Are you looking to expand the reach of your company? Do you want to start showing your ads to potential customers, but have no idea where to start? Facebook, now Meta, is a great place to begin your advertising journey. Read more about Facebook’s name change to Meta here.
Not only can Facebook help you get in front of such a large group of people, but it can get you in front of those people that are in need of your exact product or service. Showing your ads to the right people will not only streamline your audience, but it will also help you get the most band for your advertising buck.
So, What's the First Step?
The first step in starting to advertise on Facebook is to set up a Meta Ads account. You can do this here!
Once you have an account created, you will need to install a Pixel into your website, so Facebook can accurately monitor stats and help point people to your site via ads!
What is a Pixel and Why Do You Need It
A Meta Pixel is a piece of code that you can install on your website, very similar to the process of Google Analytics. This piece of code will then allow you to monitor what people do on your site, as well as retarget people who have already visited a specific page on your site with more ads.
A Pixel is very important, as it essentially helps Meta create a specific audience for you to continue to have effective and successful ad campaigns.
How to Install A Pixel
There are two different ways to install a Pixel on your website. First, you can install it through a partnering platform such as WordPress, Square Space, Shopify or Woo Commerce. Meta has a full tutorial to help you with this process here.
Second, if you do not operate your site with any of the above platforms, then you must install it manually. This process involves copying the code and inserting it in a specific part of your website’s code, usually the header code. Meta also has a tutorial for this process here.
Have more questions? Here is a link to help troubleshoot your pixel.
How Do Ads Work? Explaining the Ad Auction
Essentially, what Meta does is allow your ad to compete to be shown every time there is an instance that an ad can be shown across their websites/platforms. They are trying to get your ad in front of the eyes of the people most likely to be your true audience, those who will interact with your ad.
Meta states that there are five things that they take into consideration when it comes to picking when and where your ad will be shown. These five things are Objective, Targeting, Budget, Duration, and Creativity.
Objective
There are 6 objectives you can choose from when it comes to creating your ad. Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, and Sales. Depending on which one you choose, you are effectively telling Meta what the goal of your ad campaign is. You will select an objective based on what you are trying to generate for your business.
· Awareness: This is the goal of wanting to get your ad viewed by as many people in your location as possible.
· Traffic: This objective aims to get people to visit your website.
· Engagement: Like Traffic, this goal wants an increase in interactions from people to your posts or website.
· Leads: Leads are the objective that has the goal of getting real contact information of real people for you to utilize.
· App Promotion: This goal is great if you have an app and can be used to generate downloads.
· Sales: The objective is to encourage sales within your page.
Targeting
This is the portion of your ad that is focused on reaching your target audience. If you are a landscaping business, then you would want to target people with homes, or businesses, that have yards or landscaping plots that need taking care of, therefore you may want to target married couples of homeowning age, or older ages in certain neighborhoods that you know are a lot of business, or even certain areas that have a lot of residential homes with yards, etc.
Budget
Your budget has a lot to do with how your ad functions on the ad auction. How much money you set for each ad will directly correlate to how many people will see your ad.
You can set either a daily budget, or a lifetime budget.
A daily budget is exactly what it sounds like, a budget that is set for either your campaign or your ad that runs over the course of a day. It will be how much you want to spend on a day to day basis for your advertising.
A lifetime budget is how much you will spend over the whole duration of your ad or campaign. This is great for those that don’t want to go over a certain amount of money overall.
Duration
This is the date range for your ad that you get to set. The longer your ad runs, the better it will do, as more people will see it. Scheduling your ad is very important, and factors like the time and date should be taken into effect. Will you show your ad more on days people are less likely to be working? Will you not run ads on holidays? Knowing these things are important for the overall ad process.
Creativity
Is your ad original and eye-catching? Ads with similar theme colors to their landing pages, as well as remaining visually interesting and clean will always do well compared to cluttered, spammy ads.
What Makes a Quality Ad?
It is a great idea to have your ad always remain relevant to the landing page you will be sending people to. Doing the opposite can give your ads a spam-like feel. Keeping a uniform color scheme and neat text and fonts also encourage clicks.
Ad quality is important, because the more your ads get recognized as quality, rule following, and safe ads, the more Meta will learn that they are the best kind of ads to be promoted. Otherwise they will get suppressed.
What Could Get Your Ad Rejected?
Any form of profanity or promotion of harmful and obscene content will most definitely be a recipe for disaster. Other things, like misinformation, reactionary content, hate speech, and promoting illegal things are bound to get your ads suppressed or rejected. Use common sense and keep you ads straight to the point and you’ll be just fine!
Meta ads are a huge component of the world of online advertising, and hopefully this blog helped explain it a bit more!
If you need more information, HubSpot has a great Facebook ads checklist here!
Looking to get your Facebook Ads up and running? Contact the Spectrum Net Designs Marketing team here for all your marketing and advertising needs!