An (in-depth) Beginners Guide to Facebook Ads

You don’t have to spend a long time in the online marketing world to learn that Facebook Ads are an incredible way to grow your business.

In fact, 92% of marketers are using Facebook for advertising.

However, if you’re still on the fence about launching your own Facebook Ads campaign, it might be fear the of the unknown that is stopping you.

After all, you may have never run a paid traffic campaign of your own before, so you may not know what to expect.

In this article, we’re going to examine in extreme detail, how the Facebook Ads platform works.

We’ll cover topics such as creating the perfect ad, targeting effectively and bidding the right amounts for your ads too.

By the end of this article, you’ll be well on your way to creating a profitable Facebook Ads campaign of your own.

Let’s begin!

Who Is Your Customer?

Facebook is an incredible ad platform because it allows for you to target your ads in ways that just aren’t possible on other ad platforms.

However, you won’t be able to effectively use the targeting options on offer, if you don’t know who your customer is.

After all, there are over 1.44 billion people on the platform, and they can’t all be your customer!

However, your customer is there, and they’re hanging around for 40 minutes a day.

To take advantage of this, it is essential that before you do anything else you become crystal clear on who your customer is.

So how can you do this?

Creating A Buyer Persona

One of the best ways you can achieve this goal, is by creating something known as a buyer persona.

A buyer persona will allow for you to work out the following information about your customers —

Their goals

Their fears

Their motivations

Their demographic (age, gender, location, education level and income)

It is worth mentioning, that the more specific you can be here, the better you’ll be able to target your Facebook Ads.

We’ll talk more about this later, but relevance is a big thing when running paid ads.

If your ads are not relevant to the people you’re showing them to, then your results aren’t going to great.

In any case, when you have this information, you will be able to create something known as a customer avatar.

A customer avatar is a highly accurate representation of who your customer is.

Using this customer avatar, you should be able to target your ads, with incredible precision.

Using Audience Insights

However, there are in fact other methods that you can use, in order to work out who your customer is.

One such method is using Audience Insights — a tool provided by Facebook that unearths in depth information in relation to specific ‘audiences.’

The information is provided by Facebook users, but also by Facebook themselves, as they provide data in terms of how certain users interact with the platform.

Interaction levels are high on Facebook and people are engaging with the platform more and more. Because of this, the data provided is fairly reliable.

There are two methods available to you, if you want to harness the power of Audience Insights.

The first is to input some basic information, related to your customer avatar, of which you discovered above.

This, of course, requires that you have some information ahead of time based on who your customer is.

You don’t have to have a lot of detailed info, just a rough sense, as the Audience Insights tool will allow provide you with a lot more information once you input the basic details.

In fact, if you only know the interests of your customer, you’ll be able to gather a lot of useful data from the Audience Insights tool.

The second is to use the Audience Insights tool to learn more about a list you have uploaded.

To do that you simply create something known as a Custom Audience, by providing Facebook with list of email addresses or phone numbers.

When using this method, it is important that the list you upload, is representative of the kind of campaign you’re looking to run.

For instance, it is of no use to upload a list in the ‘weight loss’ niche, if you’re looking to create a campaign in the ‘grow your business’ niche.

Let’s take a look at how you’d use the Audience Insights tool to turn a basic customer avatar into a detailed one.

Login to Facebook, and then go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights/

You’ll then see the following page.

Select the ‘Everyone on Facebook’ option.

You then need to input some basic information, based on who you’re going to be targeting your ads towards.

At the very least, we need to know interests.

Let’s assume that we’re looking to sell a course related to email marketing, to people in the United States.

In the ‘Interests box,’ I have typed in ‘Email Marketing.’

Because Email Marketing is a popular topic, Facebook was able to provide Email Marketing as an interest.

If you want to further define your targeting, it might be a good idea to add some influencers within the email marketing niche, into the interests section.

If you don’t know who such influencers might be, you’ll need to do some research.

One way you can do this, is by using the Facebook Graph search feature.

Simply type in the keyword, ‘Email Marketing,’ into the Facebook search bar.

