Facebook Ads Guide 2018: How to Advertise on Facebook?

Learn how to advertise on Facebook Ads within your social media strategy, thanks to this great guide updated with all the major changes that Facebook offers us for this year 2018.

With all the modifications that Facebook has been making in its policies and in its algorithms, the organic visibility that can reach the publications of almost any company page in this social network is less and less.

Although there are still many who do not want to recognize it, without a good economic investment, on Facebook there is almost no visibility … that is a marked trend that has been growing for several years and will continue to do so in 2017.

On the other hand, and since everything is not always negative, those same strategies that mostly seek to monetize their platform by pushing companies to use the promoted publications or Facebook Ads campaigns, have made their advertising tools are also evolving and improving very quickly.

Meanwhile, the purchase of Instagram at the time is now also an excellent opportunity to make ads for companies in this visual network, and everything directly from the platform of Facebook Ads Manager itself.

The integration of Instagram with Ads, allows us to obtain greater options to reach more target audience and to increase the profitability of any ad campaign.

Another trend that consolidates in this social network is video, and of course, is a great format for your ads on Facebook Ads.

Keep in mind that the videos represent an increase of the visibility, thanks to an increase of the reproductions superior to 50% (according to the own Facebook).

Company pages, therefore, can increase their visibility and sales by using the video format in their ads.

Perhaps for all of the above, although they want to advertise on Facebook, most small and medium-sized businesses often have many doubts when planning their advertising strategy and investment.

In short, many businesses still do not end up having very clear how is used (or even from the most basic point of view) this social advertising tool called Facebook Ads.

Mega Facebook Ads Guide What you need to know about how to advertise on Facebook!

That is why, on this occasion I would like to help you to better understand this tool and to plan and develop your own advertising campaigns (updated information with all the changes that have occurred until 2017).

What is Facebook Ads and what are its main features?

Facebook Ads is the platform, system or tool with which you can carry out all types of advertising campaigns within the largest social network in the world and Instagram.

The ads of these two super social platforms can be beneficial for any brand, company, business, professional, etc. that wants to become much more visible, both to themselves and to their products and / or services, in the face of the millions of users (or potential clients) in them.

This “social media advertising tool”, among other characteristics, allows us to create different types of publications and segment them according to the particularities of the targeted audience (see: How to identify the target audience on the Internet?), By means of some different parameters such as:

• Country or city of residence
• Language
• Sex
• Civil status
• Customs, interests or tastes of the user …

Keep in mind that we have two tools to advertise on Facebook:

► Power Editor: This is an advertising platform focused on accounts for large advertisers, such as agencies, who need to create a large number of ads at once and take more advanced control over them and their results.

► Ad Manager: Manage and create campaigns and ads easily and intuitively.
Throughout this post I will focus on showing you how to use and optimize your ads through the Ads Manager, although some of the advice I give you are also applicable if you use Power Editor.

This is the look of the Ads Manager in 2017.

Thanks to the Ad Manager you can manage, evaluate and control your campaigns.

So, if we remember that Facebook is the social network with the highest number of users so far, and we consider that this advertising is one of the most economic, carrying out a Facebook Ads campaign would make our Internet advertising investment a business more profitable (especially if we design and segment it correctly).

Campaign Structures in Facebook Ads Advertising with New Ad Set Up Settings

In the previous infographic made by the team of FB For Business we see the structure of the advertising campaigns of Facebook Ads.
Let’s look in more detail at this structure of advertising for companies:
► Campaign

Each campaign must have a single advertising goal of the 9 available (shown below) for all of your joint ad sets.
► Ad set

A campaign can have multiple groups or ad sets. But each ad set must define a budget, timeline, bid, location, and audience targeting for all your ads in common.
► Classifieds

Within each ad set, we can have multiple ads. And each of them have different combinations of images, text, links, videos or call-to-action buttons (but they share the segmentation and budget of the whole set).

Advertising targets and types of ads on Facebook Ads

Facebook has modified some features and now we have 11 different types of objectives for our campaigns.

But also, as I was saying, among the new features now is the grouping of objectives based on three categories of objectives:

• Awaness: Increase the visibility of your brand within facebook
• Considertion: leads other people to perform a certain action
• Conversion: get more conversions from your customers

Then I’ll show you the options that exist today, so you can decide which one you should use according to the objective of your campaign.
Recognition:

1. Brand awareness

You will get the publicity spread among those people most interested in your brand and with it a greater affinity.

2. Local Dissemination

Reach people who are close to your business.

Get more visibility and connect where your prospects are.

3. Scope

Increase the number of people you can reach with your ads thanks to this type of goal.
Prestige:

4. Traffic

Attract people to a destination on or off Facebook.

Bring more qualified traffic (or quality visitors) to different places on your Facebook page or to your own website, according to your goals or the importance of them.

