The most detailed Facebook advertising tutorial in 2020!

Facebook advertising has always been the concern of those who run independent websites. There are also many foreign trade people around them who get a large number of orders through Facebook advertising. With the crazy influx of Chinese people into Facebook for paid promotion in recent years, this has directly driven up everyone's advertising expenditure. So how should Facebook advertising be used? In this article, I will introduce it to you in detail.

Why are Facebook ads so important?

Currently, except for a very few countries in the world, most online advertising businesses are monopolized by Google and Facebook. The annual advertising revenue of these two companies accounts for more than 80% of the world's advertising revenue, which is very amazing.

What huge advantages does Facebook have that make advertisers addicted to it?

1. Huge active user base

Facebook has more than 2 billion active users every month, and is firmly ranked as the number one social platform in most countries in the world. In addition, Facebook also has two trump cards: Messenger and Instagram. These two social applications also have a large number of users. In the Facebook advertising background, you can place your ads on Messenger and Instagram at the same time.

2. Target customers based on demographics, interests, and behaviors

Facebook's ad targeting is very representative. It can deliver your ads to very precise potential audiences through a series of complex but intelligent algorithms, such as audience characteristics, interests, behaviors, age, education, occupation, etc. This is something that most social platforms cannot do at present.

3. Quickly build brand awareness

Nowadays, most e-commerce websites have established Facebook pages to communicate with fans and promote their brands. Of course, you can also create your own page on Facebook and use advertisements to promote your page. This can be very effective and quickly help you find fans who are interested in your products while expanding the visibility of your own brand.

Step 1: Create a Facebook Business Account

We know that personal Facebook accounts can also be used to run advertisements. Just click on the ad in the upper right corner to enter. However, I personally recommend registering a Facebook business account, which may be relatively safer.

To create a business account, visit business.facebook.com and click Create Account.

Facebook will ask you to provide some information, such as: name, address, email, business information, etc. Here you just need to fill in your real information.

Then you need to verify your email (go to your email to activate it), add a payment method, and add a new advertising account (the business account we registered can add multiple advertising accounts).

For more detailed information on how to open a Facebook advertising account, please read: How to open a Facebook business and personal advertising account

Step 2: Install Facebook Pixel

Many newbies may not know what Facebook pixel is. In fact, pixel is used by Facebook to track and count the specific actions taken by visitors on your website, such as: which pages are visited, how long is the visit, whether it is added to the shopping cart, whether it is paid, etc.

When running Facebook ads, you must install the pixel first, otherwise you will be like a blind person, spreading rumors everywhere, and you will have no idea who visited your website, what products were visited, and other important data.

Installing Facebook Pixel in Shopify

It is actually very simple to install the Facebook pixel in a Shopify store. You just need to find the pixel in the Facebook ad management tool first.

Select Create Pixel. There are three ways for you to choose. Select "Add code through partner integration".

Within a few hours of adding the pixel ID to your Shopify store, the pixel can start collecting data. You can view stats such as visitors, add to carts, and purchases under “Pixels” in your Business Manager account.

Step 3: Create a Facebook Audience

Whether your ad can be targeted to the right audience is one of the most critical steps to success, and Facebook provides very powerful targeting functions: saved audiences, custom audiences and similar audiences.

1. Save your audience: interests, behaviors, and demographics

When we create ads and audiences, in addition to targeting by country, region, age group, and gender, more importantly, we can target by "segmented targeting", which includes: demographic data, interests, and behaviors.

How should we use "segmented positioning"?

Target people who have interacted with other Facebook Pages. Simply enter the name of the other Facebook Page. Note that some Pages can be targeted, while others cannot.

· Targeting user behaviors, e.g., celebrating a birthday, moving to a new city, having a baby, etc.

Targeting user characteristics, including user profile information (e.g., new mother, engineer, college graduate).

You can also use the "Audience Analysis" tool to locate your audience.

The tool displays information about your potential audience, such as the Pages they like on Facebook, the devices they use, and the cities they live in.

Of course, I usually use "Audience Analysis" to find new interests and hobbies of the audience, and then input it into "Segmentation and Targeting".

Since interest, behavior, and demographic audiences are usually very broad, there are usually millions of potential audiences after setting them up, so I suggest that it is best to limit the potential audience to a few hundred thousand, and then run several groups of ads at the same time to test them separately.

2. Custom Audiences: Convert Enthusiastic Audiences

Custom audiences are very important targeting tools. For example, if a user visits your website or adds your product to the shopping cart (but does not pay in the end), how can you push your ads to them again? This is where custom audiences come in handy.

When you create a custom audience, you are provided with lists from different sources. In e-commerce, we usually mainly use customer files, website traffic and engagement.

