Social advertising or social ads have become a staple in most modern businesses who are trying to increase sales and improve their product sales. So, we’ve broken down how to get your first social ad posted and accepted by Facebook/Instagram!
You’ll need a few things for your first social ad…
- Access to/creation of Facebook Business Manager
- Facebook Pixel Installed (this is coded into your website, your web developer can help with this if you’ve not already installed)
- The content post you’d like to use as your advert.
- Headline for your advert
- Body Text
- The audience you’d like to target with your advert.
- Minimum of £15 per day to spend on advertising budget.
So, the first step is to access your Facebook Business Manager. This is where you can connect all your business assets such as your Pages, admins, Pixels, Subscriber mailing lists, CRM systems etc. Adding more assets will assist Facebook when you’re building ad sets which will help guide your adverts to the best people to purchase your products or drive the business outcome you have, it might be app downloads or landing page views etc.
Within your Facebook Business Manager, you want to go ahead and click “Create”, this will take you through a step-by-step ad submission process, you want to follow this process carefully as this is where you are going to set your budgets, audiences, link to Pixels and set your cost cap (if available). You can choose from 1 of 11 options.
Once you’ve selected your campaign objective you will see a section below, here you can fill in the name of your Campaign, Ad Set & Ad. It’s important that your adverts are labelled correctly so you can quickly identify ad sets and/or ads that are performing well. After you have named them appropriately, you’re going to want to go ahead and click “Continue”.
Now you should see a new window has appeared, this is where you complete the information of your budgets, A/B testing, Special Ad categories. Each social ad is completely different, and you will find that some work better than others for your desired outcomes. Selecting the correct options here are key as it will determine profitability. Once you’ve completed this page you can then select “Next” at the bottom.
The second window that will appear is all about your ad set, this is where you will build your audience, include, and exclude customer personas, optimise for delivery including cost control and select your placements. It’s important to ensure that your goals are set correctly here, for example, if you have selected traffic campaign, make sure that you have chosen the correct location for the ad to send potential customers. If you’ve selected dynamic creative, this will open up a more custom way of re-targeting customers – there are a number of ways to build the perfect adverts to display on social media, if you’re trying ads for the first time, the best way is the use A/B testing to see what works and what doesn’t – although, please be cautious with your budgets as improperly managed social ads can put you at a negative revenue instead of a positive return! After this section has been completed, go ahead, and click “Next”.
The final stage of your ad submission for Facebook approval is the ad itself. On this final window you will upload what your potential customers will see based on your selected social media placements. Here you will look at Identity so which accounts you will be advertising through, ad setup and your tracking & pixel connection. You can again select from multiple options, single image or video, carousel, collection, these will be how your ad is laid out and displayed to your potential customers. Each of the selections can make or break your advert based on what you desired outcome of your advert is, for example, using still imagery can notify people, however, in our experience the best content is usually well-structured video. Facebook also puts content rules in place for ad submissions, one example would be if your advert content holds more than 20% text, Facebook may downgrade your advert and show it to less people meaning a much lower ROI. These are things to be aware of when you are following ad submission.
We have broken down some of the below headings to help with your submissions.
Media – Image, Video or Slideshow.
Primary Text – This is the advert copy that will appear above your picture on Facebook & below the image/video on Instagram.
Headline - this is a short amount of text that appears in a grey banner across your ad on Facebook, but doesn’t appear on Instagram.
Description – this is the tiny text under the Headline that appears in the grey banner.
Destination – what your desired outcome is, where are you sending the potential customer?
Website URL – The link to the page you’d like the ad to drive the traffic.
Display Link – if your link is long with lots of slug (in short: slug is the number of forward slashes displayed in a URL below is an example), you can shorten it in the ads dashboard and show your desired display link, for example you can enter the link to be displayed as 'thesecretwarehouse.co.uk' instead of 'thesecretwarehouse.co.uk/product/positivity/shop' etc.
Call to action – each advert will have its own relevant outcome; this could be Learn More or Shop Now. These are pre-set by Facebook and you cannot enter a custom one other than the ones supplied for use on the dropdown box.
In this section, you can also add translations if you so wish.
Lastly is tracking, are we tracking for web purchases, app downloads, landing page views? Then you will need to ensure that the Ads Manager can track your chosen outcomes through your website. You want to ensure that this is all connected and coded correctly as if it isn’t then all of your adverts will show at a loss and there will be no way of knowing if your ads are profitable.
In summary, ads can be super profitable if done well and the perfect way to boost your business activity – they should always be used alongside your usual activity and they are not going to make you millions overnight, but done properly, they can skyrocket your business revenue to new heights and grow your profit margins across your marketing efforts by integrating them alongside a great social/marketing strategy!