5. Interaction

Increase interactions with your posts, likes you receive or responses to events and offers you’ve launched.

6. Increase downloads for your app

If you have already created an app this is a goal with which you can boost the success of such an application.

Get more people to use your mobile application or Facebook.

7. Increase video playback

Promote videos with unpublished images, product launches or customer stories to boost the recognition of your brand.

8. Generating leads for your business

With this objective you can capture potential customers.

That is, your business will have a form with which to obtain and collect information from people including records to newsletters, price estimates and follow-up calls.

9. Conversions

Increase conversions on your website.

Attract more users to your website, so they can take specific actions on it.

Some of the conversions to pursue with this goal may be:

• Sales
• Ebook downloads
• Subscriptions to Newsletters
• Hire services

Here you should always use a conversion tracking pixel to be able to properly evaluate those results.

10. Sales of a product catalog

With this objective you can make ads that include products of your catalog and that are also oriented to people who may be interested in them.

11. Visits in the business

Get people to visit your business.

Selecting this goal you will be able to promote the different locations of your business (in the case of having several) to get an increase of customer views in it.

How to target the audience of our ad on Facebook Ads?

It is very important to always carefully analyze who or who we try to capture with the campaign that we are going to design because if that ad is shown to a user who does not see it as an attractive content, we will be spending our money in vain.

That is why Facebook Ads allows to segment the audience or audience to which our ads will be directed according to different parameters.

How you are going to check the options we have for segmenting are very wide and varied.
Who do we want to see our ads?

Here’s how to create an audience segmentation to show our ads (if we have already created an audience configuration before we can select it instead of creating a new one)

► Custom audiences

Targets ads to be shown to those people who you decide on your own criteria.

You can set up and create a personalized audience by:

• A client file: use a file that you have with data from your own clients to analyze which already have an account on Facebook so you can set a personalized audience with your own customers to show your ads. You can import them from a text document or even Mailchimp. The import process is guided and quite simple.
• Website Traffic: Target your ads to people who routinely visit your website or other web pages. You will be able to select the exact URLs for which you want to select your visitors as well as the time period to take into account for that selection.
• Activity in the application: if you have an application you can create a list with all those people interact in it.
  Interaction on Facebook: Select those people who interact with your content and create a list with them. You can select people who have viewed a video, registered on a form, or used one of your canvas spaces.

► Places

We can define the geographical segmentation of our ads by the following criteria:

1º Everyone in this place
2º People living in this place
3rd Persons who have recently stayed at this place
4th People traveling by this place

After choosing one of these criteria we continue to decide the countries, provinces, states or cities of the public in this set of ads.

In this option we will also be able to use exclusion targeting. That is, excluding places (a country, a province or a particular city).

► Age

You must choose between a minimum age (13 years) and a maximum age (+65 years).

► Gender

Here you can choose to make your ad visible only to men, just for women or for everyone.
► Language

Choose the language (s) of the people who will be able to see your post.

► Detailed Segmentation

In this field you can target your audience by:

• Demographic data: data are mainly obtained from the biographical information that each user has filled in his profile, such as education, work, relationship, political ideology, etc.
• Interests: These targeting parameters are designed according to the customs or interests that users show habitually have in their behavior within Facebook. That is, the categories of the pages of which they are fans, the style of publications that share the most, the posts with which they interact the most, being able to deal with hobbies, sports, entertainment, shopping, food and drink, etc.
• Behaviors: they are parameters of segmentation that are focused on the actions or behaviors that the public usually has in their lives, for example events or trips that have performed or assisted.
• More categories: Facebook’s own categories.

Also in this case you can use the option to exclude by any of the above criteria.

► Connections

Finally you can also choose to segment according to the connection or relationship that the user / fan has with our company page, choosing between:

1º Connections with your Facebook company page
2º Connections with your application
3º Connections with your event

In the same way you can also exclude under those criteria and combine several at the same time.

As we select and fix the criteria for our audience we can see in the right column the real-time Facebook Ads estimate of the potential reach of our defined audience, as well as some indications that will serve as feedback.

Having well identified our target, in addition to studying our community in social networks, is also very useful to get data that improve our criteria much more at the time of segmentation.

Recommendation: Do not try to reach everyone, because in the end we will not end up reaching almost anyone.

If we do not have a good budget for our campaign, the most reasonable would be to try to maintain through segmentation, a maximum potential reach not very high (about 200 thousand people). Of course this always depends on the campaign and the investment, because then that first reach will decrease even more when the next budget point is set.

In short, if we obsess about reaching a large number of people, sacrificing part of the segmentation (because we do not have an abundant budget), we could lose effectiveness in our campaign and, as we said before, end up showing that ad to people who may not be interested in it.

Location of ads on Facebook Ads

Your ads will show in different locations but you also have the possibility to choose exactly which ones to show.

