Content

Chapter 1
How Do Facebook Ads Actually 7
Work? Here’s What You Need to
Know
Anna Crowe, Assistant Editor,
Search Engine Journal

Chapter 2
How to Choose the Right 44
Facebook Ad Objective for Your
Goals
Amy Bishop, Owner & Marketing
Consultant at Cultivative, LLC

Chapter 3
4 Powerful Facebook Ads 85
Targeting Options
Susan Wenograd,Paid Media Reporter,
Search Engine Journal
How to Track & Optimize 102
Your Facebook Buys
Suchi Sajja, Social Media Manager,
CallRail (SEJ Partner)

Chapter 4
10 Tips for Facebook Creatives 132
Tim Jensen, Campaign Manager, Clix Marketing

Chapter 5
How to Set the Budget for Your 160
Facebook Ad
Michelle Morgan, Director of Client Services,
Clix Marketing

Chapter 6
5 Reasons Your Facebook Ads 184
Aren’t Converting & How to
Improve Them
Kristopher Jones, Founder / CEO, [Link]
The Role of Ads in the 204
Customer Journey
Stephanie Mansueto, Head of Content at
Rock Content (SEJ Partner)

Chapter 7
14 Facebook Remarketing 220
Strategies To Try
Amy Bishop, Owner & Marketing Consultant at
Cultivative, LLC

Chapter 8
12 Facebook Ads Features 256
Every Marketer Should Know
Andrea Taylor, Outreach Manage,
Clix Marketing
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Chapter 1

How Do Facebook Ads

Actually Work? Here’s What
You Need to Know

Anna Crowe
Assistant Editor,
Search Engine Journal
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Let’s just get to the elephant in the room.

Facebook ads are struggling.

Facebook is fighting a lawsuit against their

reach metrics. And, Facebook’s personalized ad
campaign isn’t going well to combat Apple’s App
Tracking Transparency (ATT).

Well, it’s not great.

But, the truth is that Facebook ads actually work.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

With Facebook’s updates like exclusion controls,

new Conversions API that allows you to pull data
directly from your server into Ads Manager, and
transparency to the data Facebook is collecting,
this social network doesn’t show any signs of
slowing down.

Ahead, I’ll explain how and why Facebook ads

work, different types of Facebook ads, and how to
get started creating your first Facebook ad.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

So, Do Facebook Ads Really

Work?
The short answer: Yes. Facebook ads do really work.

Want proof?

In 30 days, this app generated 7,044 installs after

spending $9,821 on Facebook ads.

BionicGym generated 9x ROI from their Facebook

ads.

This company spent $300,774.82 to earn $3.64

million in revenue from Facebook ads.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

But, there’s a caveat, Facebook ads work

when your business is the right fit for
Facebook ads. Depending on your industry,
you want to consider if Facebook aligns with
your business model.

Facebook ads are not always the answer

for more traffic, clients, or sales. If you’re
a business with a low cost of entry like an
ecommerce pushing products or a SaaS
that’s driving sign-ups, it can be difficult to
find success.

If you’re unsure, start small. Stick to a cheap

$5-$10 per day ad spend for 1-2 weeks to
test.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

A Quick Background of Facebook’s

Ad Algorithm

Originally, when Facebook launched its ad

algorithm, it was based on an auction. It gave
priority to the highest bid.

However, in 2018, Mark Zuckerberg announced that

Facebook would be shifting to prioritize “meaningful
interactions.”

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook shifted more toward the user experience

model while integrating the auction.

The auction is based on:

Ad rank.

Advertiser bid.

Estimated action rates.

Ad relevancy and quality.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

However, it is still unclear exactly how

Facebook’s ad algorithm works.

Eric Sodomka, research scientist at

Facebook that focuses on auctions shared
his first-party insights on how Facebook’s
ad algorithm works.

You’ll want to watch this:

Within that presentation, Eric shares how

Facebook evaluates content.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

On the left, you’ll see the probability that this

specific user will click any ad.

On the right side, you’ll see the probability that

a specific user will click this ad.

Facebook uses this predictive data to decide

the likelihood that someone will take an action.
With Facebook’s flexible analytics architecture,
they do test various models outside of this.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of it,

you’ll want to dive into this research paper,
Practical Lessons from Predicting Clicks on Ads
at Facebook by Joaquin Quinonero Candela,
the Director of Applied Machine Learning at
Facebook Research.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

6 Types of Facebook Ads

There are six types of Facebook ad formats:

Image

File type: JPG or PNG

Resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels
File size: 30MD

Facebook image ads allow users to create visuals

with static images to drive action.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Here are my secrets to optimizing your

Facebook image ads:

Show examples of customers using your product.

Try to avoid text. Remember, less is more.

Stick to a consistent theme if you’re running multiple ads.

Always use high resolution images.

Video

File type: MP4, MOV, or GIF

Resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels
Fie size: 4GB
Video duration: 1 second to 241 minutes

Facebook video ads give businesses a chance

to showcase their brand in sound and motion.
These can be seen in-stream, feed, or stories.
You also have the option to create a slideshow.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Here are my secrets to optimizing

your Facebook video ads:

Showcase a unique feature, product, or

service. You want to tell your story.

Keep the audience engaged with 15

seconds or less.

Stick to one message per video. Ask

yourself: What action do you want them to
take?

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Carousel

File type: JPG or PNG

Video file type: MP4, MOV, or GIF
Resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels
Number of cards: 2-10
Image file size: 30MB
Video file size: 4GB

Facebook carousel ads allow you to display

up to 10 images or a video in a single ad. Each
image receives its own link.

Here are my secrets to optimizing

your Facebook carousel ads:

Choose a different product on each image

pair, each product image with its own
landing page link.

Tell a compelling story that pushes people

to swipe for a more interactive format.

Explain a step-by-step process of how a

product or service works.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Instant Experience

Image type: JPG or PNG

Video file type: MP4 or MOV
Size: 1080 pixels x 1920 pixels
Images supported: Up to 20 images

Instant Experience Facebook ads pair with

collection ads. Users can watch videos, swipe
through carousels, and shop for products in
your catalog.

Here are my secrets to optimizing

your Facebook collection ads:

Try to not autoplay two videos at once. It

could cause multiple playback issues.

Skip the captions for videos with Instant

Experience ads.

If you’re using the title-to-pan feature, add

a CTA to let users know they can tilt to see
more.

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Collection

Image type: JPG or PNG

Video file type: MP4, MOV, or GIF
Resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels
Image file size: 30MB
Video file size: 4GB

Facebook collection ads are paired with Instant

Experience ads. The collection ad serves a cover photo
or video and four product photos. When a user clicks
on a photo, a landing page pops-up to drive that
Instant Experience feature.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Here are my secrets to optimizing

your Facebook collection ads:

You can allow Facebook to

dynamically choose which
products you want shown. It
saves time in the long-run.

Try to stick to product

categories with more than 50
products. Facebook forces
you to pair a minimum of
4 products, but with the
dynamically chosen options,
Facebook will serve the most
popular or highest likelihood
to be purchased.

Always include a URL

parameter to track ad data.

Bonus tip: If you’re unsure

how to choose the right
Facebook ad objective for
your goals, check out Amy
Bishop’s article.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Here’s How to Create an Ad on

Facebook With Step-by-step
Instructions
First things first, before you can create an ad on
Facebook, you’ll want to create a Facebook Ads
Manager account (if you have a business page).

If you’re not sure if you have an account, try to log

into Facebook Ads Manager.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 1: Choose a Campaign

Objective
Facebook gives you options to select from the
following goals.

If you’re unsure how to choose the right

Facebook ad objective for your goals, check out
Amy Bishop’s article.

For the purposes of this article, I selected traffic

as my goal.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 2: Name Your Campaign

After you select your campaign objective, you
want to name your campaign along with the
ad set and ad.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 3: Complete Campaign

Details
After you name your campaign, Facebook will
give you more campaign details to complete.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Here’s a quick breakdown

of each:

Special ad categories: If your ad

relates to credit, employment,
house, social issues, elections,
or politics, you must select this
option. Due to restraints of certain
countries, there are different steps
Facebook must follow to be legally
compliant.

Campaign spending limit:

Similar to budget optimization,
campaign spending limit stops
delivering your ad once that limit
is reached. Facebook will send you
a notification to let you know the
limit has been reached so you’ll
have the option to keep it running
if you’d like.

