not a single site or app, but actually a network of apps and tools. So your ads can also appear automatically on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the ‘Audience Network’.
If you choose to take control of this yourself though, then you’ll be able to select whether the ads appear on only the desktop or mobile version of the site, whether they appear on platforms like Instagram or not, and which operating systems you want to support.
Next up, you will choose the budget and schedule.
You’ll next need to think about how to create an ad campaign that will be cost effective. In other words, you’ll set up your budget and your schedule. The budget is the amount you’re willing to spend on these ads per day. You should make sure to set this number only once you have assessed your finances and cash flow to ensure that you can afford to support this kind of campaign.
You can also choose whether to set your ads live during a set period, right away, or to go live after a set amount of time.
Go into fine detail regarding how you want to spend money using the ‘advanced budget’ option.
You can also think about the precise times of day when you want your ad to show. Ideally, that should be when your visitors are awake.
Next, you’ll be able to create your ad format. This can be a single image, video, slideshow or other.
Make sure to check Facebook’s guidelines for the size and format of images etc. You can find those at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-ad-sizes/.
Next, you’ll need to consider the number of words that you can ad to the headline, as well as to the body of the text etc.
Here is a quick reference to help you identify how many words you have available for each section
Photo ads
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- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
Video ads
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- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
Carousel ads
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- Headline: 40 characters
- Link description: 20 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
Slideshow ads
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- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
Collection ads
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- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: n/a
- Body text: 90 characters
Instant Experience ads
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- Headline: No strict limits—insert text blocks using Facebook’s templates
- Link description: (same as above)
- Body text: (same as above)
Lead ads
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- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: 30 characters
- Body text: 125 characters
Messenger ads
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- Headline: 25 characters
- Link description: n/a
- Body text: 125 characters
Of course, these all give you a finite number of words/characters through which to get your message across. While remaining inside those parameters, it is your job to create something that will stand out and that will get the right kind of visitor to click through and visit your website.
It’s not quite as simple as just trying to ‘trick’ as many people as you can into clicking on your ads though. There is more to it, which we will go into in more depth now.
Creating a Highly Profitable Campaign
Facebook ads are a type of ad referred to as PPC. If you have been marketing online for any length of time, then you should be familiar with this term. To recap, PPC means ‘Pay Per Click’, which in turn means that you only have to pay for the ad each time someone clicks on it.
You will set a maximum amount you are willing to pay for each click on each ad. So, for instance, if you set your maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) to be 50 cents, then that means you will get a minimum of 20 clicks a day before you spend more than your daily budget.
In truth though, you may get more clicks than this. That’s because Facebook ads work on a bidding system. When there is a ‘space’ on the site for an ad to show to a specific customer, Facebook will then look to the ad campaigns it has live and find the relevant options.
A bidding war will then be carried out between those different ads, so that the one with the highest CPC will end up being shown.
That said, the advertiser will only pay the amount they need to in order to win the bid. So if all the other ads in your niche only set their CPC to 20 cents, then you will only pay 21 cents per click, thus getting a lot more clicks in total!
So, if you set your CPC too low, then you will lose out on the bids and your ads won’t show – or will only show a few times, to less competitive audiences.
That said though, if you set your CPC too high, then you’ll only reach a few people before you exceed your budget and your ads stop being served for the day.
And so there is a highly precarious balancing act that must take into account all three of these factors: the competitiveness of the niche, the CPC, and the daily budget… and you thus must choose the right amount to spend.
Do you aim for a smaller niche with fewer people, and thus be able to get more exposure for a lower cost? Or do you compete head to head with the big players, and perhaps only get your ad displayed once or twice?
As ever, the best option is often to work your way up. When you’re a small business with a small budget, aim for smaller sub-sections of the market and try to establish yourself there. From that point onward, you can then try to reinvest the profits you make in order to expand your reach further and further and compete with the bigger brands.
If you’re brand new, then targeting males interested in fitness between 20-30 with a supplement brand will be out of your price bracket as you compete with big supplement companies, Amazon, and Bodybuilding.com.
But if you target martial artists who do Brazilian JuJitsu with the same product, all located in a specific area, then you might be able to make a dent.
The other thing to consider is your CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). In other words: how much do you stand to earn from each of these ads? And therefore, how much should you realistically be willing to spend on each ad?
The best case scenario is that someone sees your ad, clicks on your ad, and then visits your site to buy your product. Remember: you only pay each time someone clicks on your advert. So as long as you earn more from each visitor than you pay for each click, your ads will make more money than they cost you. If you make $30 profit for each sale, then that should be very easy.
But of the 100 people who visit your website, it’s likely that only one or two will actually buy a product. That’s a 1-2% conversion rate, which is actually considered to be pretty good.
That means that the ‘average’ value of each visitor to your site, is closer to $30 / 100 – so 30 cents.
If you consider though that a few people might sign up to your mailing list and buy later, or might buy more than one product, then you can potentially increase the number to 60-70 cents. This is why it’s called the lifetime value – it’s the lifetime of the customer. You might take a while to see this return though, which is why you also need to consider your cash flow.
Either way, make sure you are earning money from your campaign on average, before you start spending.
Creating Ads That Work for You
The quality of the ad will of course determine whether it gets looked at and whether it gets clicked.
The mistake people make though is to make an ad that is just begging to be clicked – that is so interesting that even someone with no interest in your product will still want to click on it and check out your site.
This is a mistake, because of course you aren’t trying to maximize clicks. You’re trying to maximize profit.
Therefore, you need to think once again in terms of targeting, and your ‘buyer persona’. Who are you selling to? Who is most likely to buy your product?
And what types of images will that person respond to, moreso than the average Joe? What kind of text will get them excited and curious? And how can you dissuade people from clicking who are statistically unlikely to buy.
Reading about persuasive writing is highly advisable. So too is thinking about how to create eye catching images that are high quality. This will help establish trust with the viewer.
