A Beginner's Guide to Facebook Ads

Hello Entreprenerds! We recently launched our Facebook page and it got us thinking about how to run advertisements. If you’ve been on Facebook recently, you’ve probably seen multiple ads, surely since Facebook’s total ad revenue reached $14.9 billion in quarter 1 of 2019. If you’re an entrepreneur deciding whether you want to promote your business through Facebook, read on to find out what the process is like and what decisions you’ll need to make:

1. Firstly, you’ll need a Facebook page in order to run ads, so make sure that’s set up

2. On your Facebook page head to your ‘Ad Centre’

3. Once you click ‘Create Ad’, you have 7 ad objectives to choose from

4. Creative decisions

• Format: single image (recommended size: 1200 x 628 pixel), video, carousel (multiple images, recommended size: 1200 x 628 pixels), slideshow (video of up to 10 images), keep in mind Facebook usually rejects ad images that contains more than 20% text (Buffer)

• Headline: make sure its attention grabbing, analysis found the median length of a headline is 5 words (AdEspresso)

• Text: give a little more information, analysis has found that on average ad text contains 14 words (AdEspresso)

• Call to action: what you want people to do when they see your ad? The top 3 buttons are Learn More, Shop Now, and Sign Up (AdEspresso)

• There’s a preview on the right, you can check it looks good on different platforms and formats (e.g. Instagram stories, desktop newsfeed)

5. Audience decisions

• You can target a specific audience, people who like your page, people who like your page and their friends, or just a general ad

• If you select the first one, you can specify your target audience in terms of gender, age, locations, specific interests/demographics/behaviours and the option to exclude people.

• How specific or broad your audience is depends on your goals (e.g. greater awareness: more broad, higher conversion: more specific)

6. Duration and budget decisions

• You can select between running an ad continuously with a daily budget or choosing an end date and a daily budget

• Based on this, Facebook provides you with an estimated number of conversion and you can keep playing with your days and budget to select your goal

7. Payment

• In our experience, when we created a Facebook page, an admin received a notification for free ad credits. Keep this in mind because you might get one as well!

• Payment details need to be entered before redeeming your voucher, so you can pay for the excess once the voucher runs out

And that’s it! We hope this helps in your journey of growing your small business. All statistics from this post were retrieved from https://backlinko.com/facebook-ads-stats, check it out if you would like to see more. Until next time...you might just see one of our Facebook ads roaming around on your newsfeed.

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