A/B tests: Facebook allows ad

managers to test creatives,
audience, and placement to
uncover the best performing
campaign. If you select this option,
Facebook will automatically make
this the A of the A/B test.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Campaign budget optimization:

This allows you to set a budget
at a campaign level. In the past,
Facebook only allowed users to set
this at an ad set level so it caused a
lot of complications when allocating
budgets to different audiences. I’d
recommend using this if you’re starting
a campaign in a learning phase, or
easing your campaign management,
or if you’re targeting to get more
conversions or a lower cost-per-
ad. If you’re targeting a super niche
audience, you may want to avoid this.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 4: Choose Budget, Schedule,

Audience, and Delivery

This is my favorite step of creating Facebook

ads. It’s where the research and the data
begin to come together.

First, you can choose where you want to drive

traffic.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Then, you can toggle dynamic creative

on if you want Facebook to automatically
generate variations depending on the
audience most likely to engage.

You’ll want to pair this with automatic

placements that I’ll cover below.

These are my new favorite ad sets from

Facebook. Wordstream saw 60% more
conversions after using dynamic creative ads
in just 30 days.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

You can also use this to rotate in an offer style

ad feature. This allows you to send automatic
reminders, discount codes, and more.

Swish used this to promote a 50% off discount

at 7-Eleven stores and saw an increase of
66% of offline sales.

Next, you can choose your budget and

schedule.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Followed by audience creation.

Until you get down to the placements,

optimization, and delivery at the bottom.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

One element you’ll want to remember to

check is how you get charged for these
Facebook ads.

Facebook is tricky and hides this all the way

at the bottom.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 5: Choose Ad Format

You’re on the final stretch! On the last page of

the Facebook ad set-up, you have the option
to select your format of how you’d like to
structure your ad for users.

This is where ad type knowledge from above

comes in handy.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 6: Upload Creatives

Now, you can upload your media, add ad

copy, and a landing page URL.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 7: Select Languages

If you’re a global company or a local

company targeting other dialects, you will
want to add your own transcripts to your ads.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Step 8: Set Up Tracking and

URL Parameters
This last step is the most important step. You
want to always track your data and select a
URL parameter to understand how your ads
are converting and what’s motivating users
to click.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook Advertising Is Just

Getting Started
Due to the growing lawsuits aimed at Facebook
ads and Apple’s stance on security, Facebook is
going to look for more ways to generate revenue.

Keep your eyes peeled for Facebook Group ads.

Facebook has been silently testing these since
late 2019. And, their $10 million Super Bowl ad was
dedicated to Facebook Groups. I smell a new ad
type baking in the oven.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

With a bigger drive for user experience and more

lawsuits, Facebook is going to drop core targeting
options slowly. But, with this comes more ad options
and more drive to video.

Until there’s more information from Facebook,

businesses should continue to work to understand
their customers and how to engage with them best.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Chapter 2

How to Choose the Right

Facebook Ad Objective for
Your Goals

Amy Bishop
Owner & Marketing
Consultant at Cultivative,
LLC
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook Ad objectives are the backbone of any

Facebook campaign: the objective controls your
bidding options, your ad unit options, and the way
your campaigns are optimized.

There are 13 campaign objectives to choose from

but not much supporting content to help make
that selection.

Because of this, getting started with Facebook

can be a little bit overwhelming.

I remember back when I was setting up my first

Facebook Ads account – I searched for tips or
guides that would help me to determine which
objective was the best fit for my use-case.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Unfortunately, I came up empty-handed.

What I found was:

Facebook’s own guide

leaves a lot to be desired.
It gives a short overview of
each objective and loosely
groups each objective into
a single area of the funnel. If
you’re a glutton for the type
of punishment that requires
you to try to extrapolate the
next steps from next-to-no-
information, you can find
their guide here. Suffice to
say, it hasn’t been updated in
a long time – at least not in a
meaningful way.

Any other guide that I found

was just a repurposed
version of Facebook’s guide.
Sometimes with better
graphic design but still not
helpful.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook groups separate their

objectives into three parts of the
funnel:

Awareness.
Consideration.
Conversion.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

While they’re not wrong that the campaign

objectives that they’ve grouped into each funnel
stage could play a positive role in their respective
sections, it’s also really oversimplified.

If you’ve run media before, it’s easy to overthink it

– without much solid documentation, it’s hard to
validate the decision.

If you’re here, you’re probably as I was – searching

for more information about how to use each
objective to your advantage without settling for
what might seem most obvious.

It’s also really easy to under-think it. The

conversion objective, from the accounts that I’ve
audited and onboarded, appears to be the most
popular by far.

It’s no surprise really – given that the objective is

called “conversions” and that’s what we all want.
Don’t get me wrong – I love this objective – but
using it in the wrong context can be a really
expensive mistake.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

A Guide to Each Facebook Ad

Objective: When to Use Each &
Your Bidding Options
1. Store Traffic Objective
The store traffic objective isn’t exactly as it sounds.
This objective is really geared toward chains.

If you wanted to drive local awareness for multiple

brick-and-mortar locations or to help people
contact the right location, this objective could be a
good option.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

According to Facebook Ads Help Center :

The store traffic objective is available to any business with
multiple physical stores, restaurants, dealerships or other
places of business. You can use this objective to reach
people within a set distance of each of your locations and
help them find or contact the location closest to them.

With the store traffic objective, you can create

customized ads for each of your locations and
deliver them to people nearby to theoretically
increase store visits and sales.

Right now, store visits reporting is in testing

which means that not all advertisers that have
access to the Store Traffic objective have
access to store visits reporting and optimization.

Instead, most Store Traffic campaigns will

optimize for daily unique reach by default,
which is what makes the objective name a bit
misleading.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

For those that have access to store visits

reporting and optimization, Facebook
uses a combination of data points to
report on store traffic, including:

Information from people with location

services enabled on their phone.

Satellite imagery and mapping data from

third parties.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook attempts to filter out people that

they believe are employees. It admits that
its methodology isn’t perfect, so they use the
information to extrapolate results and then they
attempt to verify it through polls to validate the
accuracy of their measurement and extrapolation.

All that said, because the results are estimates,

the more data that Facebook has, the better. For
smaller retailers, this data is more likely to be less
accurate.

If you have just one store location and want to try

to drive in-store visits, Facebook suggests using
the daily unique reach objective (that’s the default
optimization KPI for the Store Traffic objective
anyway).

Another option could be to use offline events to

track in-store purchases, which could lend itself to
other campaign objectives.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

2. Reach Objective
The reach objective is going to try to maximize
the number of people that see your ads and the
number of times that they will see your ads.

Plain and simple, the goal of this objective is to

try to maximize exposure.

One of the benefits of this campaign type is that

you can set frequency controls, which is often
not the case with Facebook campaigns. You
can control the frequency by defining X number
of impressions per X number of days.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

With the Reach objective, you can pay per

impression (CPM) or per “Reach” (CPM but
based upon your defined frequency controls).

The Reach objective is often thought of as being

top of funnel. This could potentially be a cheap
way to get a lot of exposure for your brand but,
it can be a little difficult to quantify – especially
if you have a sales cycle that is long enough
that Facebook may not accurately track view-
through conversions.

Even top-of-funnel, I prefer to have a metric to

quantify (beyond impressions) to ensure that
we’re beginning to get some high-level traction
with prospects and, more importantly, to begin
to build audiences to use lower in the funnel.

That said, I’ve had success in using the Reach

objective for remarketing, as you can define
frequency, you know it’s a low funnel audience,
and it can be cheaper than the conversion
objective.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

3. Brand Awareness Objective

The Brand Awareness objective is geared toward
driving ad recall.

With many of the objectives, you can choose

different options for how you bid. With this
objective, you don’t get to choose – Facebook is
going to serve your ads to the people that they
believe will remember seeing them and you’ll be
charged based upon CPM.

Facebook reserves the right to survey your

audience to try to improve their delivery
optimization.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

As with the Reach objective, I don’t love to

optimize for impressions. This isn’t an objective
that I use often for that reason. That said, if
you have a brand without much awareness, it
could be worth testing.

Side Note: I realize I’ve now said that I don’t

really like to use either of the two objectives
that are in the “Awareness” bucket for the top
of funnel initiatives. Am I saying that I don’t run
top of funnel campaigns?

Not at all!

But this is exactly the purpose of this post: I

think you’ll find there are better ways to use
the objectives beyond just their suggested
purposes.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

4. Traffic Objective
The Traffic objective is most useful if your goal is
to get people to your site or app.

I like the traffic objective for advertisers that

have a long buyer journey and likely won’t
convert prospects on the first interaction as
it is often less expensive than the Conversion
objective (not always – but we’ll get to that
later) and it still gets people to the website.

