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How to create a Facebook advertisement

How to create a Facebook advertisement

Facebook advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your website and increase your company’s online sales. These advertisements appear on users’ newsfeeds and use specific algorithms to help you target your audience by taking their needs and interests into consideration.

There are certain steps you need to take when setting up your Facebook advertisements in order to maximise your return on investment.

Follow these four steps to create your advertising campaign on Facebook’s Ads Manager

To get into the Ads Manager platform, look to the left hand column of your Facebook page. You’ll see the Ads Manager option under your News Feeds and Events. Once you click on that you’ll be ready to set up your campaign.

Step 1: Identify your advertising goals

Before you set up your advertising campaign, you need to decide what you want to achieve with your Facebook advertising. Here are the basic results you need to consider first:

  1. Create awareness and drive traffic to your company’s Facebook page
  2. Elevate the recognition of your company’s brand
  3. Generate new leads that you can sell to
  4. Increase the number of likes on your company’s page
  5. Drive people to you company’s website
  6. Increase your company’s sales by offering a special discount

It is important to focus each advertising campaign on only one of these outcomes at a time.

These are the full range of options. You’ll have to choose the right objectives for your campaign.

Step 2: Understand your target market

What is your ideal client or customer and what information will they be interested in clicking on? Before you start your campaign, you need to know the profile of your customer.

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can focus your advertising campaign to appear to your different customer profiles. You can create a new audience, or use an existing audience using these targeting options:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Languages
  • Relationship status
  • Education
  • Work
  • Financial
  • Home
  • Ethnic Affinity
  • Generation
  • Parents
  • Politics
  • Life Events
  • Interests
  • Behaviours
  • Connections

Step 3: Design your advertising material and select your budget

Design your advertisement according to Facebook’s requirements. Facebooks ads are made up of the following elements:

  1. A headline or title – Name of your Facebook page, company, event or product
  2. Body text – Explain your products or service in less than 135 characters.
  3. Image – Don’t use text heavy images or company logos as Facebook only allows images to have 20% text in them.
  4. URL (A link to your company’s website address)

Once you’ve done this, you’ll need to set your budget. You could either set a daily budget or a lifetime budget. If you set the daily budget, Facebook will only show your ads until the daily budget is used up, and then start showing them again the next day until it reaches your budget, and so on. This is useful for testing purposes.

If you choose the Lifetime Budget, you can schedule the full duration that you want your ad to run and the total amount of money you want to spend on your campaign. This is useful once you know an advert is working.

This is the screen you’ll see.

Once you’ve set your budget, and submitted your ad, Facebook will ask you to pay for your advert. You can use a credit card, direct debit, PayPal account or a Facebook Ad Coupon to process your ad (if they’ve sent you one).

Step 4: Monitor the success of your campaign closely

Once you have your campaign up and running, monitor its progress closely. Use the Ads Manager option on the left hand side of your personal Facebook newsfeed to see detailed information on your spend, schedules and campaign results.

Since you can run more than one campaign at a time, it’s a good idea to check the success of each campaign based on the number of clicks you’re receiving and how people are interacting with your adverts.

Remember, if a campaign is not delivering the results you expect, it can be paused at any time. This gives you the opportunity to make changes to your design, wording and images to improve your results.