One of the most amazing things about the ads platform on Facebook is the incredible array of targeting options available. Facebook has an enormous amount of data on its users, and this allows advertisers (including you!) to tap into some of that knowledge. Using Facebook Ads will allow you to serve targeted ads to an audience that is most likely receptive to what you have to sell.
Here’s another way of looking at it: Imagine a billboard ad for a romance novel on the wall of a subway station.
Fifty percent of the people who see that ad are likely to be male and therefore unlikely to be interested in the book. Of the other fifty percent (the women, who are perhaps more likely to read a romance novel), there will be a percentage who don’t read books, don’t read romance, or don’t read that particular sub-genre of romance.
The cost of the billboard ad is fixed, so for the advertiser (in this case, let’s say the author of that romance novel) that means that the value for the money they spent on the billboard ad is questionable at best.
With Facebook Ads, however, that same author would have a much higher chance of success (and probably spend less money). Instead of the “scatter-gun” approach of the billboard ad, which just flings the information out to any and all passersby regardless of interest, Facebook allows you to show your ads only to people who are likely to be interested in them. For example, our romance author could target her ad to women between the ages of 45 and 65 who’ve indicated that they enjoy novels by Nora Roberts. That sort of focus can be incredibly powerful.
Creating Your First Campaign
Once you’ve understood the last few steps, you’re ready to create your very first ad campaign! Head over to the left of the screen and click the big ‘Create’ button.
This will take you to a screen where you can choose your Ad objective. Today we’re going to be looking at Lead Generation, so select that option.
Choose a name for your campaign (make it easy to differentiate from any other ads you may go on to run!) and press Continue. Once you’ve done that, you’ll see the advert set, which is where you will be setting your budget and targeting. I name my advert set with that in mind.
Decide what works best for you and name your advert set accordingly. Choose which Page you want your ad to be associated with (i.e. the author page you just made) and then scroll down. At the moment, it will show your ‘potential reach’ on the right-hand side as around 42,000,000 (if you’re targeting the UK), since the audience has not yet been filtered to your specific needs.
To do that filtering, we will start by completing the budget and schedule. The minimum budget you can select is $5 a day. Once you have changed the budget to your desired level, you will see that Facebook will show you your estimated daily reach on the right-hand side. You have the option to choose a daily budget (default) or a lifetime budget (i.e., the lifetime of the campaign).
If you choose a lifetime budget, you will need to select a higher amount. You will then be able to choose a scheduled start and end date, and Facebook will spread your budget out over the life of the campaign. If you select this option, you will also be given the option to schedule your ads by time of day.
Today, however, we are going to be looking at a daily budget. Scroll back up and you will see an area where you can select your audience. The audience area allows you to do some great things with mailing lists, which is what I talked about at the start of this booklet.
Here, you can import your list into Facebook and serve ads just to those people, which is a particularly powerful strategy for launches, for example.
It also allows you to create ‘lookalike audiences,’ an amazing process in which you tell Facebook you want a bigger audience composed of people similar to those on your mailing list (those that share the same kind of data points) and it creates that newer, larger audience for you.
For the purposes of this training, though, we are going to keep things simple. Under Locations, choose where you want to serve your ads (by country).
Scroll down, and you can then select an age range and gender for your audience. Whilst you are doing this, you will note that your potential reach (on the right-hand side) is getting smaller. Don’t panic: this is what you want.
Leave ‘Languages’ blank. Now it’s time to get into the detailed targeting.
If I start typing in the detailed targeting box, Facebook will show me a list of options I can select, along with the number of people who have that particular interest. The number given is worldwide, but if you check your potential reach again (on the right-hand side) you will see how many are in your targeted country.
You can add as many interests as you like, and your reach will grow each time. If your target audience is still too large after you’ve added your interests, you can then narrow it further using the ‘Exclude people’ option.