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This allows you to start educating prospects and build
remarketing lists at the same time. This is especially
valuable if you don’t have videos to use for a video view
campaign.

With the Traffic objective, you have a few different bidding

options. By default, the setting is to bid for “link clicks,” which
means Facebook will deliver your ads to the people that it
believes is most likely to click on them.

By default, it’s a CPM bid model, even though your target is

link clicks, but you have the option to change it to pay per
link clicks.

However, you don’t have the option to set the CPC –

Facebook automatically optimizes for the lowest CPC or
CPM, whichever bidding option you choose.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

I highly recommend updating the bidding

defaults – I’ll come back to that but first, the
other options. You can alternatively opt to bid
on:

Landing Page Views: Facebook will deliver your

ads to people that it believes are most likely to
click on your ad’s link and load the website or
instant experience.

Impressions: Facebook will deliver your ads

to people as many times as possible. (Note
frequency will likely be high.)

Daily Unique Reach: Facebook will deliver your

ads to people up to once per day (meaning:
Facebook will try to reach as many people as
possible).

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

The reason that I don’t like to bid on link clicks is

that it doesn’t really mean that you are getting
traffic.

If you review your “link click” stats versus your

landing page views, you’ll find that the numbers
are often vastly different.

There’s a variety of reasons for this – one being

that people that click don’t always wait for the
site to load. For this reason, link clicks are much
less valuable to me than landing page views.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

5. Engagement Objective
I personally find engagement campaigns to be
underrated. (Hear me out!)

The goal of these campaigns is to drive

engagement. I know it sounds like a vanity
metric. Facebook will show your ads to the
people in your audience that are most likely to
engage.

Now – an engagement campaign likely isn’t

going to convert people. It can – I’ve seen it –
but it typically isn’t best suited for that.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Rather, the engagement campaign

can serve as:
A cheap way to build a
remarketing pool.

A way to build social proof.

I especially like it for the latter. Then, after we’ve

built social proof on the ad, I take the same
ad (using the ad ID) and I plug it into other
campaigns.

The result is that we now have ads with a lot of

engagement that are plugged into campaign
objectives that are better for driving the funnel.

With the Post Engagement objective, you can

choose to optimize for post engagement,
impressions, or reach.

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6. Lead Generation Objective

I’m a big fan of the lead generation campaign
because it is really, really versatile.

Facebook suggests using this objective in the

consideration stage but I find that it can really be
used in any stage of the funnel – with the right
content.

One of the best things about the Lead Generation

objective is that you can capture email addresses
to start to build up your email marketing efforts in
tandem with your paid social efforts.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Here’s how I suggest using it:

Top of Funnel or Low Intent

Prospecting Audiences:
to drive downloads for
awareness level content, all
while building your email list.

Mid-funnel: to drive
downloads in exchange for
mid-funnel content.

Low Funnel or High Intent

Audiences: to drive quote
or pricing requests or to
drive coupons or access to
promotions.

I’ve also seen the Lead

Generation objective work as a
means to drive quote requests
from low intent prospecting
audiences but, they (unsurprisingly) seem to have lower close
rates, so I don’t recommend using it for that.

If you have the content, I highly recommend testing out this

objective. It can be incredibly cost-effective.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

7. Video Views Objective

The Video Views campaign is another one of my
very favorites. Facebook recommends using it in
the consideration stage.

I find that I typically like it best for Top-of-Funnel

campaigns but, with the right content, it can also
be useful for mid-funnel campaigns.

The beauty of the Video Views objective is that you

optimize for video views and those are typically
really inexpensive, comparative to other objectives.

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How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

With good creative, you can also see a decent

click-through-rate, which then means that not
only are you driving traffic, as you could do with
many other objectives, but you’re first educating
them with the video content so they are that
much more informed before they even arrive
on-site.

For one client, I compared a Video View objective

campaign with a Traffic campaign, both having
targeted the exact same audience.

I found that the number of landing page views

was nearly the same but yet the cost per landing
page view was cheaper with the Video View
campaign.

So, to summarize: the cost per landing page

view was cheaper and they also had the added
benefit of having watched the video. Win-win!

You can also build audiences off of video views,

so there are a ton of ways to use this objective to
tee yourself up for lower funnel campaigns.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

With video view campaigns, you can

optimize for:

ThruPlay: Facebook will optimize for prospects

that watch your whole video or up to 15 seconds,
whichever is shorter.

10-second Video Views:

Facebook will optimize for
prospects that will watch at
least 10 seconds of your video.

2-second Continuous Video

Views: Facebook will optimize
for 2 continuous seconds or
more.

You can opt to be

charged for impressions
or for ThruPlays.

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8. Messenger
Messenger campaigns are ideal for engagement.
If your prospects are likely to require certain pieces
of information before converting, then messenger
campaigns may be ideal.

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 How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

When creating your messenger

ad within Facebook, you have a
few options:

Create your own custom

welcome message.

Use a standard welcome

message from a template.

Use an automated chat.

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With a welcome message, you have an option

to pre-populate actions for your prospects, such
as the option to select one of a few FAQ or other
requests that they can click on to receive an
automated response.

With an automated chat, you can collect

information from prospects prior to routing them
to the correct place for a response. For instance,
you might ask their email or their ZIP code.

Where possible, Facebook can help pre-

populate their answers to make for a better
experience.

You can also ask short answer questions or give

them multiple choice answers to choose from.
There are a lot of different ways and reasons to
use Messenger campaigns. In some cases, you
may prefer to use a chatbot to help manage
those campaigns instead. Check out this post for
tips.

Messenger campaigns are automatically

optimized for the people that are most likely to
message you. You can set a bid cap.

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9. Catalog Sales
The Catalog objective is meant for ecommerce
advertisers that have a catalog connected to their
business manager.

One of the most popular functions of this

campaign objective is the ability to run dynamic
remarketing. It can also be used for other purposes,
though; such as cross-sell, upsell and even
prospecting.

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With this objective, Facebook makes it

really easy to set parameters for:

Which product set should be

used.

Which audience should see

the ad.

Other basic preferences

(such as cookie pool length;
whether items were viewed,
added to cart or neither;
and exclusions) that the
advertiser might want to
define.

Product sets can be

defined in a number of
ways, including but not
limited to:

Price.

Brand.

Product type.

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If you’re an ecommerce marketer, I highly

suggest giving this campaign objective a test,
especially if you plan to run a remarketing
campaign.

There’s quite a bit of flexibility in what you

can optimize for conversion events, clicks, or
impressions. Depending on what you choose to
optimize for, you’ll have different bidding options.

If you choose to optimize for conversion events

then you’re able to choose which one (Add to
Cart, Purchase, etc.) You can then choose to
optimize for the lowest cost conversion or set a
target cost to optimize for.

If you choose to optimize for link clicks or

impressions, Facebook will optimize for the
lowest cost of each, respectively, and you can
also choose to set a bid cap.

If eligible, you’ll be able to optimize for value

which tells Facebook to optimize for a certain
ROAS.

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10. Conversions
Ah, the Conversion objective.

This is probably the most widely used objective

because the name is synonymous with nearly
everyone’s goals. I’m not bashing the Conversion
objective – I love it – but it has a time and a place.

A Conversion objective campaign is going to

do everything it can to optimize for as many
conversions as it can.

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So, the main pitfall is when clients try to use this

campaign objective to convert high-funnel/low-
intent prospects on a high-intent conversion
type, especially with products that require a high
degree of consideration.

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The Conversion objective works best in

scenarios where:

The audience is low-funnel and ready to

convert. (Remarketing could be an example.)

The audience is high-funnel but the product

or service requires little consideration. (Maybe
the product has a low purchase price, for
instance.)

The audience is high-

funnel and the conversion
we are optimizing toward
is also high-funnel. (For
instance, optimizing toward
an informational micro-
conversion, instead of a
purchase.)

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The conversion objective needs data in

order to be able to best optimize itself,
so it’s important that when using this
objective:

You don’t segment audiences

too far to the point that the
algorithm doesn’t have
enough data to learn from.

You don’t set such a lofty

conversion type that it rarely
happens within the audience
targeted and the algorithm
doesn’t have enough data
to learn from. If you find your
campaigns are struggling
with this, consider creating
a micro-conversion just one
step up that you can optimize
toward (e.g., test optimizing
toward Add-to-Cart instead
of Purchase). The additional
data volume will help
Facebook to make better
decisions to get a better
ROAS in the long run.

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Don’t let any of this deter you from using the

Conversion objective – just keep in mind that it
will work best if you set it up for success.

