Facebook Advertising FAQ When Raw Talent Only Is Not Enough to Keep Your Head Above Water

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Facebook Advertising FAQ answers the top Facebook advertising beginners’ questions.

Do Facebook ads really work? Which ad placement is best? What is a good cost per click? Where should I make my ads?

Because raw dog talent will keep your head above the water for only so long.

Do Facebook Ads work?

Well yes! Otherwise, advertisers would not return to the platform and Facebook would not be earning Billions of dollars each quarter.

However, if you expect to Boost a post for €5 today and get €99 in return tomorrow then Facebook ads won’t work. Worse again, Facebook Advertising doesn’t work like that – contrary to all the guru hype.

Alternatively, when you must match your business goals with the right ads, test and you measure the right things – then magic happens.

The Facebook Ads platform is the most highly targeted ads platform and lowest cost per click on the internet today, bar none.

However, Facebook ads are not perfect for all industries, naturally; the oil industry or enterprise software is not the best. Most B2C industries do find success on Facebook.

Yet, if your business model is selling low-priced products, absent a value ladder, then ROI will not arrive easily or at all.

Low-cost products as front-end funnel products are perfect, but you need to make up the profit on the back end…

Facebook Advertising FAQ – Are Facebook Ads better than Google Ads?

Facebook and Google are different kettles of fish. Each for different purposes.

Think about it this way: people search Google for answers – sports scores, how-to’s, or answers to specific problems, – including shopping for products and services – high-quality men’s shoes anyone?

User intent – solving a problem – is stage 5 of Eugene Schwartz’s five stages of the buyers’ journey – stage 5 being ‘The Most Aware stage’ where people are ready to splash the cash.

At the ‘The Most Aware stage’ people only need to know what is “the deal”’ before they buy.

Facebook buyers, or users, are on FB for distraction, right? Not to shop.

People are on Facebook to get out of the boring boring everyday stuff and fly away on a dreamy ship of what the ex-Partner is doing, or the baby pic the crazy Texas cousin posted, or what meme did that one post – again…right?

We are surfing Facebook to escape our daily humdrum life – not surfing with a credit card in hand.

So, treat Facebook peeps as if they are at Stage 2 the ‘Completely-Unaware’ of the buyer’s journey – because they are.

Yet, Facebook peeps are the same cash-in-hand people as when they search on Google – but, are not in the mindset for shopping.

Both Google ads and Facebook ads work – only with different intent and methodologies are required to have success.

Where Should I Create my Facebook Ads?

Use the Ads Manager to create your Facebook Ads.

Boosting a post is ok, but any advanced tactics, anything beyond pressing the boost button, require the Ads Manager.

For clarity, there are at least 3 places to create Facebook Ads.

1) Directly from your Facebook page via the boost post button
2) Using the Facebook Ads Manager.
3) Or an external tool like AdEspresso, or even making FB ads through Mailchimp is possible.

Note: as of spring 2018, the Ads manager and power editor have merged.

Boosting a post from your Facebook Page is good, especially when targeting a custom audience you’ve previously built in the Ads manager – it is fast and easy. But any tactic beyond boosting requires the Ads Manager / Power Editor.

Which Ad Placement is best?

All the ad placements are useful and serve a purpose. Here are my favourites.

• The news feed is good because the eyeballs are there.
• Instagram because of eyeballs if your images are suitable.
• Messenger because it’s a messenger and it’s booming.
• Right-hand column because its desktop-only – good for retargeting.

Choosing where to place ads is confusing. Not on purpose, because there are options…

Under the ‘Placements’ section, the ad set level is the manual placement. Auto placement is Facebook deciding where your ad goes.

We can auto or manual place our ads. Note not all placements are available for every Campaign Objective.

and you can place Facebook Ads in multiple locations…

and on multiple devices and operating systems.

Most people spend time in the Mobile news feed – which has the highest cost and most eyeballs.

What type of Facebook Ads Should I run?

