Facebook Ads Tutorial 2021

By Andrew and Pete | May 6, 2021 |

Learn the basics of Facebook Ads with our Facebook Ads Tutorial 2021! You guys LOVED hearing from Allison Christie, our Facebook Ads manager last week so we have some great news for you: she’s back! After giving us an intro to running profitable Facebook Ads she’s now going to take a deeper dive, covering everything from the type of campaign you need to how to actually write and choose images for your ads.

So settle in, because we guarantee this is going to be a good one… 😉

👇 Watch the video

https://youtu.be/r0xJIXATH-E

RELATED TRAINING FROM ATOMIC:

▶ How to set up your Facebook Ad campaign for ultimate success with Nick Jaworski

▶ Getting started with Facebook remarketing with Gavin Bell

So settle in, because we guarantee this is going to be a good one. Over to you, Allison…

We’re going to kick off with an example — a business owner called Sally. Sally’s goal is to be seen by more people, grow her audience, and build her reputation. She has a website, a lead magnet, and 250 email subscribers. She posts regularly to Facebook and Instagram and she has tried some Facebook ads but she hasn’t achieved consistent results.

So here’s the plan: we’re going to run ads to Sally’s photography-related lead magnet landing page so we can reach more people and increase her signups.

Refine your lead magnet

The first thing we need to do is make sure Sally’s lead magnet is actually working. For that, we need to ask some crucial questions:

Is Sally talking about her lead magnet in her social media posts?
Is she telling the people in her email list about it?
Is she asking people in her business network if this is something that would interest them?
What do people think of her lead magnet?
Is it converting well?

The answers to these questions will help Sally adjust her lead magnet to the point where she knows it’s going to work well for her and that it’s going to be worth investing money in promoting it via Facebook ads.

Setting up the ad campaign

Assuming Sally’s tested her lead magnet and is confident it’ll do the job, it’s time to look at setting up her ad campaign.

There are three stages in every Facebook ad campaign; the campaign, the ad set, and the ads themselves.

The campaign is where we set our objective — the ultimate action we want to happen as a result of our ads. The ads set is where we decide which audience we’re sending the ad to. We also decide if we’re placing it on Facebook, Instagram, or both and we can set a budget either at campaign or ad set level. And finally we have the ads themselves, where we have to think about the copy and the images we’re going to use to encourage people to first stop scrolling and then to take action — in this case to sign up for Sally’s lead magnet.

Before setting up an ad campaign, it’s worth knowing about a few changes Facebook has made regarding its ad settings regarding permissions. If you have Business Manager but haven’t been in for a while, you’ll probably have to go to the resource centre and your ads manager and follow some steps in there to set up some new actions so that people can be tracked, as Apple’s iOS14 comes out and affects how people can opt-in or opt-out of you being able to track them through the pixel in future. When you’re picking your campaign objective, you do have the option to toggle this button on or off.

For Sally’s campaign we’re also going to look at keeping our campaign budget optimisation switched off because we’re only running one ad set. If we had multiple ad sets we might want to switch it on so the budget can move between different ad sets depending on how people are responding to our ads on any given day.

Choosing an audience

Next, we’re going to move on to our ad set. Under budget, we’re going to pick the audience we want our ads to be shown to. First, we’re asked what conversion event we’re optimising for. In Sally’s example, we’re selecting website event and complete registration and we’re using a standard event rather than a custom event that we create ourselves.

So we want to ask Facebook to find people who were most likely to complete registration and sign up for the opt-in. When looking at selecting an audience, testing is everything. There are no guarantees about how any audience will perform but we have a few options — and I always suggest you start with the option that makes the most sense for how people interact with you in your business already.

Because Sally has an email list it might make sense for us to build out a lookalike audience and try that first. We would start with her email subscribers and target our ad to an audience of people with similar characteristics. We could also create an interest-based audience and of course, for Sally, it would make sense to work on building an audience of photography business owners because they are most likely to be interested in her opt-in, being sure to exclude those who have already signed up to her list.

When it comes to your own audience, you might need to set parameters based on things like location — and that’s okay — but in general it makes sense to give Facebook a fairly large audience to sift through. Again, this is something that you’ll want to test, but I recommend aiming for an audience of 500,000 to 1,000,000. I know that sounds like a lot but a larger audience gives Facebook the freedom to serve your ads to people who are on the right device, at the right time, and are more likely to take action.

Ad placement

Now we need to look at where to show our ads. You can choose to show your ads on Facebook or Instagram, in news feeds, in stories, or in audience networks and if you have the budget for running multiple ad sets you could test your ads on news feeds vs. stories, Instagram vs. Facebook, by selecting manual ad placements and experimenting.

For Sally, however, I’m going to keep it simple by sticking to automatic placements and letting Facebook decide where to show the ads. That’s much less random than it sounds. For example, I might be on Facebook in the mornings scrolling through news feeds, but I’m not likely to sign up for an opt-in at that time of day. I might be scrolling through Instagram in the evening though, and am much more likely to sign up to an opt-in at that time of day. Since Facebook knows that about me as a user, automatic placements give it the freedom to use that information to show me an ad at a time I’m more likely to take action on it and sign up for something.