With the Conversion objective, you’ll be able to

set the conversion you’d like to optimize toward
at the ad set level. You can choose to optimize
for lowest cost conversions or for target cost (a
target CPL that you’d like to achieve).

Ultimately, you’ll be charged a CPM but

Facebook’s algorithms will work to optimize
toward the bidding objective of your choice.

If eligible, you’ll be able to optimize for value, in

place of lowest cost or target cost conversions.
Optimizing for value tells Facebook to optimize
for a certain ROAS. If you prefer, you can optimize
toward impressions, link clicks, or daily unique
reach but it isn’t recommended.

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11. Event Response Objective

This one is pretty self-explanatory and unique in
its purpose. The Event Response objective is great
for promoting an event that you’ve created on
Facebook in an effort to try to drive awareness and
attendance of an event.

With an Event Response objective, you can choose

to optimize for event responses, impressions, post
engagement, or daily unique reach.

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12. Page Likes Objective

This objective is super straightforward. The Page
Likes objective can be used to drive more… well,
likes. This is only available for your Facebook page
(it isn’t available for Instagram).

With this objective, you can only optimize for page

likes but you can choose to bid per impression or
per page like. You also have the option to set a bid
cap.

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13. App Install Objective

App install campaigns are great for driving people
to install your app but also for driving app events.

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You can choose to optimize for:

App Installs.

Retention (which means Facebook is trying to

identify the people that will be most likely to
open your app on day 2 or 7 – your choice –
after having installed the app).

App events (which means Facebook will try

to identify people that are
most likely to complete the
selected event.).

Link Clicks.

Note: you can optimize

for app traffic and app
conversions through other
campaign objectives but
this is the only campaign
type that allows you to
optimize for app installs.

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Testing Different Objectives

I’m all for thinking outside of the Facebook
Objective boxes.

No doubt the intention of creating these objectives

was to try to make it simple and easy for
advertisers to determine which objective to use at
each stage of the funnel.

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The reality, though, is that many of these

objectives work in other areas of the funnel – even,
at times, better than objectives designed for said
parts of the funnel.

You won’t know unless you test.

For that reason, if you’re on the fence about

which objective to use, pick out a few different
campaign objectives to test against each other
for a specified goal and determine which is more
successful at achieving the predetermined goal.

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Chapter 3

4 Powerful Facebook Ads

Targeting Options

Susan Wenograd
Paid Media Reporter,
Search Engine Journal
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook has figured something out: a lot of

times, folks don’t want to leave their platform.
As users spend more time in their News Feed, and
Facebook continues to expand into new areas, it
opens up a whole new ecosystem of behaviors
that can be targeted.

This trend has started with the Engagement

Remarketing options that are now available.

Sadly, these are still vastly underused on many

accounts. They can be a goldmine not only
for remarketing but also for creating lookalike
audiences and moving users through a sales
funnel.

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All of this targeting is possible before they even get

to your site!

This can be extremely effective for brands

that have a lot of social interaction, as well as
businesses that may not have micro-conversions
on their site, substandard landing pages, or
anything else that creates challenges around
remarketing or solid Lookalike audience creation.

Let’s look at some of the most powerful ones that

you can use starting right now.

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Where to Find Engagement

Options
These options are all in the Audience section of Ads
Manager.

Create a new Custom Audience, and choose

“Engagement” as your option:

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Clicking that reveals the treasure trove of options

you have to target people based on their
Facebook actions.

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Power Option 1: Video

Behavior Remarketing
Within the Engagement options, choosing Video
gives you a small screen with a drop-down for the
behavior you want to isolate:

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Once you pick the behavior you want to create an

Audience from, you can also choose the length of
time to include, and then the specific video.
Why is this great? Because you can create a
content funnel based on what the user has viewed.

Let’s say you create an Audience of users who

viewed 25% of your how-to video on building a
deck. You could then follow up with a carousel ad
of tools that are featured in the video.

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Or, if you want to promote more content, you

could show a part 2 to the original video, and then
follow that one up with something sales-focused.

As you build the Audience you choose, you can

create a Lookalike off them as well. That way, as
you give Facebook more data it can find other
users in your target demo who are most likely to
watch your video, making that targeting more
exact.

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Power Option 2:
Lead Ad Engagement
Lead ads are a great way to drive building your
email list for relatively low cost.

These ad units allow users to submit things like their

name, email, and many other fields of your choice
within the unit, without having to leave and go to a
landing page.

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There are several options for Engagement targeting

based on their interaction with your lead ad unit:

This can open up a few tactics.

You can remarket to users who opened the form

but didn’t submit it, or maybe you want to test
showing a remarketing ad to users who opened
and submitted with a more sales-oriented
promotion message.

This is also a prime opportunity to create more

lookalikes that you can use to further your lead
gathering: create a lookalike audience of users who
opened and submitted the form.

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Power Option 3:
Page Engagement
The name of this one is a little misleading; it cites
your page, but actually also applies to the ads you
create or messages sent to your page:

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If you tend to get a lot of social interaction on

your posts, this can be a great way to continue
interacting with users who took the time to interact
with you. The option to interact with users who
sent a message to your Page is also intriguing, as
it coincides with the ability to have ads drive to
Messenger to start those conversations in the first
place.

One of the biggest things on my wish list is tied to

this particular option, which you can read about a
little further down.

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Power Option 4:
Instagram Business Profile
Interaction
This option is a nice crossover, especially for
businesses that may have a healthy Instagram
following, but are struggling to replicate it on
Facebook.

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Much like the Page options on the Facebook side,

this allows you to create ads based on Facebook
behaviors.

This is also highly effective for brands that are

focused on images, such as apparel, allowing them
to use their fan base on Instagram to drive their
messaging and targeting on Facebook.

Combined with other interests, you can get

targeted with a combination, like a Lookalike
audience plus a makeup interest for a makeup
brand’s ads, for example.

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The Wished-For Options

Here are three options I would love to see
from Facebook!

The ability to choose which

piece of content/which
post you want to create
the Custom Audience for
when it comes to post/
ad engagements. Right
now it just applies to every
post, but there are so many
possibilities for content
targeting if the advertiser
can choose which pieces of
content the user has already
viewed. We can choose the
specific video we want to
create the audience around,
so I’m hopeful this option will
expand to posts/ads.

The ability to target based

on what type of interaction
a user had with a post or
ad. Did they like it? Love it?
Comment? There have been

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screenshots circulating that there’s a beta test based

on users who shared your content, so I think they’re on
the way to having this as an option, but it would be a
super-cool option to have!

A way to categorize or tag your

content within the interface, so
you could easily create larger
groups for remarketing. So
maybe you tag things based on
“how-tos” or “sales messaging,”
and then you can easily push
out messaging you know
those categories of content
consumers are going to be
interested in.

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Summary
Really, with all the data Facebook Ads has, the sky’s
the limit. The options outlined here (and the others
in there) are already powerful on their own.

Test them out and find what works best for you,
and be ready for the newer iterations that are sure
to show up!

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How to Track & Optimize

Your Facebook Buys

Suchi Sajja
Social Media Manager
CallRail (SEJ Partner)
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook is the world’s most popular social

media channel, boasting a staggering
2.7 million monthly active users. As such,
it represents an unmissable opportunity
for marketers. And with 94% of Facebook’s
annual revenue coming from mobile
advertising alone, it’s a particularly potent
channel if you’re focused on driving calls to
your business.

However, this isn’t as simple as setting up a

campaign, pressing go, and watching the
leads flood in.

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Facebook advertising is becoming more

competitive than ever before. Companies
are aware of the channel’s promise, yet
many are left unclear about its ROI.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. You

can flip the script on this common narrative
by using CallRail to track and optimize your
Facebook ad spend – helping you take
control of your Facebook ad strategy. Let’s
take a closer look.

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How to Track Your

Facebook Advertising
There are two primary ways you can track
your Facebook advertising efforts within
the CallRail platform: source-level and
visitor-level tracking.

Source-Level Tracking

Source-level call tracking assigns one

phone number per marketing campaign.
This means that when a prospect calls
your business, you can directly track them
to the specific marketing campaign that
drove them to pick up the phone.

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As a result, source-level tracking helps you

easily prove Facebook ad ROI – directly
linking conversions to the Facebook Ads that
brought prospects to your business.

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What’s more, the CallRail platform goes

beyond simply stating, “X amount of calls
came through from Facebook.” By including
specific call tracking numbers – one
for mobile, one for desktop, and one for
Facebook’s Call Now button (their version of
click-to-call) – you can precisely track which
types of ads drove the most calls.

For instance, you can clearly see if you’re

generating more calls from mobile ads
than from desktop ads, meaning you should
continue investing in this strategy going
forward.

