Facebook Ads Tips for Beginners

Choosing Your Objective: What is your end-goal? Do you want to grow your website traffic? Generate more leads? Grow engagement on your ad?

When choosing between Reach and Brand Awareness at the early stage of the purchase funnel, we recommend Reach. The way Facebook tracks Brand Awareness is through something called ‘Ad Recall Lift’, meaning how many people can recall seeing your ad. That’s a pretty difficult thing for Facebook to truly report on if you think about it, so take it with a grain of salt. Choose Reach instead.

Try an A/B Test between two objectives using the same creative/message and analyze the results. This may give you more insight on what objective you should start with and end with in your cold/warm/hot lead strategy.

Choosing Your Ad Types:

Unless you are an e-commerce business, you can stay away from Dynamic Product Ads. We recommend video or a really strong static Image. Again, do an A/B test between two different creatives, the same copy, and the same objective. Analyze the results and see which performed better.

Remember the text-to-image ratio requirements. Video will not be as difficult to deal with when following these guidelines outside of the thumbnail at the start of the video.

Placements: Where will your ad show up?

There are so many placement Facebook will try and show your ad: Feed, right column, marketplace, stories, in-stream video, instant articles, Instagram, Audience Network, Messenger, etc.

Really ask yourself where you feel your ad is necessary to be shown. Do you need it on Facebook Marketplace? Does the message make sense for a spot where people are buying and selling their items? Is it great for a younger audience who spends most their time on Instagram? If not, don’t waste your impressions there. You get the idea!

Budget: What are you willing to pay per objective goal being met? What is a lead worth to you?

Knowing the answer to those questions should help you determine your budget. If you don’t know that information, we suggest you dig into it but in the meantime, start with a budget of $50-$100 over 2-4 weeks. Analyze results. Test again.