Facebook Advertising Overview
Megan Adams invites her viewers into the world of Facebook advertising to discover how incredibly powerful the tool can be for businesses. She begins by emphasising the importance of understanding your “why“ or purpose to leveraging the media platform for purchasing ads. After a quick example of how to recognize sponsored ads in your Facebook newsfeeds, we are then provided with a high-level overview of ads manager, which is Facebook’s platform that businesses use to create and manage their campaigns.
Ads manager can initially seem overwhelming; however, Adams breaks the platform down systematically by first describing how anyone can create an account through their own personal Facebook profile as long as they have a business page to associate to the tool. You can then begin creating campaigns within the ads manager that is broken down into 3 levels: campaign, ad set and ad level. The campaign level is used to set the main objective of the ad is wishing to accomplish while the ad set level breaks down targeting. We discover how incredible powerful Facebook is when it comes to how advertisers can target specific audiences. Media buyers have the ability to target people geographically, demographically, by interest, behavior, as an uploaded audience list or even a custom audience tracked through a Facebook pixel. Adams also breaks down some metrics terminology that advertisers must understand to measure the performance of the campaigns including, CTRs, CPCs, CPM, Reach and Frequency.
How Facebook Ads Work
In this next module of the training, Adams, describes how anyone with a personal profile can make create an ad account to begin advertising on Facebook. You can choose to run the ads from your personal ad account or create a separate account business account through business manager. To set up your account properly, you simply need to connect the account to your business page and provide a payment method. From here, you can adjust your settings for spend limits and your notification preferences.
In order to create a powerful campaign, we learn that you must first understand how they are structured and how to create the appropriate framework settings. To begin, you first must choose a marketing objective through the campaign tab. Different objectives can help the business accomplish different things such as simple awareness or conversions like leads or purchases. Next, you can set your budget and choose a target audience in the ad set level. Facebook can get incredibly granular with its audience targeting making for a marketing paradise. Finally, in the ads level is where you can actually create the creative portion of ads your audience will view. You can choose to leverage videos, images to pair with your copywriting message.
How to Create Facebook Ads
Adams continues here tutorial through Facebook’s ads manager by going into the details of creating a campaign at the ad set level. Here we first learn how we can select and edit an audience type who we wish to target. Selecting an audience can be done by a variety of factors including by location, gender and age. To get an even more detailed audience, Facebook allows you to adjust the audience’s criteria to include specific interests and behaviors. This allows the marketer to really refine exactly who they wish to show their ads to. Adams gives us an example of this by showing available audiences who have an interest in the Los Angeles marathon and/or who also have a behavior of using Google Chrome.
Once the audience is set, the media buyer will then be able to choose from a variety of placement. Options include on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Network Audience network. These all have multiple areas within each vehicle that can be selected to place the advertisement and can be viewed on desktop, mobile or both. The option to have Facebook automatically place the ads or to manually adjust the preferred placements are both available. The last section on the ad set level is the campaign budgeting which can have a daily spend allocated or a lifetime budget that Facebook will manage over a preselected timeline.
The final level is the ad level settings. Here Adams walks us through the steps of creating the powerful ads we see on Facebook or Instagram. Ads can be either videos, single images or a carousel of images. Beyond the image or video there are several other aspects in the ad. These include the copywriting, the URL, a headline and description, CTA button and the advertising accounts Facebook pixel for event tracking. All these combine to provide the viewer with a powerful message of the business’s message and offer.
View Your Advertising Data
Once a business has their campaign running, they will want to be able to see how it’s performing. Adams shows us how Facebook has great reporting features that allow for just this. In the ad’s manger tab, the user can select “account overview” to see a variety of insights about their campaigns over any selected time period. Everything from total reach, ad spend, impressions, link clicks is available to get a macro understanding of the ad account. This also includes detailed demographic of the viewers, where they are from, and when they are viewing the ads.
Within the campaign, ad set and ad levels a more detailed view of results is available. Here the advertiser can see the exact results metrics that Adams had referred to at the beginning of the training. Adams does not go into much detail about the metrics but emphasises that measuring success “isn’t as simple as pulling a single metric” (Adams, 2019) The campaign results can also be documented by available reports. Facebook does provide standard reports that can be downloads and reviewed in a excel or csv file, or alternatively, a custom report can be created within ads manager to include and combination of specific metrics that the advertiser wishes to include.
Implement Best Practices
To achieve success with advertising on Facebook, Adams provides some of her best practices to follow. These include ensuring that all copy and creative work is relevant to the targeted audience including off Facebook and onto a landing page. For ads to perform their best, each portion of the ad should resonate with who it’s designed for, while feeling natural and eye catching. Once the ads are created, the work is not over. Ads should be analyzed and tested against others to optimize their performance. If done correctly, only strong winning ads should remain that resonate deeply with the targeted audience.
Conclusion
Throughout the video tutorials, Megan Adams provided a clear and detailed understanding of how powerful Facebooks ads can be and the arsenal of tools within its ad’s manager platform. I was very interested in each module and found the flow of the teaching very clear and easy to grasp. After completing the course, I believe anyone could have an understanding of what is required to use the platform effectively at a basic level.
With a deeper understanding of the platform and creative effective ads, I am able to analyze specific ads that show up in my newsfeed and determine if they follow the best practices as outlined in the training. As an example, I can analyze this ad here:
When reviewing this ad, we can first notice it is, in fact, an ad because it has the “sponsored” tab. The ad is also likely targeted to me because I’ve been researching Facebook ads and my behavior online has been picked up by this companies Facebook pixel. The advertisement uses the interesting tagline “GET OUT OF JAIL FREE” in the copy to initially catch my attention. They also have a clear CTA button to apply for their offer and a second link to their URL in the copywriting. All of these demonstrate that this advertisement is being published by a sophisticated marketer with experience in effective Facebook ads. Something I may not have recognized without the course from Megan Adams.
References
Adams, M. (2019, October 2). Facebook is an advertiser’s dream. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/learning/advertising-on-facebook-2/facebook-is-an-advertiser-s-dream?u=2109516Open publish panel
Robert's NAIT Blog 