But calls aren’t everything. With 49.7% of

companies reporting that forms are their
biggest lead generation channel, you

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also need to analyze form submissions.

Fortunately, CallRail’s Form Tracking
capabilities allow you to see which ads drove
customers to your business, and ultimately,
led them to fill out a form.

By using Call Tracking and Form Tracking in

unison, you can begin to holistically track your
Facebook advertising efforts’ true impact.

Visitor-Level Tracking

If you want to gain a more granular view of

your Facebook Ads’s performance, simply
leverage CallRail’s visitor-level call tracking
capabilities. But wait. How does this work?

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If you want to gain a more granular view of

your Facebook Ads’s performance, simply
leverage CallRail’s visitor-level call tracking
capabilities. But wait. How does this work?

It’s simple. CallRail uses first-party cookies

to track all of your website visitors on an
individual level. These cookies not only show
you which webpages a prospect visited, but
more importantly, they specify the Facebook
Ad that drove them to your website in the first
place.

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Visitor-level call tracking lets

you dive into each individual
caller to find out:

Their name, phone number, and location.

The source of the call (you set this yourself, so

they might be named ‘Facebook Ads Mobile,’
‘Facebook Ads desktop,’ ‘Facebook Ads
Retargeted,’ etc.).

The caller’s timeline: any previous calls and

texts from their number, tags that categorize
the nature of each of these interactions,
and any additional notes from previous
interactions/conversations.

Visitor session data: referrer, landing page,

pages visited, active page during the call, and
the device and browser the caller used.

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First-Time Callers
First-time callers are like gold dust.
They’ve never spoken to you before, so
they’re essentially brand new leads. This
presents a far better sales opportunity
than someone who’s spoken to you before
but didn’t see your value, for example.

Tracking your overall call volume is just

the first step. Tracking your overall call
volume is just the first step. But to unearth
valuable insights, you have to differentiate
between repeat callers and first-time
callers.

Given that new callers are undoubtedly

a better sales opportunity, it really helps
to directly track how much you spend on
acquiring new callers from your Facebook
Ads.

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To do this, simply dive into CallRail’s

Call Attribution report and identify how
many first-time callers you received
from Facebook advertising.

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Plus, you can also track how many

of these first-time callers came from
Facebook mobile versus desktop, how
many came from each particular
campaign that you’re running, and more.

By tracking which channels and

campaigns lead to first-time callers,
you can invest more in strategies that
drive high-value calls with brand-new
prospects.

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How to Optimize Your

Facebook Advertising
Tracking is interesting, but it only adds
genuine value if its insights are used to
improve your strategy going forward.

Here are the ways the CallRail platform

can help you optimize your end-to-end
Facebook ad strategy.

Location

Facebook allows companies to target

users based on their country, state, zip
code, or even their precise distance from
your business. You could argue that this
has never before been so important.

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Post-COVID, McKinsey believes that our

lives will become hyper-local. Accenture
supports this, saying: “Fifty-six percent of
consumers are shopping in neighborhood
stores or buying more locally sourced
products, with 79% and 84% respectively
planning to continue with this behavior
into the longer term. Reasons for this
vary from actively supporting local stores
or national products, or as a quest for
authentic and artisan products.”

The main takeaway? If businesses want

to capitalize on this emerging trend, they
need to optimize their Facebook Ads for
local consumers. Fortunately, CallRail can
help with this.

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Not only can you specifically target your

ads towards consumers based nearby,
but you can also include special local
call tracking numbers thanks to CallRail’s
Local Swap™ feature – helping to present
your brand in a localized manner.

Custom Audiences

We’ve spoken about the value of first-time

callers. However, that doesn’t mean that
previous callers have no value – far from it.

Somebody might’ve rung up your software

business, spoken to an agent, and been
impressed by your solution, but simply
never got around to following up.

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Perhaps they suddenly had to deal

with an urgent project and all tech
investments were put on hold. Or, maybe
they didn’t have enough budget for the
quarter but meant to get back in touch in
a few months’ time.

Frustrated by the lack of response, you’ve

now decided to run a special Facebook
ad campaign encouraging your previous
callers to finally convert.

With CallRail’s Facebook Integration, you

can upload your call log from CallRail
itself and target all previous callers who
aren’t yet customers.

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Alternatively, if you’re running a campaign

designed to upsell your services to
existing customers, you can also upload a
call log listing all your existing customers’
details.

Sit back, relax, and let CallRail do all the

heavy lifting. What’s more, the platform
even updates this custom audience
automatically in real-time – every time a
new call, form, or text comes in.

You can then spend your time, energy,

and focus on identifying how to
communicate with your audience instead
of worrying about reaching them in the
first place.

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Lookalike Audiences

Targeting those already in your sights –

current leads or customers – is a decent
strategy. However, you likely want your
Facebook Ads to also attract new customers
to your business, instead of just targeting
existing leads/customers.

This is where Facebook’s lookalike audience

feature comes in handy.

Facebook crunches all available data

on your existing prospects/clients before
identifying similar people who you should
consider reaching out to. They look at various
demographic factors: age, location, interests,
behavior, and more.

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With CallRail, you can simply upload your

current customer list and then Facebook
will automatically create a lookalike
audience that you can also target.

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Used well, the CallRail platform provides

marketers with a simple, unified, end-to-
end Facebook Advertising management
platform.

From your call log, upload a custom

audience (containing existing customers’
details) thanks to our Facebook Integration.
Then, let Facebook’s lookalike audiences help
you find similar prospects.

When these prospects call up, use

Conversation Intelligence’s Automation Rules
feature to reveal what they want to talk
about. Feed these insights back into your ad
copy, making them more targeted and more
effective.

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Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

If you want to increase your inbound calls,

website visits, and form submissions, then
you need strong CTAs.

There are three ways the CallRail platform

can make your CTAs more effective. First, it
allows you to add call tracking numbers to
your Call Now buttons on Facebook Ads.

Call tracking numbers are crucial. They allow

the CallRail platform to accurately track
inbound calls coming from Facebook Ads
and map them as “offline other conversions,”
meaning you can see precisely how many
callers your Facebook Ads drove before
identifying which were high/low-value, which

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converted and which didn’t, etc.

And that’s not all. If you don’t add a call

tracking number, then prospects that end up
clicking the Call Now button will see another
message pop up that says: “Do you actually
want to dial this number?”

This drastically reduces your CTA’s power.

You’ve got people excited enough to ring up
your business. Yet, when they try to do this,
they’re faced with another message making
them question their decision.

You want to make the process of seeing

an ad, calling up your business, and
speaking to an agent as smooth and
seamless as possible. So you need to reduce

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any unnecessary steps that get in your

customers’ way.

Lastly, with CallRail’s Conversation

Intelligence Automation Rules feature, you
can instantly analyze all your call transcripts
to find out what your callers are actually
interested in talking about.

Once you have that information on hand,

feed these insights back into your CTAs to
pique your prospects’ interests.

Landing Page
You can easily see which precise landing
pages drove someone to call your business
within the CallRail dashboard.

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Play around with different landing pages to

see which one leads to more phone calls.
You can also break this down into first-time
and repeat callers, understanding which
copy and messaging works best for which
particular segment.

And if you’re building a form from scratch

using Form Tracking’s Form Builder tool in
CallRail, you can maximize the insights you
generate. It’ll instantly alert you every time
a customer fills out a form, allowing you to
respond quickly to their needs.

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What’s more, you can also catch all keyword

data from these form submissions and see
which landing page each submission came
from in Form Tracking’s comprehensive form
activity dashboard.

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You might find, for example, that your

landing page is great at driving first-time
callers from visitors using Google Chrome.
However, this success doesn’t translate to
those browsing on Safari.

You decide to check out why this is. Quickly,

you realize that your landing page layout,
designed with Chrome users in mind, doesn’t
work well with Safari – so you, therefore, need
to alter the layout to take Safari users into
account.

Such insights play a crucial role in helping

you optimize your landing pages going
forward. Identify which landing pages/
language work best for which segment, on
which device, and update your strategy
accordingly.

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A/B Testing

A/B testing is a foolproof strategy to

help you improve your Facebook Ads
performance. Move beyond what you
think you know and instead work out what
resonates and what doesn’t with your
customers.

Conversation Intelligence and Call Tracking

are invaluable tools if you’re looking to A/B
test your Facebook Advertising strategies.
When a caller rings up your business,
CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence tool
dissects everything they say, while Call
Highlights identifies the keywords and
topics they mentioned, the language they
used, etc.