This tells Facebook that people in your target audience must like what you typed. For example, you could select an audience that likes Kindle eReaders. This will reduce your audience size, and you will know that your audience is very focused.
Below, you will see the placement box. This is where Facebook asks you where you want your adverts to be served. The default is set to ‘automatic placements,’ and although Facebook recommends that, I don’t. Select the ‘edit placement’ option.
Now you will see that options for Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger appear. If you have a big presence on any of these, you may want to leave them selected. I don’t use Instagram, Audience Network, or Messenger much for marketing, so I leave those un-selected. I get the best return on adverts that are just run in newsfeeds.
When you are happy with everything, just click on the ‘Continue’ button at the bottom of the page to move onto the advert itself.
This is where you will start building your advert. Choose an appropriate name for your ad, double-check that it’ll be running from the right Page, and then choose which format of ad you want to run. In this case, choose ‘Single image or video’. If you scroll all the way down you can see how your ad currently looks.
You will see the changes in real time as you apply them. Scroll back up to the ‘Media’ section and click either Edit Image or Ad Image (depending if you’ve used any images before, or if it’s auto-selected anything).
A popup will appear with your image library. Yours will likely be empty, so you will need to select the ‘Upload image’ tab and upload your image — this is most likely the cover of your upcoming book, but can be anything else you choose.
Your image can be all sorts of dimensions these days, but the most common is still 1200 (w) x 628 (h) pixels. Down at the bottom, your selected image will then show in the preview pane on the right.
Once you’re happy with your image, you can start adding copies in the fields/ boxes on the left. The copy you put in the ‘Primary text’ box appears above your image. The copy in the ‘Headline’ box will appear in larger text just below the image, and the text in the ‘News feed link description’ will appear just below that.
Facebook defaults the ‘Call to action’ to ‘Sign up’. I use ‘Learn more,’ but you can choose whichever option you prefer. In the ‘Display URL’ box, input your website address.
In the preview pane, you can see how your ad will look on both desktop and mobile.
Setting Up Your Lead Form
Next, we need to set up the lead form. This is what users will see when they click on the ‘Call to action’ button in your ad. The beauty of a lead generation ad is that the reader doesn’t need to go to your website or anywhere else to give you their email address: the whole process takes place, quick and easy, on the Facebook platform. Fewer steps equal less frustration for readers — and more readers for you! Now, scroll down to Instant Form and click on ‘+ New Form’.
This is what you will see:
The ‘Intro’ screen is optional, but if you do want to use it, go over to the headline box and input the text that you want to appear on the form. You can then select to use the image from your advert as the header or upload a new one. (The image from your advert will appear whether you use the welcome screen or not.) In the layout box, you can input a paragraph that will make your readers want to subscribe. This needs to be quite short. An example would be “Just hit ‘Sign up’ to get your free copy now.” Then select the text you want to appear on your button.
Once you are happy, select the ‘questions’ box. If you click ‘Add Question’ and ‘Add Category’, you will see a list of questions that you can ask your potential subscribers.
I recommend that you don’t add any. In fact, I recommend asking only for their email address, not even their name. It seems the more you ask, the fewer subscribers you will get. Keep it simple. You then need to move down to the ‘Privacy policy’ box.
You must include a link to a privacy policy on your website. These are readily available, and creative commons licensing allows you to use them for free. Input the link to your preferred policy under ‘Link URL’. Under ‘Link text,’ you can input text that assures the reader that you won’t spam them. You can then move on to the ‘Thank you’ screen. Here you will be asked to input your website address.
Once you’ve added your website address, you can then hit ‘Finish’ up in the top right. You are now back at the Ad level of the ad creation process. Your ad is now complete — but before you finish, I recommend going back through each tab and double-check-ing that everything is as it should be. Once you are happy, you can hit the ‘Confirm’ button at the bottom right of your screen.
The ad will now be sent to Facebook for review, and once that is done your advert will go ‘live’ and start delivering.