10 Best Practices For A Successful Facebook Advertising

Hey, do you run adverts on Facebook?

Chances are that you’ve been doing it all wrong. You may never know but you have been spending a lot of money unnecessarily. In this article, I’m going to show you 10 Facebook advertising best practices. In other words, how to optimize your Facebook ads for success.

With the increasing population of Facebook users around the world (over 2.8 billion people), Facebook has been established as the go-to platform for businesses who want to utilize the power of online advertising.  However, it is one thing to do something and yet another to get it right. Many people (businesses) run Facebook adverts but only a few get real value for their money and this may prompt the question: is Facebook advertising worth it? Or; is Facebook advertising overrated?

Well, these are both topics for another day. You are here because you want to know the ways in which you can optimize your Facebook adverts for your success, right?

Great, let’s get into it.

Set An Appropriate Campaign Objective

This may seem so common and easy, but it is very important. In order to get the most out of your advertising, you have to know what your goals are and set an objective accordingly. Your mission in every advertising is to get your potential audience or customers to take certain actions that we want them to. So, if they don’t, we end up having failed advertising (at least in some cases).

Identify Your Potential Customers

Everybody is not your customer, and that’s just the fact. When you correctly identify your ideal customer, You tend to get one step closer to running a successful advert. It can also help you save more as you won’t be spending money on people who will not buy your products or what you have to offer.

To start with, most products or services appeal more to a particular gender than others. Here’s an example; Imagine you’re selling a men’s wristwatch, though some women may be interested in the wristwatch for one reason or another but let us be realistic here, the chances are going to be so slim. So, instead of targeting both genders for the ad, it is best advised that you target the most appropriate gender which in this case is the men.

Identifying your potential customers go way deeper than just knowing their gender. It pays to also know their age, location, interests, and sometimes, their occupations or employment status.

Let me take this employment status for a case study, Imagine we’re running an advert for a really expensive car.  We both know that employed staff can barely afford it, right? ok, now we know that most of our potential audience is self-employed. Now, we just have to think of categories of people who are self-employed. Let me try, we have businessmen, Uhm….. CEOs? Yeah, that can do, entrepreneurs, and so on.

There are so many ways through which you can identify your potential audience, there are so many that I will have to dedicate an entire blog post to it. Should I ? ok, I will. Do anticipate the post, I’ll update this article when I publish it.

Always Target A Broad Audience

When you select your audience, make sure to leave them as broad as possible (unless you know your audience too well, and this is only possible in rare cases).

Here’s why, no matter how good your audience or customer research is/was, Facebook knows your customers more than you do, because hey, it’s Facebook’s algorithm, not yours. And you always want to give Facebook a chance to help you find new customers or don’t you?

Again, when your targeting gets too narrow or too specific, Facebook tends to charge you more. Here’s why: When you go with very specific targeting, you’re telling the system that you want to serve ads to a certain amount or category of people. The Facebook ad algorithm then goes after those people, and you, as the advertiser, are battling budgets for a presumably small amount of people who are also being targeted by other advertisers.

This can drive costs up, and Facebook doesn’t have much to learn from. When you go a little broader with your targeting, however, Facebook has more touchpoints to learn from, and will automatically optimize to serve your ad to the people in your target audience who are most likely to take your desired action.

Ensure That Your Ads Are Mobile Friendly

Let me ask you one question, can I?

Great, how often do you browse Facebook or Instagram, or even Google with your PC?

Rarely, that’s because mobile phones are getting more popular and more advanced these days. In fact, research shows that over 80% of users browse Facebook on their mobile phones.

Facebook knows that other social Media know that, Google and other search engines know that, and that’s why they have prioritized smartphone users. Well, we are not talking about these search engines, are we? No, we are talking about how to optimize your Facebook advertising for success. But since we now know that most people use Facebook and other social media, it is only appropriate that we optimize our ad creative for smartphones.