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This will show you if there are any areas

where your Facebook Ads could be
improved. For instance, let’s imagine that
you’re running an ad that stresses how cost-
effective your SaaS solution is.

When people click through and speak to

your agents, however, they barely mention
the price. Instead, they want to know about
your support process, data security set-
up, and ability to scale according to the
customer’s needs.

You decide to try and see whether these

pain points will attract more customers.
You keep the original campaign but set
up another alternative with copy that
specifically stresses how your solution is
secure and scalable with a great support
team on hand at all times.

Then, after a predetermined length of time,

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check back in to see which campaign

performed best.

Of course, the real gems come when

you A/B test everything (and not just the
copy). Make sure to test different creatives,
and the landing pages that visitors are
redirected to.

Remember, Call tracking and Form

Tracking are key tools in this process. You
want to directly link callers/form-fillers to
the Facebook Ad that got them to your
website in the first place, instead of simply
analyzing website visitors.

If you’re not using call tracking, you

lack precise, accurate visibility into
your campaigns’ performances. You’ll
instead be forced to rely on hunches
and assumptions without being able to
specifically identify your ROI.

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Unlock More Value

From Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads are a brilliant tool for marketers.
However, growing competition and inefficient
processes are plaguing marketers looking to
drive tangible value from Facebook Ads.

With CallRail, you can begin to master the two

key steps to unlocking value from Facebook
advertising: tracking and optimizing.

Source and visitor-level tracking helps you

work out who’s calling (or filling out forms),
and which marketing made them take the
plunge.

From there, you can begin to optimize your

ads according to your prospects’ location by
targeting previous callers, compiling lookalike
audiences, mastering your CTAs, fine-tuning
your landing pages, and, of course, A/B testing.

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Chapter 4

10 Tips for Facebook

Creatives

Tim Jensen
Campaign Manager,
Clix Marketing
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Think about your social media scrolling behavior.

What makes you stop and take a second look at a
post?

More often than not, it’s the graphic that gets your
attention, whether it’s a sarcastic GIF, a hilarious
cat, or a smiling baby.

When running Facebook ads, the best copy is

likely to be overlooked if it’s accompanied by a
mediocre image. Read on for 10 tips to up your
creative game in Facebook advertising.

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Customize Images by
Placement
The Facebook Ads interface lets you select unique
images for different placements. Ideally, you should
use vertical images for the Stories format to fill
the whole screen, while using horizontal or square
images for the News Feed.

The desktop right sidebar placement is also one

to be conscientious of, particularly since Facebook
changed its layout in late 2020. Previously, only
rectangular (1200x628) images showed up in that

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placement; now, Facebook, will show a square

image in that space if you use one, allowing
for more prominent ad space.

In addition, be mindful that ads in the right

sidebar will be significantly smaller, meaning
that any text you include in your images will be
barely legible. I would recommend minimizing
or completely removing text from any images
that appear in this placement.

Notice how it’s difficult to read the copy in

the below ad examples. In addition, see how
the ad with the square image is much more
prominent:

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Use Text (Smartly)

In 2020, Facebook finally did away with the 20% text
rule, no longer penalizing ad images for including
text. I’d encourage you to test images with text in
them, but don’t overdo it.

Often a simple benefit point will get people’s

attention more than a text-overloaded image.

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Depending on your product, there may be

additional creative ways to incorporate working
text into your image. For instance, the below
product promises to help refine your writing style.

In this case, the text in the image highlights a use

case for the product, while showing off features.

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Think Twice About Stock

Photography
We’ve all seen the generic stock photos people
insert into their ads, such as the well-dressed
business-people staring coldly into space as they
sit around the conference table. While stock photos
may offer an easy solution for brands without a
designer or good photography, these photos often
are less likely to grab attention and yield a direct
association with your brand.

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If you choose to use stock photos, think about

adding some sort of branded element, such
as your logo, into the ads. You can also include
overlaid text specifically mentioning the offer you
are promoting.

For instance, the ad below incorporates a photo

of a person but also places that on a background
with the Wingspan brand logo and a quote to
get attention from people with the problem the
company seeks to solve.

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Include Star Ratings

If your business has a four- or five-star rating,
include that in your ad imagery! Positive ratings will
stand out and encourage people to take a further
look.

In the example below from Lemonade (a home/

renter’s insurance company), note how the
stars match their brand color. In addition, the ad
contains an image of a house (the product they
insure) along with their logo.

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This creative carries both the positive rating and

the direct brand association.

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Show the Product

If you’re selling a tangible product, show it in use
in your ad imagery. People will know exactly what
you’re selling and how they could incorporate that
into their lives.

For instance, the ad below for Calm Strips

immediately gets your attention as you see the
colorful strips stuck to a laptop. Then, you can read
the copy for more information about the purpose
of the strips.

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Sometimes, it might not be practical to show the

product in actual use, but you can still show it by
itself. For instance, you might not even be able to
see this clear aligner on someone’s teeth without
looking closely, but an image of someone holding it
shows how simple and unobtrusive it is.

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At the end of the day, investing in decent product

photography can go a long way. Even if you don’t
want to pay a professional photographer, buy an
SLR camera with a macro lens along with some
lights to be able to take quality close-up shots of
your product.

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Include Event Information

If your ad is promoting an event, one of the first
questions people want to answer is when the event
will take place. Including the date(s) right in your
graphic will answer this question upfront.

That way if people are already booked that day

they won’t bother to waste a further click, and
people who know they’re free in that timeframe
and are interested may take a second look.

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A further test could entail including the time of day

an event starts (especially for a one-off event that
just takes place for an hour or two).

If your event involves notable speakers who might

be recognized by the people being targeted, add
their photos and names into event graphics. You
could even test a carousel ad with multiple faces,
names, and topics for events with multiple sessions.

You could test mentioning the venue or city

where the event takes place, if it’s taking place in
a physical location. The event promoted below
is virtual; perhaps another test here could be to
include “Virtual Event” in the image.

Of course, it’s very possible in current times that

people start with the assumption that an event is
virtual.

An additional test could be to include a “Register”

button graphic directly within the image. This could
help initiate a call-to-action to sign up.

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Include Customer Quotes

Including direct quotes from customers helps
to establish credibility, whether they’re citing the
problems that led them to seek out the product
or the solutions that came. You might find these
quotes from directly surveying customers, from
online review sites, or from casual conversations
that take place.

Quotes help to establish a personal connection in

the ad and resonate with people who can identify

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with what is said. For instance, the ad below for

an app geared around helping people focus at
work cites a quote many will identify with about no
longer having the “ability to do deep work” with all
the distractions faced in a modern world.

Of course, if you’re going to cite a problem, you

also need to introduce a solution. In this case, the
headline of the ad encourages people to “Regain
your ability to do deep work” with a call-to-action
to learn more about the product.

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Mention an Offer
If you’re promoting a discount or something for
free, mention that directly in your ad image to really
get people’s attention. Be as specific as possible
about what people will get.

The word “free” always stands out. For instance, the

ad below for a barber shop offers a free haircut
experience for new customers. The word “FREE” is
in red and a large font to get people to stop and
scroll.

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As an aside, the image jives well with the concept

of a “MVP haircut experience,” showing the process
of being lathered up with a wet towel.

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This next example promotes 2 free months of a

magazine app subscription, with an added CTA
to “Try Now” right in the image. The image also
incorporates specific examples of magazines
readers will get access to, which may help get the
attention of people who particularly enjoy Forbes,
Time, or other publications pictured.

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If you’re offering a specific dollar amount or

percentage off your products, cite that in your
images. Coupon grabbers will immediately tune in
to a chance to save, and an offer may encourage
people to try a product they’ll then like and
continue to purchase in the future, as with the ice
cream ad below.

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Include Specific Stats

If you have studies or surveys showing statistics
that reflect positively on your brand’s success,
include those in graphics.

For instance, Betterment’s ad cites that people

can “earn an estimated 38% more money” with
them vs. using “a typical investor.” Mentioning the
percentage in the image copy, as well as including
the upward graph, helps make the case that
Betterment is a good choice for seeing investment
growth.

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If you conducted a survey of your target audience,

you could cite a statistic about how a large subset
of your prospects encounter the problem you’re
trying to solve. For instance, perhaps 90% of CFOs
wish they had better software in place for tracking
expenses.

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Use Carousel Ads to Tell a Story

I’ve seen several brands try carousel ads, only to
determine they don’t work. Unfortunately, a frequent
approach with carousel ads is to lump together a
few unrelated points together with stock photos,
which only results in a disjointed ad that won’t
garner the focus you need.

