Setting Up Facebook Site Traffic Ads
Facebook advertising is a good source of traffic. However, beginners find it hard to deal with as there is very little useful information about setting up these ads. The reason is simple: Facebook Business Manager is constantly changing, which makes it difficult to put the knowledge together.
In this article I will highlight the features of Facebook advertising for beginners in the context of promoting a website.
Figure out the target audience for your Facebook ads
Advertising will be useless if you get the profile of your target audience wrong. So grab a piece of paper and write down the features of your target audience:
- Age
- Gender
- Place of residence
- Marital status
- Education
- Job
- Financial status
- Interests
Keep in mind that this is not a final target audience profile, but just a general description. You still have some work to do.
Segment the target audience for your Facebook ads
Split the users into several categories depending on their demography and behavior.
The target audience behaves differently in real life and on the Internet. Let’s say you sell expensive PVC windows. Your main customers are men, aged 25-50, with above-average income. However, that’s not them who goes through heaps of information on the web, chooses the window and drives them crazy until they buy it. It’s their wives. It means you will show your ads to them.
Women consume much more content on social media than men. Ads targeted at women are cheaper.
In addition, these wives are likely to be of different age and have different interests. They are motivated by completely different things, and you should take it into account. Create separate ads for each segment of the audience.
- A 40-year-old woman may not be aware of the latest trends, but she will definitely want good windows that will make her home warm.
- A 20-year-old may be into interior design wanting her windows to be shabby chic.
Select one option for each sphere of interest. Thus your targeting will be more precise.
Don’t forget to specify behaviour patterns. There are lots of interesting options. For instance, you can include into your targeting only those people who access facebook via iPhone. Or those who are the first to adopt new technologies. Sometimes such settings are critical to the success of your campaign.
Set the budget of your Facebook advertising campaign
I am not here to determine what your maximum budget should be. It solely depends on your wallet. Instead, let’s think which is better - assigning your own CPC or letting Facebook do the math. My advice is to choose the latter. The cost per click will depend directly on the quality of your ad. If you choose the right audience and properly compose the snippet, a click to your website will be cheaper than you can imagine.
Should you limit ad impressions during a certain time of the day? It’s up to you to decide as it depends on the type of service you offer. Perhaps, you should advertise only during off hours or only on Tuesday morning. If you are targeting a large country with multiple time zones, don’t limit yourself.
If you want to avoid wasting money, launch an ad for a week with the budget of $7. You will be able to see the first results in a day. If you are happy with them, up the time and budget. Otherwise, take down the ad.
Assess the benefits your Facebook ad offers people
This advice may be the 4th in the list, but it’s monumental in terms of importance. Remember: no one gives a damn about your product, service, or company, unless it solves their problems and makes their life better. Each audience segment has their own problem and their own approach to it. Try to find out why your offer may be interesting to those people. Understand how your product or service can fix their problem.
Choose a snippet to promote your website
Facebook offers two options of an ad snippet:
- Several square images. This option works well when you have something to show: products, speakers (if you advertise a seminar), the benefits of your service. What's more, this way you have several ads in one. Each image can be marked as a separate ad and then tracked by the Facebook analytics tool.
- One big image. It works well if it’s a bright, high quality, attention grabbing image. You can write text over it, but it can’t cover more than 20% of the image. There is a convenient tool to determine how much text there is in your ad image.
Use only interesting high resolution images with no crop. Avoid trivial staged photos from photobanks.
When writing the text, think of the problem you are going to solve. Ask the audience a question. Identify the problem, suggest a solution. Be laconic and stick to the point. Do not praise yourself, write about the audience.
Specific aspects of Facebook ad placement
Where should you place your ad? There is no recipe or magic formula that will determine the best place to run your ad on Facebook. However, there are some tendencies:
- The right column is a blind zone which yields almost no results. It receives the smallest amount of clicks. There are some exceptions though. It works well for elderly people who are used to reading everything everywhere.
- Mobile news feed accounts for 60% of all clicks. But keep in mind that the ad must look good. So don’t be too lazy to check the preview of the ad.
- Desktop news feed is the second source of clicks after the mobile one. Users respond to these ads well. They are not in the blind zone like the right column, the size of such ads is larger, and users interact with them more actively.
- Audience network is a peculiar channel. Sometimes the traffic it brings is tiny, other times it’s huge. It’s hard to predict as we never know which applications Facebook will display its ads in and how relevant they will be.
6 steps to effective Facebook ads
Let’s recap. In order to drive more traffic to the site from Facebook you need to:
- Create your target audience profile taking into account general demographics and interests;
- Segment the target audience according to their interests, financial status, age, etc.
- Create a value proposition for the target audience;
- Select good images and texts, get a designer involved;
- Choose the right placement. You can correct it after the ad is launched, so test different options;
- Pay money to Facebook.