Then select the ‘Pages,’ option.

You now have a list of ‘influencers,’ that you can include in your ‘Interests’ section within the Audience Insights tool.

It will be a little hit and miss, in terms of who you can input into the ‘Interests’ section.

Though it’s worth trying any names and pages you do come across, of which are relevant to your niche.

Just by putting in that basic information, Facebook has provided us with a lot of data, based on this demographic.

Let’s go through each bit of data provided.

As you can see, Facebook let’s us know the ‘Age’ and ‘Gender’ of this group.

The darker bars, represent the audience we have created.

The majority of this audience exists between the ages of 25-54.

This could be related to the fact that 29.7% of Facebook users are between 25-34. Though the Facebook user base is so large, that it’s probably just a coincidence.

There’s not really a statistically significant variation in the gender.

We can also see that the majority of this audience is either single or married.

There is a ‘-25%,’ because this audience has 25% less people who are married when proportionally measured against the rest of Facebook.

This audience is also mainly made up of people who have attended college.

There’s also evidence to show that the top three job titles of those interested in the topic of Email Marketing, are in ‘Production,’ ‘Sales’ and ‘Management.’

We’re also provided with some information, based on what kinds of ‘Pages,’ this demographic tends to like.

Facebook users like 40 Pages on average, so this is something to pay attention to, if you want to identify interests.

Interestingly, there are some unusual pages mentioned here. However, I have highlighted some that might be worth targeting.

The ‘Locations’ tab, let’s us know the various cities in which this audience mainly resides.

If you click on the ‘Activity,’ tab, you’ll be able to see how this audience interacts with Facebook.

It is evident that this audience is used to clicking on ads.

There’s also reason to believe that most of the people who belong to this audience use ‘Desktop & Mobile,’ when interacting with Facebook — something to keep in mind when adjusting the targeting options.

There are also some other tabs provided by Facebook in the Audience Insights tool of which rely on 3rd party data.

However, it is worth mentioning that these other options aren’t provided for all countries, as Facebook tends to use 3rd party data to populate the charts, of which isn’t available for all countries.

So that’s how you’d use Audience Insights to turn a basic customer avatar, into a very detailed one.

Using the information above, we now know that if we want to run a campaign, designed to promote an email marketing course, we ought to target —

Males and Females

Aged between 25-54

Single or Married

Interests in PeopleFluent, Hubspot, Marketo, SpyFu, Hootsuite, BigCommerce Social Media Examiner, Social Media Today and Hubspot

Job roles - Production, Sales and Management

Live in New York, LA and Houston

College Graduates

Desktop and Mobile Users

We also mentioned earlier, how we could use the Custom Audience feature, to work out the demographics and interests of a list that we may already have in our possession.

Here’s how you’d do that.

To upload a custom audience into Facebook, go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/audiences/

Then click on Create Audience and select ‘Custom Audience.’

Then choose ‘Customer List.’

Then select whichever option applies to you.

Once you’ve gone through this process, you’ll then be able to select your custom audience, when using the Audience Insights tool.

You can then use the information provided, to laser target your ads.

Okay, so now that we’ve covered that topic, let’s talk about what it takes to actually create an awesome ad.

Creating Your Ad

Unfortunately, Facebook is the king of distractions.

In fact there’s evidence to show that ⅓ of people use Facebook whilst driving!

Now we’re not trying to reach people whilst they’re driving, of course. However, the whole point of mentioning that stat, is to exemplify that idea that Facebook is distraction heavy.

Because of this, you need to find a way to create ads that are going to break through the noise and get noticed.

Otherwise, people will just scroll past your ads, and click on something else — maybe even the competitors ads.

Remember — there are two million other advertisers out there!

Thankfully, there are a couple of things that you can do in order to create an ad that is going to generate great results.

Ads have three main components —

The headline

The image/video

The description

Now, there's a lot more you could focus on, but getting those three aspects right will allow for you to create an ad that has a high chance of succeeding.

It’s also worth mentioning that Facebook provides three main kinds of ads.