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Use the multiple slides in a carousel ads

to tell a story, making sure the slides fit
together with a common theme. This
tactic could include:

Walking through a setup

process step-by-step.

Highlighting a handful of
major features .

Showing problem/solution
steps (or before/after images
if applicable).

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In the example below from the Discovery+

streaming service, they’ve chosen to design
slides each fitting the theme of “Thousands of…”
messaging, while also highlighting different shows
people can watch on the platform.

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Start Creating!
I’ve seen several brands try carousel ads, only to
determine they don’t work. Unfortunately, a frequent
approach with carousel ads is to lump together a
few unrelated points together with stock photos,
which only results in a disjointed ad that won’t
garner the focus you need.

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Chapter 5

How to Set the Budget for

Your Facebook Ad

Michelle Morgan
Director of Client Services,
Clix Marketing
How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

The Facebook Ads platform has lots of

control options to help you reach your target
audience in the most efficient ways. There are
lots of customization around target audience,
ad copy placements, conversion actions, etc.,
but one lever that doesn’t get much attention
is budget.

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There are two types of budget for Facebook

– daily and lifetime – and each has its own
benefits and drawbacks and choosing
the wrong one can be detrimental to your
campaign performance.

We’re going to go through each of these in

detail below, but first, we need to discuss
which levels you want your budgets to be
controlled from campaign or ad set.

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Campaign Budget
Optimization
Historically, budgets on Facebook have been
controlled at the ad set level. But in the past couple
of years, Facebook launched Campaign Budget
Optimization, which lets advertisers set a campaign
level budget which Facebook then disseminates to
the ad sets based on performance.

Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) leverages

Facebook’s machine learning to serve ads from
whichever ad set is expected to deliver the best
results. Here’s a quick overview image Facebook
uses to show its potential impact:

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In the first example, each ad set has

a daily budget of $10 that Facebook
spends during the day and each
generates a few conversions, resulting
in a total of 10 conversions.

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In the second example, you set a $30

campaign level budget, the same amount
as the combined ad set budgets from the
first example, and Facebook will (in theory)
serve it to the ad sets with the most potential,
resulting in ad set spend levels of $7, $18, and
$5 and a total of 15 conversions generated.

While this chart makes this seem like a no-

brainer, this isn’t always the case. CBO is
sensitive to audience size differences.

If you have three ad sets in a campaign,

2 with audiences of 100,000 users and a
third with 32 million users, Facebook will
almost certainly spend the majority of your
campaign budget on the largest audience
size as it has the most potential, regardless
of the number of conversions or return the
smaller ones are seeing.

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There are some allowances for daily

minimums and maximums with CBO,
meaning you can tell Facebook that one ad
set can only spend a certain amount while
others have to spend at least this much every
day. These can help offset some of those
service issues, but they’re not a silver bullet.

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If you do plan on using ad set minimums and

maximums, don’t use them to dictate the
entirety of your campaign daily budget. This
won’t allow Facebook to learn and optimize
to the best performing audience and it would
be the same as if you were using ad set level
budgets.

Instead, dictate only about 50% of your budget

across your ad sets and let Facebook do the
rest of the work.

With that out of the way, now let’s dig into the
pros and cons of Daily vs. Lifetime budgets on
Facebook.

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Daily Budgets
Daily budgets are the easiest to set up, but also
have some intricacies that all advertisers should
be aware of. With daily budgets, Facebook will
spend up to the amount of budget per ad set you
give it per day. Seems pretty simple, and it is.

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The Drawback:
Facebook will not only spend up to
that daily budget limit, it will actively try
to spend the full daily budget you’ve
given every single day, no matter what
performance is on that given day.

In the image above, the ad set budget

is $32 and it’s spot on where the
average spend is for the past 30 days.

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Facebook targeting operates more like

Display than Search, so it’s working to get
impressions in front of a target audience
rather than responding to their fluctuant
demand. With daily budgets, Facebook will
show as many impressions as it needs to
that target audience to make up your daily
spend.

That might sound ominous, but this isn’t

necessarily a bad thing. More on that in a
minute.

The second drawback for daily budgets is

that there is no option to schedule your ads
for specific times of the day or days of the
week. With daily budgets, your ads will run
24/7 (unless you have an external tool to
assist).

If your business model, offerings, or calls to

action dictate that your ads only run during
certain portions of the day or days of the
week, then daily budgets likely aren’t the
right fit for you.

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The Benefits:
First, I want to revisit the “spending the
whole budget everyday” thing. This
pattern of spending allows for much
easier pacing of spend.

Each day you can count on Facebook

spending the same amount, making it
much easier to control your budgets and
plan ahead financially.

Additionally, if your ad set is performing

well and you’re getting the returns you
want, then there’s no harm in scaling
into your full daily budget to get those
results as soon as you can since future
performance is never guaranteed.

Second, Facebook daily budgets are

the simplest option if you’re setting up
an always on, evergreen campaign.

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This allows you to keep your ads on at

all times without needing to adjust end
dates to keep them active.

Additionally, if you work with weekly,

monthly, or quarterly budgets and they
change from time to time, daily budgets
are a great option. Lifetime budgets, as
we’ll discuss, are best when a budget is
set and then left in place until the end
date is reached.

If you’re anticipating regular changes to

your budget, daily budgets are likely the
better choice.

When changing daily budgets, there

is a best practice to keep in mind: limit
budget adjustments to 20% of their
original level for each day.

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Any change larger than this will

have too great of an impact on the
Facebook algorithm and performance
can be negatively impacted.

If you’re needing to double your spend

or cut it in half, ideally, you would make
changes everyday in 20% increments
until you reached the level you needed.
(I realize this isn’t always doable, but if
it is, this is the right way to go.)

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Lifetime Budgets
With Lifetime budgets, you give Facebook the
budget you’d like to spend for the entirety of the
campaign and then choose the date the ad set
should end on. These operate differently than daily
budgets, but also come with their own benefits and
drawbacks.

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The Benefits:
With Lifetime budgets, Facebook will adjust daily spend
levels based on the results of the campaign. On days
where performance is strong, Facebook will spend a
little higher than the average daily budget to reach the
lifetime goal.

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On days where performance is lower, it

will under spend to save funds for another
day. At the end of the campaign, you will
only spend the lifetime budget you set at
launch (or adjusted to as the campaign
went on).

Many advertisers find this fluctuating

spend to be a benefit as, in theory, you
should have better returns for your
campaigns.

Additionally, Lifetime budgets also have

ad scheduling available for you to choose
which days of the week and hours of the
day you want your ads to run.

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If you need to only have ads on during

certain hours, this is the budget
type for you. That said, this might
be something to employ only if it’s
imperative that you do so.

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For example, if your call to action is to call in and you

have no one there to answer the phone, that’s a pretty
poor user experience and you should likely schedule
your ads.

But if you’re only scheduling them because you don’t

think someone will fill out a form past 8pm, then I
encourage you to start with all days and hours running
and see what performance you get first.

Sometimes folks aren’t able to be on their phones

during typical hours and they may take actions in the
wee hours of the night.

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The Drawbacks:
With the good comes the bad,
but admittedly, the “bad” for
Lifetime budgets is more a sense of
convenience than anything.

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With Lifetime budgets, daily spend can

fluctuate quite a bit and those fluctuations
can make it difficult to predict or plan on
what type of coverage you’ll get on any
individual day. If you’re in an important
season for your business and need to
ensure you have coverage or simply want
to know what to expect when it comes to
spend, it might make more sense to go
with daily budgets.

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Lifetime budgets require advertisers to

set an end date along with your budget.
By doing this, you’re telling Facebook the
amount of money it has to spend for that
timeframe.

If you are certain there will be no changes

to the time frame or budget, this is a great
option. But if you’re likely to get additional
budget or lengthen or shorten your
promotion, then this might not be a good fit.

Although adjusting budget and changing

the end date are possible, doing so will
impact how Facebook prioritizes your
budget.

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If you set an ad set to run for two weeks, but

then have to cut it down to only one after
a couple days, Facebook is then going to
adjust and spend a much higher amount
on those last few days to try and spend
your Lifetime budget during the shortened
period.

If you do need to change the date range

or budget, I suggest you also adjust the
other to balance out and mitigate any large
swings in average daily spend to try and
prevent performance from tanking.

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Conclusion
Controlling budgets on Facebook is sort of a
dealer’s choice option, but there’s technically no
right or wrong way to do it, only some scenarios
where one option might make more sense than
another. Hopefully this rundown makes you feel
more confident in setting up budgets and knowing
what all options you have at your disposal!

