Facebook Ads Manager is one of the most powerful social media advertising platforms in the world, accounting for 18% of total digital advertising spend in 2023. With over 3 billion users across the globe, Facebook offers marketers a unique opportunity to engage their target audience across a portfolio of apps and services.
Facebook’s advertising has evolved a lot since it was first launched in 2007. New capabilities such as location targeting, custom audiences, and dynamic ads empower marketers with greater control over their advertising programs. But the breadth of features within Facebook Ads Manager also makes the platform more complex.
With average Facebook ad costs increasing significantly since 2019, and as marketing budgets are becoming more scrutinized, it’s important for paid media marketers to make the most of their spend. In this post, we’ll outline the steps you need to complete to create efficient and successful Facebook Ad campaigns.
One of the first things to define when creating a new Facebook Ads campaign is the campaign objective, which informs Facebook of the business objective you’re trying to accomplish with your campaign.
The customer journey encompasses multiple stages, and different advertising programs can be used to reach consumers at each stage. While certain campaigns are designed to increase brand awareness at the beginning of the customer journey, others are designed to drive high-intent users to purchase at the end of the journey.
Facebook currently offers six campaign objectives to choose from – Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App Promotion, Sales. When creating campaigns in Facebook Ad Manager, ensure you select the campaign objective that aligns with your campaign goal, as Facebook will optimize the ad delivery for the campaign objective selected.
Defining your campaign budget is one of the most important steps in the campaign creation process. Set your budget incorrectly, and you may run through it too quickly without any results to show for.
Facebook enables you to define campaign budget at two levels – the campaign level and the ad set level. Set your budget at the campaign level, and Facebook will automatically distribute your campaign budget to the ad sets within your campaign that have the greatest opportunity of achieving your campaign goal. The other option is to define a budget at the ad set level, which lets you specify how your budget is allocated across the ad sets in your campaign.
Campaign budgets are more simple to manage, and perform well when ad sets within the campaign are very similar. Ad set budgets, on the other hand, provide greater control over how your budget is spent throughout the campaign. If you have significant variation across your ad sets, such as different audience sizes or different optimization goals, defining budget at the ad set level allows you to specify how much will be spent on each ad set.
For both campaign and ad set budgets, Facebook allows you to decide between setting daily budget and lifetime budget. If you’d like to spend roughly the same amount per day, daily budgets allow you to define a target daily spend for your ads. Facebook aims to hit this daily budget on average over the course of a calendar week. If you’re flexible on the amount spent per day, lifetime budgets allow you to define the total budget you’re willing to spend on a campaign or ad set throughout its lifetime. If a lifetime budget is chosen, Facebook will allocate your budget to the best advertising opportunities available throughout the lifetime of your campaign.
Finally, it’s important to tell Facebook what success looks like for your campaign. ROAS goals, one of several bid strategy options offered in Facebook Ads manager, tell Facebook how much return you’re expecting to generate from a campaign, providing Ads Manager with guidance on how they should bid for your campaign at auction. Once ROAS goal is set, Facebook will “try to deliver against that over the campaign's lifetime, dynamically bidding as high as needed to maximize results.” While Facebook does not guarantee that they will hit the ROAS goal specified, setting a ROAS goal in Facebook Ads Manager will give Facebook guidance on how to bid for your ad placements during a campaign, decreasing the chances of runaway campaign costs and wasted spend.
To maximize your return on investment, you need to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time. There are numerous hacks you can use to refine your campaign targeting and get more out of your Facebook Ad programs.
Understand your audience with Audience Insights
Facebook Audience Insights provides aggregated demographic, interest, and lifestyle information about people connected to your Page. With this understanding, you can create content that resonates with your followers and easily find more people like the ones in your current audience. For example, Audience Insights might uncover that 75% of users that follow your brand also follow pages related to dogs, influencing you to incorporate dogs more in your campaign creative.
Increase flexibility with Custom Audiences
Facebook’s topic-based targeting makes it easy to reach users on their platform, but sometimes you want to power campaigns with your own data. This is where Custom Audiences come in. Custom Audiences allow you to use sources such as customer lists, first-party website or app data, or engagement from across Meta technologies to create segments of users who already know your business. Custom Audiences are especially powerful when used for retargeting campaigns, which re-engage existing customers and drive them to make additional or repeat purchases. Custom Audiences can also be used as the basis for Lookalike Audiences, in which Facebook creates an expanded list of potential customers that “look like” the existing customers in your Custom Audience.
Sharpen targeting with audience exclusions
Who you decide not to target with your Facebook Ad campaigns can be just as important as who you do target. Mis-targeted ads waste campaign budget, lowering ROAS and reducing the number of ads that can be shown to your ideal customers. Setting up audience exclusions allow you to prevent certain users from being included in your campaign, increasing campaign efficiency. Within Facebook Ads Manager, you can create audience exclusions based on interests, geographic, and demographics. For example, if you currently sell your products in the United States of America but aren’t currently able to ship to Canada, you can exclude advertisements from being shown to users in Canada.
Another great audience exclusion hack is to upload Custom Audiences and use them as custom exclusion on your campaigns. For example, you may upload a Custom Audience of customers that have made a purchase in the last 7 days, and exclude them from being shown ads promoting a new product offer.
Bonus: Use a real-time audience platform, such as WasteNot, to automatically update audience exclusion lists in real time. This makes it possible to remove customers from your advertising campaigns as soon as they’ve made a purchase, increasing return on ad spend and improving the customer experience.
Facebook offers a range of apps and services, all with different user experiences and behavioral patterns. When creating your campaign, select the ad placements that best align with your campaign creative and objective.
Campaigns with a strong visual offer will perform best on a primarily visual platform such as Instagram, and may be less engaging on a text-based platform such as Facebook Messenger. If you’re unsure of the best placement for your campaign, Facebook does provide an “Automatic Placements” option, which gives Facebook the flexibility to show ads in places they're likely to perform best.
As you get to know your audience, you may find that they’re more receptive to Facebook ads at certain times. B2B companies, for example, may choose to advertise on Facebook and Instagram during lunch breaks on weekdays, while eCommerce retailers may find their customers are more responsive to ads on weekends. If you’re not sure, Facebook Audience Insights provides data on when your audience is most active across Facebook platforms.
It’s important to note that ad scheduling is only currently available for campaigns and ad sets with a lifetime budget.
With so much time and money going into generating clicks with your Facebook Ads, it’s important to do everything you can to translate those clicks into conversions on your website and mobile app. To maximize the return of your Facebook Ad campaigns, it’s important to also invest in improving the landing page experience.
John Joe Smith, founder and CEO of WasteNot, is hosted by Tom Triscari, founder of Quo Vadis, for a Q&A conversation on the future of audience suppression.
Many advertisers waste up to 40% of their ad budgets due to inefficient targeting, and they aren't even aware of it. In this article, we'll walk through how brands can use modern audience suppression strategies to improve advertising efficiency and performance.
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WasteNot is the only platform focused on allowing marketers to activate and optimize real time ad exclusions across all biddable media.