Sidebar Ads, Newsfeed Ads and Mobile Ads.

Even though these are different ad formats, the principles we’re going to discuss, tend to remain the same for both ad variations.

Writing High Converting Headlines

If you’re not used to writing headlines, creating one can seem like a hard thing to do.

However, even if you have very little experience when it comes to writing headlines, there are a few actions you can take to shortcut the process.

One such action, is to create something known as a Swipe File.

This is where you take a screenshot of every headline you see that catches your eye or causes you to take action.

The fact that these headlines caught your eye, or even better, got you to take action, means that they’re effective headlines.

When writing your own headlines, you can reverse engineer these headlines, to create something that is appealing.

You can also take the approach of creating a headline from scratch, by sticking to a few proven principles.

One is to use numbers in your headline.

Of course, this will depend on the kind of offering you are advertising, but let’s take a look at some examples to further identify what you need to do.

The ad below is a great example of how numbers can be used to promote an offering.

Here’s an example of a sidebar ad, that uses numbers.

Numbers work well, because they’re a great way to quantify the value that is on offer.

‘101 web tips’ increases the perception of value. The offering sounds a lot more high value than if the ad above just had ‘web tips’ as a headline.

In any case, here are some Facebook Ads that use curiosity well.

Here’s another one.

This ad below has a curiosity headline, but the description section does a great job at explaining the headline (something we’ll cover more later).

Now let’s look at the other action you can take to create effective headlines — using ‘Power Words.’

Such words include ‘Free,’ ‘You,’ and ‘,Ultimate,.’

You’ve probably seen a lot of these ‘Power Words’ whilst reading blog post headlines.

Here are some examples of Ads that use ‘Power Words.’

And another one.

Here’s a Sidebar Ad that uses ‘Power Words.’

As well as ‘Power Words,’ you can use a technique that is known as ‘entering the conversation that is going on the mind of the prospect.’

The technique can be really powerful, if you want to draw attention.

You could present these headlines in a ‘how to’ format, or you could just state a certain benefit.

Here are some examples.

Here’s an ad targeted at people who are thinking about how they can generate more traffic.

Here’s another one, designed for people who are once more, struggling to generate traffic.

Here’s one directed towards people who own a SAAS company.

You can bet that people who are in such a position, are thinking about how to get more signups on their landing pages.

Can you see, therefore, how this kind of headline can be so powerful?

So there you have it, if you want to create great headlines consider the following —

Use numbers

Invoke curiosity

Use Power Words

Enter the conversation going on in your prospects mind

Now let’s take a look at how you can create a great description for your ads.

Writing A Description

In general, you’re using the description to explain further the headline that you used in your ad.

If you take a look at some of the ads above, you’ll already have a good sense of what makes a great description.

It is important that you focus on benefits, when writing out your description.

You’ll also want to include a ‘call to action,’ that tells people what to do next.

Let’s take a look at some great description examples —

The ad above has a great description for the following reasons. Firstly, they include a call to action, that tells people to ‘Contact’ them.

Additionally, the description is very heavy on benefits. They explain how the offering is ‘Free’ and that there are ‘No Risks.’

You could also argue that they’ve included a bit of urgency, as they say how the consultation call can take place ‘Today.’

It’s worth mentioning that for Newsfeed Ads you have the ‘Text’ section, which is the text at the top of the ad, and then you have the ‘Newsfeed Link Description.’

Here’s Facebook’s explanation, of what the different components of a Newsfeed ad are.

In general, what you will find, is that the Newsfeed Link Description is used to explain the ‘Text’ and the ‘Headline’

This Newsfeed Ad does a great job at creating a description, because in essence, they’ve used a customer testimonial.

Social proof is a big deal, and it can really move the needle when you’re trying to convince prospects who might otherwise be on the fence.

It also backs up the statement that was made in the ‘Text’ section of the ad.

Here’s another great example of how ‘Text’ and a ‘Newsfeed Link Description’ can work together.

Okay, so now that we have taken a look at how text can influence your Facebook Ads, now let’s take a look at the image.