Use standard smartphone dimensions for your images and videos (4 to 5), make sure your videos are vertical and do not exceed 15 seconds as the human attention span is generally short and Facebook can be really distracting so you want to deliver your message just in time before they see their friend’s cat dancing in another post (lol).

Use Attractive Creatives

If you want your potential audience or customer to stop scrolling and give your advertisement any attention, you must use an attention-grabbing creative (flyer).

Then make your headline spectacular in order to have their attention for a longer period of time. And finally, you should have a great copy for your advert, a copy that will make them run after you with their money or anything you hope to gain from them with the ad.

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Use A Clear And Simple Call To Action

You don’t want to get people confused as to how to take action or what actions to take on your advert. And that’s why you need a clear Call To Action.

A range of call-to-action (CTA) buttons is available for Facebook and Instagram ads. These buttons draw attention and encourage people to engage with your ad.

Based on what you want people to do when they see your ad, experiment with the CTA buttons available for different ad objectives and formats. See which ones get your audience to take your desired action.

Utilize Placement Optimization

We often get asked which Facebook ad placements are the best. To clarify, a Facebook ad placement is anywhere that an ad is eligible to be served – this includes in the Facebook News Feed, Instagram feed, Stories, Audience Network, and even in Messenger.

According to Facebook, the best way to run campaigns is to activate all placements. This enables the Facebook Ad platform to optimize against which placements are achieving your desired objective at the most cost-effective rate.

Facebook calls this ‘Placement Optimization’. The logic here is that the more placements you use, the more data the Facebook Ad platform has to learn from. The more it can learn, the better your campaigns can perform.

But even though this is one of Facebook’s own recommended best practices for Facebook Ads, it is important to consider where you, as the advertiser, want your ads to be shown.

For example, ad placements on Audience Network won’t generate engagements. If you care about that metric, you might want to omit Audience Network from your efforts. We recommend going to market utilizing Placement Optimization and nurturing what performs the best.

 Embrace Campaign Budget Optimization

Facebook’s ‘Campaign Budget Optimization‘ process is a way of optimizing the way a campaign uses budget across ad sets.

Typically, an advertiser would set budgets at the ad set level, however with Campaign Budget Optimization, Facebook will continuously and automatically find the best opportunities to achieve your designated objective across your ad sets, and prioritize budget to the ad sets that are performing best. This gives you less control as an advertiser but gives the system more control to use your budget efficiently.

What is Facebook Ads Remarketing? (5 best reasons you should utilize it)

The one thing to be cautious of here is that if there are campaigns that you need to get a certain level of attention, you will not want to use Campaign Budget Optimization. You’ll want to set the budget at the ad set level to ensure visibility.

Always Keep an Eye On Your Ads

This is very important because some ads may not be performing well. (Look out for this article on how to know whether an ad is performing well or not). If you ignore such ads, you tend to lose money and nobody loves that.

Again, always test metrics and demographics in order to find your perfect customers and what appeals most to them. Always test out creatives like copies, flyers, and videos, test out locations, and test out interests.

Finally, invest more money in your advertising

This is often overlooked, probably because Facebook gives us the opportunity to advertise with as little as 5 dollars per day or less. Subri, the author of an Amazon best-seller “sell like crazy”, made it clear in his book that advertising should be your greatest investment as a businessman because advertising, when done well, can get you up to 1000% Returns On Investment (ROI) or more.

He stated that if you can’t pay to acquire a new customer, then you do not have a business. Sales are the lifeblood of every business and advertising is the single most effective factor in driving sales.

While low-budget ads work sometimes, experts suggest that you use low-budget ads only to measure metrics and test out different demographics, more like a test run. Then, if you are satisfied with the results you’ve gotten from the ad, you can invest more money into the ad.

Related: How to Set up Facebook Pixel: ( Facebook Remarketing Pixel)

Final Thoughts

In addition to all these, try to stay updated with facebook’s advertising policy in order to know what is accepted and what is not.