Facebook Ads

Because of Facebook's issues in the past in regards to political ad campaigns, Facebook now has to show all the ads that are running on its platform.

Head over to Facebook's Ad Library, switch the toggle from Issues, elections or politics, to Search all, and type in the name of your competitor. Change the filter from your country (top right) to all if no ads are appearing.

This is the perfect place to get inspiration! Take a look at competitors around the world and take notes of all the awesome ways you can improve your ads.

My favourite is Radiant Plumbing and Air Conditioning. Take a look at their content on Facebook & their ads. They take a concept that most people will struggle to advertise and have so much fun with it. Check out this Terminator ad they did 😂

Before you begin launching your ads, first take a look at your funnel.

While only 1% of your market might know they need what you sell, and are ready to convert, the rest of the market is sitting at the awareness phase.

Take a company selling pillows for example. 1% of the market is ready at any time to buy a new pillow, but 30% of the market are searching "how to have a better night sleep." This much bigger section of the market is aware they have a problem but haven't yet tied it to your solution.

Mapping how a user might flow from awareness to conversion is a fantastic process to complete before you launch your ads.

And for companies on tighter budgets, start from the bottom up. Focus on the early adopters who are looking for the solution you provide. With the revenue you earn from them, build out content pieces and ads that start to focus on the rest of the market.

Webinar funnel: For more expensive or complicated items, start by sending people to a webinar. The goal is to add value and then sell the product or service. Take a look at how Intercom does this.

Lead Magnet: This is one you will have noticed a lot recently. This funnel directs users to a lead magnet (a piece of content in exchange for an email), which is then used to encourage them to buy the core offer. This is super effective because it creates a series of small micro-commitments and you can build trust as the user goes through the funnel.

One example of this is HubSpot's Website Grader. This tool offers a lot of value in exchange for your email address which they can then use to send you extra offers.

Like we said before, we build from the bottom of the funnel up. We focus first on our early adopters and use the revenue earned to validate our offer as we expand to the wider market.

What most people get wrong at this phase is they think that offering a free phone call or a form submission is valuable to the customer. It's not.

And most SaaS companies offer free trials. While these can work, there's much more you can do, especially if you offer a complicated or expensive service.

In the start-up world, you would have heard the phrase, do things that don't scale.

‍Airbnb offered free photography for their clients at the start. Their employees also stayed at most of the early customer's houses to help them generate revenue.

‍KnowYourTeam offers a free 30-minute chat with the CEO to help you onboard and become a better manager.

We turned our paid Growth Marketing Workshop into a free tool that anyone can use.

What can you do to help turn your offer into something that will blow your customers socks off? 🧦

While the offer is where the first 50% of problems can occur, the structure of your campaign is where the other 50% is bound to happen.

With a proper foundation and Facebook campaign structure, you can accelerate your results. Below are all the things you need to keep in mind when building out your Facebook campaign.

Before we dive in, note that experimenting and testing is essential! Ads only end up working 10% of the time, so the more you can test, the faster you can discover campaigns to scale.

Campaign Optimisation is still a new feature being rolled out by Facebook.

Where your ad sets optimise the budgets of your ads automatically, campaign optimisation optimises the budget of your ad sets.

From our experience, and from talking to others who have collectively managed more than $100 million in Facebook ad spend, this setting isn't good for launching new campaigns since it makes it harder to test.

It makes it easier for you to launch ads which is great for Facebook, but it's not quite there yet in terms of delivering results.

If however you have a campaign you know is working and you're looking to scale, then you can leave it on.

When choosing your campaign objective, 99% of you should be choosing conversions.

Note that Facebook needs at least 50 conversions a week to be able to make the most of its data and help you show your ads to the right people.

If there's no way you can get 50 conversions a week, try to optimise for traffic.

Note that you can hack this a little. If you're getting 10 purchases a week, switch to something further up the funnel like optimising for add-to-cart instead.

Since you'll have a lot more people adding the item to the cart, you can give Facebook the data it needs, and still optimise for a great audience fit.

When it comes to targeting, the best thing you can do is use the data you already have.

If you have a list of customers already, or users for your app, download that information, and upload the list into Facebook.

This allows Facebook to create a look-a-like audience which matches your current customers with other users on Facebook.

Doing this will save you 3 to 6-months of testing and optimisation.

If you don't have that many customers yet, why not try your email list instead? And data you can provide Facebook will give you a massive head-start.

If you're building a test campaign:
‍
✅ Campaign optimisation off,
✅ 5 - 6 ads in each ad set
✅ Audience size of 500k - 3 million for each ad set

If you're building a scale campaign:
‍
✅ Campaign optimisation ON,
✅ 1 to 2 ads in each ad set (the highest converts from the test campaign)
✅ Audience size of 5 - 30+ million in each ad set

The biggest benefit to using Facebook is its massive amount of data.

That's why we recommend to leave ad placements to automatic, unless you've got custom creative like for Instagram stories.

On top of that, we don't optimise for age or gender either.

If you've set up a strong combination of interests, or are targeting a look-a-like audience, then let Facebook do its thing!

It's important to note that Facebook is an auction house for media buyers. This means that you and I are going to be bidding against each other if we both want to target small business owners for example.

The best way to achieve more effective results is by ensuring your ad score is high. While media buyers are Facebook's main customer, if Facebook doesn't provide good user experience, then it's going to have no one to show its ads to.

Facebook evaluates all ads using a score called Total Value.

Total Value = User Value + bidding + estimated auction rate

User Value: The experience the Facebook user has after clicking the ad. Do they stick around or bounce off the website. How fast does the website load? Does the user convert? 

Bidding: This is what we can control on the technical side.

Estimated Action Rate: How are users engaging with your ad? Are they commenting and liking the ad? Are they hiding the ad? How does this ad make the users feel? Are they more likely to stick around on Facebook because of it, or less?

The best advice we can give is to leave the ads as much as you can. Every time you make a little adjustment, it starts the learning process all over again.

The only thing you need to do is pause the ads that aren't performing very well, and increase the budgets on those that are.

Then when your testing is complete, launch another test campaign and scale the winning ads from the previous test.

If you scale an ad to quickly, it can also ruin the optimisation so we recommend that you increase the budget by 50% max once a week.

Your Facebook Ad Account is full of so much rich data and learning.

We recommend that you always maintain one core campaign that's doing well while testing the others. Spend 80% on the core campaign, and 20% on the tests.

At a minimum, you'll need to spend $7 a data to get any amount of meaningful data, and the more you can spend, the faster you can achieve incredible results.

When the tests fail, don't delete them! Simply turn them off. You and new members of the team can learn from this months into the future about what worked, and what didn't.

Also if you launch a campaign that flops, you can always restart an older campaign that was doing better.

By following these simple steps, you'll have an award-winning, revenue generating Facebook campaign in no time!