How long is a piece of string? Lol.

What Ads to run depends on your end goals.

Yea, I get it – you want to sell more stuff…who doesn’t but, the “see my ad -> spend your money” Texas two-step does not work on Facebook. See this post on getting past the distraction mindset of Facebook users.

Think in terms of a funnel – where ‘cold traffic’ are at the top of the funnel and cash in hand buyers ‘magically’ pop out at the bottom. Each stage requires different content types and different ad objectives.

Offering discount codes to cold audiences and expecting sales does not work – usually.

Effective Facebook advertising – all advertising – requires putting the right offer in front of the right audience at the right time – repeatedly

Got it? Right offer, right audience, right time. The right offer is often a blog post, not a service or product.

Here are the 11+ different campaign objectives.

Easy to get confused. Begin with your funnel and where it is empty.

See the image below for a local business funnel using the carpet bomb technique.

This funnel uses video views, Engagement/post engagement (PPE), Conversions, Messenger, and the Traffic campaign objectives.

If you are a service provider then these are the 5 main campaign objectives you’ll use:

• Conversion ads
• Video Views ads
• Messenger ads
• PPE
• Traffic

What is Facebook Custom Audience?

Earlier, I wrote about the good, bad and ugly of Facebook Custom Audiences. Not much ugly, just remembering the Western…

The custom audience is not a saved audience.

Saved audiences are built using demographic and psychographic characteristics used to group people together for targeting.

For example, groups of people who are small business owners, with a net worth of >500K, drive Mercedes cars, live in postal code 90347, have 2 kids under 10 with a birthday next week.

Right? Good. So when these people click your advert and land on your website they become pixeled from your FB pixel (which you’ve installed on your website, right?). They are now in a website custom audience.

In this example you advertised to a saved audience; a small percentage click on the link in the ads to read your blog post – instantly they a put into the bucket of a Website Custom Audience.

And Facebook gives us five groups of Custom audiences.

I won’t type them out for you…see the picture below… But, you can upload an email list of people, website traffic (mentioned above), and engage audiences.

Engagement audiences are groups of people who interacted with your content on Facebook (or Instagram). Right? and you make a custom audience of these and advertise to them….

Remember the simple funnel from above? This one at right –>

Saved audiences are the green (and the 2 Billion on FB), and the red and yellow audiences are website and engagement and customer file custom audience.

My earlier post discusses in-depth the power of the Facebook Custom Audience.

What is a Lookalike Audience?

Lookalike audiences is the third category of the audience after Saved and Custom.

Lal audiences are clone audiences of a seed audience.

Let us imagine you have the contact details of 1000 of your customers – name, email, phone numbers etc. You upload them as a Customer File custom audience (see above)…

then click the Hamburger /Audiences/ Create Audience / Lookalike audience option.

Then Facebook asks to choose the ‘seed’ audience, location and number of audience

The Look-a-like audience tool builds large audiences from ‘small’ seed audiences.

What are Facebook Messenger Marketing a.k.a. Bots?

Bots, and to give the tool its proper name – Facebook Messenger Marketing – is using messenger to communicate with prospects and customers using a channel they like and want to use – Facebook Messenger.

Yep, messenger apps – FB messenger, Whatsapp, are used by more people than social networks combined.

The good thing about messenger is messenger is similar to email but, with way better open rates and action rates, engagement rates, and abilities.

How much should I budget for Facebook Ads?

Interesting question. Worse the question is asked bass-ackward…

In this FB ads spend calculator post I talked, and showed, in-depth how we must understand the Lifetime value of each customer and calculate an acceptable CPA, cost per customer acquisition.

It is these numbers that drive Facebook ads budgeting, not how many coppers you have in your pocket…

Right? That ad spends post discusses in detail yet, if you have a €100 product, with a sales page converting 10% into customers.

E.g. with 100 people landing on the sales page and 10% conversion and €100, price equals 1000 in revenue.