Setting a Facebook ad budget

The third part of our ad set setup is our budget.

Here, I’m going with a budget of £10 or $10 per day per ad set. Why? Because that gives Facebook enough to work with, enough for me to win the right auctions, and enough to test my ads to see if they actually deliver. When it comes to your own budget, you need to decide how much an email subscriber is worth to you and your business in the future. Of course, you can go lower if you like, but be aware that if your budget is too small, there’s little chance your perfect customer will see your ad, and if very few people are shown your ad, it’s harder to test too.

Creating an ad

Let’s move on to the ads themselves, the ad copy and the images or videos we’ll use.

Ad copy

When it comes to copy, try to keep things positive and uplifting. Focus on the results your lead magnet delivers and how it offers a solution to your audience’s problems. Now, we’ve set out one ad set at £10 per day but we could add two or three ads on that amount — it doesn’t mean we have to run just one ad on that budget. So play around with the copy, creating an ad with just a couple of sentences and another with maybe two or three paragraphs to see how your audience responds to different ad lengths. And remember, you don’t need to add a tonne of details (that’s what your landing page is for) you just need enough to entice people to click through.

It’s often a good idea to add a testimonial to your copy or even turn it into an image to use in your ad. And it’s important to remember the purpose of your ad when you’re writing so that the copy moves the audience towards the action you want them to take and helps them get to the next stage, e.g. landing on your website, signing up to your email list.

Images

For images, you want to use something enticing, something that’ll stop people scrolling past. One tip that works really well is to increase the brightness or contrast on the ad images, just to make them pop that little bit more as people are scrolling through the news feed. Try and use bright colours if you can and use images of real people rather than stock photos — don’t feel your photos have to be really polished or really professional, natural photos often work amazingly well.

Emojis

Feel free to use emojis in your post but don’t use too many and be wary of using stars — if you add too many stars it can look like you’re trying to state something has a five star rating and ads have been rejected for that kind of emoji use. Also be careful about using emojis as bullet points; if someone is visually impaired and using a screen reader they can be really confusing.

Buttons

When it comes to a lead magnet, ‘download’ or ‘learn more’ are always good buttons for encouraging people to click, although it’s always worth testing different options to see which people respond to best.

My top tip for an ad that really works

One of my favourite tips — and this is something I do often — is to post on your socials about your lead magnet before you run your ad. Assuming you already post regularly, you’ll have at least a few people like and comment on your post. You can then choose to run that post as an ad and because it already has some social proof (those likes and comments) it’ll likely work really well.

Testing, testing…

Okay, so our ad is up and running. What next? You know how important testing is, so the temptation is to start messing around with your ads pretty much immediately. But it’s actually a really good idea to just leave them be for at least 72 hours because every time you make a change, you pop your ad back into the learning phase — you’re basically asking the algorithm to learn all over again who to serve your ads to.

Now, let’s jump back to Sally and assume that her ad has been running for a couple of weeks and she hasn’t played around with it too much — what results should she be thinking about?

Click-through rate

The first number to look for is the click through rate, or how many people are clicking through from the ad to the opt-in landing page. Anything over 1% from an ad served to a cold audience is good — anything under that and there’s a problem; the ad just isn’t grabbing people’s attention as they scroll and it’s time to get creative with new copy or new images.

Frequency

Another thing to watch out for when you’re running this kind of ad is frequency: how often is someone seeing your ad in their feed. If your ad audience is fairly small then that frequency can creep up fast. If your audience is much larger, of course there are many more people for Facebook to pick from. So it’s likely to stay low for a lot longer. For something like a lead magnet I would aim to keep the frequency under four, just because you don’t want people to keep seeing that same ad over and over again. If they’re not going to engage with it, you don’t want them to keep seeing it because the chances are they’ll eventually want to hide it and that’s a bad signal for your ad quality.

Cost per click

Cost per link click is another stat you’ll find in your ads manager. £1 and under is good, but of course it’s always up to you to decide how much you’re happy to pay for people to sign up to your lead magnet and how much you’re happy to pay for a link click.

Landing page issues

Now, if all of your Facebook stats are looking good and you have a high enough percentage of people clicking through to your landing page but they’re still not signing up, that’s a sign that your landing page is what needs attention.

Is your website loading too slowly? Is the signup process more complicated than it needs to be? Is it easy to sign up on mobile? Do you need to tweak your copy or create a stronger call-to-action? Try to iron out any landing page issues and then see if signup stats increase.

Once you start running ads, these stats offer vital info on how your ads are performing, on where you need to make improvements, and on where to go next. With a bit of time, a bit of testing, and a bit of tweaking, you’ll soon be making the most of your Facebook ads.

Posted in Blog

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