Did you know: more than 180 million businesses use Facebook’s Ads Manager to promote their business and connect with their customers? It’s clear that Facebook can provide an amazing return on investment to companies around the world. Yet, for those just starting out, Facebook ads might seem a little overwhelming.

So what do you need to know about using Facebook Ads Manager? And how can you master the basics to give your business a boost?

Keep reading for all everything need to know about getting to grips with Facebook ads.

Audiences

A key aspect of advertising on Facebook is selecting the audience that you want to target with your ad campaign. Facebook ads allow you to do this in several different ways: lookalike audiences, retargeted audiences, selecting demographic qualities, and more.

Firstly, lookalike audiences operate by finding Facebook users with similar attributes to your existing customers. Meanwhile retargeted audiences let you show adverts to users that have already interacted with your brand. These are both essential methods for making sure your adverts are finding the right people, those most likely to be interested in your business.

You can also select the demographics of the audience you’re targeting. Whether that’s choosing a state, or even a specific area within a state, an age range, gender, or the specific interests of your target customer. You can even target Facebook users at a specific stage of life: college graduates, homeowners, or young families.

Another way to find customers who have a strong intent to buy your product or service is by purchasing advertising leads. Final expense Facebook leads can help to speed up the acquisition process and are often of a higher quality than other types of leads.

Ad Placements

Next, when using Facebook advertising it is important to be aware of the different ways and forms in which your ads can appear. Here, we’ll go through the main options available to you.

First, your ad can appear in the form of a single photo, video, carousel (multiple photos and videos), or even a collection. Facebook has become an increasingly visual platform. Think carefully about the means through which your brand can best be portrayed.

Once you have selected the form of your ad, Facebook Ads Manager offers an automatic placement option, which means it chooses where your ads should go. There are many choices for this such as within a feed, as stories, in-stream videos, in search results, messages, articles, and more.

If you are just starting out with Facebook ads, you might choose the automatic placement system to keep things simple. However, different ad placements are better suited to different marketing objectives, so this is a topic to return to when you have more confidence and experience with Facebook ads.

Bid Strategies

Another feature of Facebook’s Ads Manager to be aware of is the different types of bidding strategies. As with ad placements, Facebook gives an automated bidding option.

This is the default setting and is a good place to start when setting up your first Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. 

When you’re ready to take more control over how you bid on ads, take a look at the ‘Target Cost’ bidding strategy. This allows you to maintain a stable cost-per-event output while increasing the scale of your advertising campaign.

There is also the ‘Cost Cap’ strategy which lets you maximize conversions without straying over a set budget. This can be a great option if your marketing budget is set by an executive board and there is little room to maneuver.

Ad Content

Next, when embarking upon social media advertising, it is easy to get distracted by audiences, attribution, and ad placements. Don’t forget that your ad strategy is only as good as the content of the ad itself.

For Facebook Ads Manager, this means you need to satisfy several components. First, make sure your image or video is engaging and high-quality. Images should not be stock photos. Businesses often get the best results when they invest in creating their own advertising material.

Meanwhile, videos should be able to convey their message regardless of whether any sound is playing, as many users will have this turned off.

If the image or video is a crucial visual hook for your potential audience, the ad copy should secure their interest. Perfect grammar and spelling are a must, and if it is in-keeping with your brand, then you should include emojis too.

Finally, don’t forget to include a call-to-action (CTA) which directs the customer to their next step. This might be ‘click here’, ‘subscribe now’, or ‘find out more’.

Analysis

The final element of managing ads on Facebook is to make sure you are continually tracking and analyzing the results of your campaign. This is possible to do directly within the Ads Manager.

Over time, you can expand the metrics you rely on to judge the success of a campaign. However, there are a few you should be aware of from the start. These include the click-through-rate (CTR), relevance score (which is provided by Facebook), and cost-per-mille (CPM).

You can test how different images, placements, or even landing pages compare thanks to A/B testing. You can also compare how your ads are doing as time goes by, by considering two different periods side by side within Facebook’s Ad Manager.

Now You Can Get the Most Out of Facebook’s Ads Manager

We’ve now covered the most important aspects of Facebook’s Ads Manager so that you can start attracting more potential customers. Don’t forget that the most important aspect of PPC advertising is to continually test and improve your campaigns.

If you found this post helpful, make sure you check out our other business-related articles!