Customer files

Using Customer File, you can upload your customers' email addresses, phone numbers, and more. Facebook matches this information with users in its system (the vast majority of customers have FB accounts), so you can target them directly with ads.

If you have a large number of customer email addresses or phone numbers, this kind of precise advertising will be very effective and fast.

Website traffic

Here you can target users who have visited your website in the past 30 days or longer. You can even target users who have visited a specific product of yours, or users who have added items to the shopping cart but have not paid. These users can be considered potential customers, and you can send them promotional ads or new product ads again to get their orders.

·video

Many people like to use 15-second videos when running advertisements. In fact, we can also use the “Custom Audience – Video” feature to target users who have watched 50%, 75%, and 90% of the video, and then re-send advertisements to these users.

3. Similar Audiences

Facebook Similar Audiences are generated based on Custom Audiences. It can help you quickly find similar audiences that are similar to Custom Audiences, thus saving your testing time and costs. Of course, the premise is that your Custom Audience must be accurate enough.

Lookalike audiences can be created using any of your custom audiences, ranging in size and similarity from 1% to 10% of the selected country’s population. The 1% Lookalike Audience includes people who are most similar to your Custom Audience source.

As you expand your targeting and increase your budget, pushing your Lookalike Audience to 3%, 5%, and eventually 10%, Facebook will offer a larger range of Lookalike Audiences, but with a lower precision.

Step 4: Create Facebook Ads

Now we will start our official advertising. The first step is to create an advertising campaign. A campaign can contain multiple ad groups, and an ad group can contain multiple ads.

Select a marketing objective for your ad

At the beginning of the ad we create, we will ask you to choose your advertising marketing goal. As an e-commerce website, the ones we generally use the most are: visits, interaction rate, and conversion volume.

Let’s take a closer look at the different marketing goal options:

1. If you want to increase the sales of your website, please select "Conversion". You can provide "Coupons" in the early stage.

2. If you just want to increase the popularity of your product, then you can choose "brand awareness" (generally the first choice for large companies).

3. If you have trouble driving traffic to your website, then choose “Visits” as your goal and also offer “Coupons”.

4. If you want more likes, comments, and shares on your Page posts, select “Engagement Rate” as your goal.

5. If your advertising material is a video, you can also run “video views”.

More detailed Facebook marketing goal selection: How to choose the right Facebook advertising marketing goal

Step 5: Set up your ad

After selecting the campaign objective, we proceed to the next step and can set up the ads specifically. Here I will take the "Conversion Volume" ad as an example:

Set up conversion events

Here, we usually choose "shopping" as the target of event optimization. Of course, you can also choose others, such as "add to cart", "initiate checkout", etc., but they all need to be arranged according to your own testing strategy.

Set a budget and timeline

The next step in your ad set is to enter your budget and choose whether it is a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Determining advertising expenses depends on the following factors:

Product pricing: More expensive products usually require larger advertising budgets. For example, if your product is priced at $100 and you spend $5 a day on advertising, isn’t that like waiting to win the lottery?

Optimization goal: Purchases as conversion events usually require more advertising dollars than other conversion events.

You need to set aside time (and budget) for Facebook’s “learning phase”. Facebook will automatically find more suitable potential audiences based on your data, but this requires the system to learn, which takes time, usually about 7 days.

Audience

In addition to setting the country, region, age group, and gender, it is more important to set up "segmented targeting". In the segmented targeting options, you can target "demographics", "interests", and "behaviors", or you can enter some specified keywords yourself.

Ad placement

Facebook provides advertising display on four platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. However, there are many small display locations under each platform for you to choose from, so you must be careful when choosing here.

Step 6: Ad copy

When it comes to the ad copy, we can see: create an ad, use an existing post, and use a sample image.

Create ads: carousel, single image or video, collection

Use an existing post: Select Page, select Posts

Sample image used: Creative Pavilion style

For more copywriting information, please read: 9 Tips to Quickly Create High-Click-Through Facebook Ad Copywriting

Step 7: Optimize your Facebook ad campaigns

Facebook ads are relatively simple to create, but if you want to be successful, you must keep a close eye on the data generated by your ads and then optimize them.

Optimization can be done from many aspects, for example, you can set a certain CTR, CPC, whether there are any orders, etc. to judge the quality of an advertisement.

At the same time, you can use custom audiences and similar audiences to further screen the audience and achieve the purpose of optimizing the advertisement.

Summary: There are countless Chinese businesses running advertisements on Facebook. You ask me if there are any that are doing very well. Of course there are, and there are a lot of them.

Here is also a suggestion. When you run an independent website, you can not only focus on a few developed countries in Europe and the United States. Many developing countries are actually easier to run, with lower advertising expenditures, less competition, and higher conversion rates. However, the problem you may face is solving the payment channels.

My Promotion Career

Source: My Promotion Career