6 Simple Steps to Creating a Facebook Campaign

Any business selling a product or service should be spending on Facebook. Facebook’s reach is huge (1.4+ billion people) and the cost is relatively low, so great potential for strong ROI. Setting up a Facebook campaign is fairly simple. Here’s a quick 6-step list for getting a campaign going on Facebook.

1) Create an Audience

Upload an email list of your best customers into Facebook to create a Custom Audience:

Once you have created that list you can create a Lookalike Audience. A Lookalike audience on Facebook is a target list made of profiles that are similar to the “seed audience” (the customers you uploaded). This is a great way to find new customers that are similar to your existing customers.

The next stage is creating a Website Custom Audience (visitors to your website or specific pages). These are useful for retargeting visitors and can also be used to create Lookalike audiences for pre-targeting similar shoppers.

2) Creating the Creative

Begin with 3 pictures of your offer. This is the best way to take advantage of Facebook’s optimization process. Essentially, if you upload three photos for the same ad, Facebook will automatically test them and display the one that performs the best. Ensure that your photos meet the following criteria:

• Less than 20% text in artwork. Use this tool to test before uploading.
• Sized correctly for Newsfeed at 1200px x 627px. This size will then scale correctly to all devices.

3) Tracking & Monitoring Success

Monitoring things like clicks, CTR, CPC, and impressions is what most businesses do to measure success. However, these things should not be the measure of success for Facebook campaigns. Businesses should look to conversions, check-outs, add-to-basket and RoAS (return on ad spend). These are much better metrics to measure, as you can identify a return on your spend. To measure these things, you must use conversion tracking, which requires installing a small piece of code on your website. Install this first before pushing your ad live.

4) Ad Variations

Creating ad variations allows you to track effectiveness and later optimize specific ads. Certain demographics are more expensive to target than others. Different businesses will have different targets and therefore should have multiple variations. Having variations for different age ranges, for example, would allow you to pause an ad set for the age range that isn’t performing well or isn’t delivering the target cost per acquisition (CPA).

5) Facebook Bidding Strategy

Bid your maximum. Start with your objective and bid the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for that objective. Within your target audience, calculate the average profit for each action they take and this will determine what your max bid should be.

6) Consider Dynamic Product Ads

Dynamic product ads are always-on advertising for direct response marketing—connect the right products to the right person at the right time, at scale and across devices. Dynamic product ads (DPA) simplify the process and allow marketers to create more ads in less time. Perhaps for slightly more advanced users but definitely worth considering.

Start Your Facebook Campaign

Hopefully these steps have helped you create your first campaign. Start small and build on success. If you’d like to know how to scale your Facebook advertising and campaigns, check out StitcherAds for additional advice.