100 (people) x 10% (Conversion) x €100 (Product Price) = €1000 Revenue

So, the maximum cost per acquisition, CPA, you can tolerate without (losing money) is €10. Because:

€10 CPA x 100 visitors = €1000 spend

Lifetime value work similarly – if each of your €100 customers buys three more times each at higher price points of €199, €499, and €1999 and stays on average for 12 months, then CLV is €2697.

Understanding your specific CLV and CPA numbers is critical when running any advertisement campaigns.

How long should I run my Facebook Ad?

Until it stops producing profit or your desirable KPI! This usually happens when the Relevancy score drops or ad fatigue sets in, or you run out of people in your audience.

The performance of ads and ad sets declines over time because of the above reasons – and more.

Importantly, marketing does not stop.

What is the Facebook Relevancy score and does it Matter?

The ads Relevancy score is a 1-10 number given to an ad after the ad gets 500 impressions. The score then updates in ‘real-time.

The Relevance score is a catch-all gauge of your ad campaign. As it ‘measures’ the predicted acceptance of your audience, your ads account history, and the feedback your ad gets.

Think of the relevancy score as the check engine light in your car- it tells you something is not correct – but not exactly what…

What is Facebook Remarketing?

Facebook remarketing is getting a second bite of the sale apple.

Right? You got peeps interested in once, so advertising to them a second time, remarketing, is the second (or third or fourth) chance to convince people to _______ download, signup, buy, register, or hire you.

Using Facebook custom audience – described above – for example, if 1000 peeps read a blog post on your website – and you offer a free pdf as a content upgrade, and 100 people click through to look at that page – but only 50 entered their contact details.

You can make three custom audiences – peeps who read the blog post, peeps who viewed the signup page, and peeps who signed up.

Then you make an ad to the 100 who landed on the signup page and exclude the 50 who signed up.

This process is remarketing.

What do I do When My Advert is Not Approved?

It happens to all of us. Ads get rejected for many reasons.

Click over to here to appeal a disapproved advert or here to get an answer on “what can I do if my advert is not approved?”

Both answers are on Facebook help pages.

But, before you press the ‘submit’ or ‘boost’ button you Must read and understand the Facebook Ads Policies.

The Ad policies list all the do’s and don’t of Facebook ads- and the list is extensive.

E.g. under the Personal Attributes guidelines
Ok – Ad creative that describes or shows the promoted product or service
Not Ok – Text referencing or alluding to personal attributes or characteristics of the targeted group or individual
Not Ok – Using the word “other” to reference a personal characteristic

Age Examples
Ok “Meet Seniors”
Not ok “Meet other Seniors”
Ok- “A service for teens”
Not Ok – “Car insurance for 18-24-year-olds”

How do I get Cheaper Clicks?

First, cheap is not better. From the *I’m spending less money* mindset yes less is better than more.

However, quality over quantity is the focus I suggest and apply. Quality of the people who have clicked and converted as opposed to those that have clicked and not converted.

So, stop chasing your tail down the rabbit hole of cheaper and cheaper clicks.

Over time CPCs and CPMs are increasing as the inventory of ad space reduces and as more advertisers arrive.

Your advertising goal (yes, yes, yes, I got it you want sales!) the goal is to build audiences of people who are more interested in your product.

The lowest cost method of building audiences is using Video.

Video is excellent because you can segment people based on how long they watch the video into time-based custom audiences. See the image below:

Right?

Riddle me this: are peeps who watch 75% of your video more or less interested than peeps who watched 10 seconds of your video?

Answer: MORE!!

Good so do more videos.

As video moves people faster down the ‘know, like and trust path faster than any other form of Facebook post.

Re-read my post on how to determine an acceptable CPC and CPA.

Answered: Facebook Frequently Asked Questions

“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.”― Aristotle

…is a truism of life and the Facebook Ads platform.

What is your more frequently asked Facebook Ads question? Let me know in the comments.

 

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