There are two ways to select placements.

1 # Automatic placements

With this option we leave in the hands of Facebook the choice of the best locations for our ads at all times.

Our ads will be displayed in:

• News section (mobile devices and computer)
• Facebook’s right column
• Instagram
• Audience Network
• Instant articles

2 # Edit locations

Selecting this option will have total control over the locations where our ads will be displayed.

You can target and choose according to the following criteria the locations where your ads will appear:

• Device types: all, mobile only (1) and computer only.
• Types of platform: Facebook in the News (2), Instant Articles and the Right Column (3), Instagram (4) and Audience
• Network sections.
• Advanced options: it is possible to target mobile devices or Wi-Fi connections among others.

How does Facebook calculate the price of our ad?

The calculation of the price of each of our ads will depend on the configuration we make of all this series of parameters that I’ll detail below.

1. # Specify the campaign budget

Budgets can be set for a full period of time (campaign) or for an average daily expenditure.

Keep in mind that the budget is set for an entire set of ads, not per advertisement.

2 # Defines the circulation period

You can decide if you want it to have a fixed duration (day and time of start and end) or uninterrupted.

3 # Optimization for ad delivery

This is where Facebook now offers us three main types or structures of optimization, regarding the calculation of the price of shares in our future announcement.

Interaction with a post: Will show our ad to the people most likely to interact with that post.
Impressions: will show the ad to people as many times as possible.
Unique daily reach: Will show our ad up to one or xxx times per day.

4 # Price (choose your bid)

There are two clear options, in the first (Automatic) our bid will be automatically optimized for more interaction or impressions.

In the second (Manual) we will set the maximum price that will reach those shares in the bids.

Depending on the delivery option chosen, the price will be set per cost per impressions or per click.

► CPM or PPM: cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or bid per thousand impressions (PPM). An impression is the same as a visualization. That is to say that here we will pay for every 1,000 times that someone sees that ad, in the different places that Facebook has available for it (computer / computer news section – cell / mobile news section or right column), although that publication does not get no action or click.

► CPC or PPC: cost per Click (CPC) or Bid per Click (PPC). In this option we will pay for each click that is made in our publication (+ information on CPC, CPM or CPA).

How does the bid on Facebook Ads ads work?

Each of our publications competes for being shown to the audience that we have chosen through our segmentation, in a kind virtual auction, against other ads that also have parameters and / or criteria more or less similar to ours.

If at the end of the campaign creation process we decide to define ourselves the maximum amount we will pay in bids, then what is explained in the previous paragraph is a good reason to choose a relatively competitive maximum bid price.

Do not worry, it does not always consume the entire amount of the proposed, because if our audience is not being competed by other ads, the amount we will have to pay for those bids (shares, visibility, CPC or CPM) would be lower.

To help you here, Facebook Ads usually automatically assign (for guidance) a recommended bid amount (in addition to proposing a minimum and maximum). My suggestion is to use the one you give them or an average bid amount closer to the maximum than the minimum.

Analyze and control the performance of your ads

Analytics is very important in advertising. Therefore, before we start spending to spend, we have to be very clear about our objectives and the measurement parameters (KPI) that we will use.

In the same way, before increasing the budget, we should evaluate that campaign and see the results that it brings.

It is in the Ad Manager where you manage to control both the evolution of your promotions and Ads campaigns, through the visualization of statistics and graphics, how to edit and / or correct some possible errors that we would have committed in them.

Obviously from the same Ad Manager you can also pause, end or delete the period of dissemination of such publications (or from the same company page you can also go to the statistics tab and see the numbers of those publications).

Final conclusions and recommendations

It is the SMEs that could get very good advantages of planning an adequate investment in Facebook Ads, because with very little budget they would manage to obtain a fairly wide audience and, if they segmented correctly, also very attractive results.

Well, if you have read the entire guide, you will have noticed that the entire process of designing and creating a Facebook Ads campaign does not have to be a big secret.

But if your desire is to invest your money well, I would recommend hiring a professional to advise and train you on the subject or at least, have patience and try little by little (giving a lot of importance to segmentation, because the other options will be +/- important, depending on your goals and / or the results you are looking for).

As for the subject of the CPM or CPC, in my experience, CPM is a good choice for the visibility of an advertisement and / or brand (if you are looking for branding, you can reach many people), but sometimes get little interaction with short term.

Instead, the CPC option is less massive and may require more investment, but it will certainly leave you with more accurate statistics (because with it you ensure that a user not only saw your ad but also interacted in some way with he).

A key! In this whole issue of advertising in social networks, perhaps the key is to use the classic and traditional method of trial and error, for a simple reason: what sometimes works for some, sometimes not so useful to others (mainly if we speak of businesses or brands of different commercial sectors).