How to Set Up an Effective Facebook Ad Campaign

"How to Set Up an Effective Facebook Ad Campaign"
Review of Article from Social Media Examiner
Written by Charlie Lawrance
Published on 5 April 2017


In this article, Social Media Examiner author Charlie Lawrance explains the basic steps to creating an effective Facebook ad campaign. With these directions, Lawrance ensures readers that they will save time and money, and avoid common mistakes. I have broken down his article into the following steps:

1. Decided whether Facebook ads are appropriate. An action plan is required for Facebook advertising. Ask yourself these four questions to develop your strategy:

• What objective will be accomplished through using Facebook advertising?
• Do you have existing or consistent website traffic?
• Do you have an active email list with lots of contacts?
• Can you create unique content about your business or industry?

Your answers will determine which strategy you use. Lawrance provides three strategies

1. Give your audience free content. Content marketing helps you stand out and catch audience's attention. This content could entertain, educate, or inspire. 
2. Involve your email list. Use it, with your Facebook ads, to deliver more effective and viewed messages.
3. Retarget website visitors. Use Facebook pixel to target people who have recently visited your site, and/or build a custom audience of recent visitors and run a campaign that will appeal to them.

2. Choose a campaign objective based on your goal. An objective is a statement of the kind of action you want people to take after seeing your ad. Facebook has three basic objective categories: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Your strategy will help you determine which category; work backward from your goal to decide on your campaign objective. 

3. Build your ideal audience. Targeting will determine your performance, so define your audience carefully. Lawrance provides three ways to define an audience:

1. According to demographics and interests. This is the easiest option. You can set constraints according to factors like location, age, gender, behaviors, interests, and location. (The "Detailed Targeting" offers more complicated factors.) This is often used to reach audiences who haven't interacted with your business. A target audience has no maximum value, so choose a mix of interests and behaviors. 
2. According to past customers. This definition has you target people who have had some interaction with your business. Retargeting is always a good campaign because the audience knows and trusts your business. Within this definition, you can create a custom audience out of four different categories: customer file, website traffic, app activity, and engagement on Facebook. (Customer file utilizes data from your email list; website traffic will track visitors and their actions. App activity is similar to website traffic, but is applied to app actions, and engagement involves people who have interacted with your video, lead ads, canvas, or other Facebook pages.) 
3. According to existing audiences. This involves creating an audience that looks like a current audience and often delivers the best results. Facebook algorithms are very good at taking current audience information and finding similar people.

4. Build and test your ad. This last step involves choosing an ad format, images, videos, text, URLs, and calls-to-action. The appearance of your Facebook ad depends on your advertising strategy, campaign objective, and ad format, but there are five basic ad formats to choose from: carousel, single image, single video, slideshow, and canvas. For any campaign, you should create multiple ads that vary in their text, images, and even format. You can introduce these new ads when the relevancy score of your current ads decreases.

While each Facebook ad will vary according to audiences, societal trends, budgets, and other factors, it's important to define your campaign strategy and objective before starting a campaign!