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Chapter 6

6 Reasons Your Facebook Ads

Aren’t Converting & How to
Improve Them

Kristopher Jones
Founder / CEO,
[Link]
Is your Facebook advertising campaign not
generating enough conversions? Here are
some creative fixes to significantly increase
your conversion rate.

Facebook advertising is one of the best

tools available for audience research
and promoting your brand. But even
experienced digital marketers can run
into issues with their Facebook advertising
campaigns; namely turning targeted traffic
into conversions.

At my digital marketing firm, we recently ran

into an issue running a digital marketing
campaign for a physical therapist.

Despite creating highly targeted ads

that drove the desired impression share
and clicks, our ads didn’t result in the
conversions we wanted.

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In this particular case, the client had
tweaked his business model to no longer
lobby for referrals from local medical
physicians in the area and instead relied
entirely on digital marketing.

The biggest issue our campaign soon ran

into was informing the right customers at
the right time for that small sliver of intent
we could meet.

Think about it, when you suffer from an

accident or chronic pain, you typically
go to a doctor before going to a physical
therapist. Sure, we could inform customers
and they could click, but how were we
supposed to get them into the door?

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Fortunately, by switching up our bids, value
proposition, and even the very event we
were advertising, we were finally able to
drum up high-value foot traffic to our
client’s physical therapy firm.

The campaign itself was soon used as

a nomination for multiple awards in the
industry.

Facebook advertising, in conjunction with

PPC advertising, is a powerful tool with a
tremendous ROI. But to generate a return
you need sales.

Here are five reasons your Facebook

advertising campaign isn’t generating
enough conversions and some creative
fixes to significantly increase your
conversion rate.

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1. You Don’t Have Enough

Audience Data
Unlike Google Ads, Facebook Audiences requires you
to make judgment calls about your customers and
to complete the research upfront before creating a
campaign.

Customers don’t come to your ads, you come to them.

First off, many businesses start their campaigns off way too
narrow.

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If your client has a new business and very little

information to share with you, start off with a
broad awareness campaign optimized to the
lowest CPC available.

Here, you can start off with about half a million

impressions at a modest spend and gather
some valuable engagement data, such as who
is clicking on your ads and what people, if any,
are converting.

Facebook is an awesome tool, in that it allows

you to upload valuable data, such as all your
business’s customer email information and
data on all of your purchases from the last 30
days.

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Some additional areas to acquire

audience data include:

Google Ads and Bing Ads PPC

campaign data (e.g., contact
info).

Competitive analysis (all

advertising channels).

Census for local demographic

information.

Real-time analytics on your

site and marketing channels.

Surveys and site

questionnaires.

Psychographic info of people

who “like” your business.

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You can even use specific pixels for people who

visit your site and click on your ads and don’t
convert.

As with all advertising, the best way to find your

customers is to cast a wide net and see where
you failed.

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2. Your Targeting
Parameters Need More
Optimization
The most important part of any campaign
is audience creation. Unfortunately, poorly
optimized targeting parameters could mean
wasted ad spend.

Think about it, a poorly timed event match

could mean the difference between somebody
purchasing new jewelry from your business
close to their anniversary and somebody merely
scrolling past it on any other day of the year.

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Worse yet, many businesses go

too broad in their targeting and
don’t properly account for device
usage.

To cut down on targeting

errors and to hyper focus your
parameters, create a buyer
persona and then upload all of
the relevant details you can into
your custom audiences.

Segment your buyer

persona based on three
boundaries:
Demographics (age,
gender, race, income,
location, etc.).

Psychographics (interests,
likes, and lifestyle).

Behavior (shares,
comments, engagement,
and purchasing habits).

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Facebook also takes granularity to the next level.

For example, Facebook can help you target

ads for baby equipment to people who were
recently pregnant or had a kid. It bases this on
personal information that its users choose to
share and all of the above information, such
as pages they’ve liked and what posts they’ve
engaged with the most.

With this, you can get your message on par

with the people most likely to appeal to your
business.

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3. Facebook Users Aren’t

Shoppers
And yet, despite all of this, your Facebook users
don’t convert.

But unlike Google Ads, Facebook users are

not using the platform to shop. They are using
Facebook to interact with friends and family and
share content.

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There’s probably been plenty of times when you’ve

engaged with a sponsored post, but not actually made
a purchase. Maybe you purchased from the brand later,
but most people aren’t necessarily intent on making a
purchase when they click on your ad, especially from a
mobile device.

In the example I provided at the beginning, my team

used this knowledge to radically change our approach.

Instead, we changed our value proposition and lead

form to merely get people to attend a workshop hosted
by our client before actually engaging in a consultation.

When conversions are low, consider using Facebook

lead ads, video ads, or even dynamic ads for ways to
get people into your funnel.

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4. You Aren’t Segmenting

Ad Campaigns
Your ad creative and messaging will only apply to
certain segments of your audience.

If your ads are driving a lot of impressions but

few clicks and even fewer conversions, consider
implementing A/B split testing.

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Experiment with

Messaging.

Ad creative.

Images.

Landing page copy.

Audience segments.

Creating separate
audiences based on
different conversion goals
and previous engagement
can help you create hyper-
targeted messages that
resonate more.

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5. The Problems Run Deeper

in Your Funnel
If people are clicking on your ads and not
converting, then there could be problems with your
website or landing page that run deeper than your
ad copy.

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Issues could arise from:

Inconsistent messaging.

Poor UX and loading times.

Thin content.

Unappealing value offer.

Track your conversions using

the conversion pixel and your
bounce rate using Google
Analytics.

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Some landing page optimization tactics

to resolve a low conversion goal rate
include:

Inserting high-resolution
images and interactive
content to keep users
engaged.

Presenting a clear CTA with

an offer (e.g. 50 percent
off now or 1st-month free
subscription).

Removing additional or
unnecessary navigation.

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How to Improve Facebook Ad

Conversion Rates

Target users based on

previous purchases.

Use ‘Lookalike Audiences’ to

expand the scope of your
campaign once converting.

Leverage events targeting

for special offers and
events.

Adjust your value

proposition to appeal to
different audience pain
points.

Leverage remarketing for

people who bounce from
your landing page.

Layer targeting parameters

for more granularity.

Continue to learn more

about your customers.

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Sometimes it’s keen to look at your business

model and determine whether or not Facebook
advertising is right for your business or your client’s
business.

Using a combined approach of paid social,

PPC advertising, and remarketing can help you
acquire leads and nurture them for conversions by
reaching them over a variety of channels.

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The Role of Ads in the

Customer Journey

Stephanie Mansueto
Head of Content
Rock Content (SEJ Partner)
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Digital marketers walk a tightrope in

publishing ads for their audience because
modern consumers are much more aware
when a brand is trying to market it to them
than previous generations.

And unlike traditional forms of marketing, such

as TV commercials or radio ads, consumers
can choose to ‘opt-out’ of receiving messages
from a brand if they feel that they are over-
marketed to or that the content being shared
with them is not relevant.

For marketers, it can be challenging to create

an authentic ad that motivates consumers
buying decisions. Ads on social media, for
example, often disrupt the user’s content
experience and can be annoying if the ad
doesn’t flow with the content on their feed.

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When done right, ads can help build

awareness of a brand and provide valuable
information to potential consumers. And when
targeting specific stages of the customer
journey, an ad can effectively deliver the right
information to users when they need it.

So, how can brands leverage ads in the

customer journey in a way that engages their
audience rather than disrupting them?

In this article, we will cover:

Journey-based marketing – what is it?

Reasons that ads fail and how to fix it

Why marry your marketing ads with your

buyer journey

How to get started

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Journey-Based
Marketing – What Is it?
The customer journey is the path your
customer takes toward making a purchase.
From their first interaction with your brand
to when they finally become users of your
product or services, they are on a journey.
Along the way, they will likely engage with the
content you have created, such as blogs or
ebooks, and probably followed you on social
media, but where did they start? How did they
find you?

If a consumer found you because of an ad,

they were likely searching for a solution to a
problem they were facing and stumbled upon
your business. Once a user clicks on an ad, it’s
up to us to keep them engaged, and the best
way to do that is to nurture their journey with
relevant information.

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What goes into shepherding potential

customers toward making a purchase can
vary based on the type of organization.
For example, B2B businesses often have a
longer buying cycle because of the internal
review process, where B2C is usually much
quicker. But all of it starts with a compelling
ad; if you can’t hook them on that first
touchpoint, you likely lost them forever.

Reasons That Ads Fail &

How to Fix It
It doesn’t matter what industry or market
you are targeting - your audience is
inundated with ads every single day, which
makes it difficult to stand out.

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Some of the reasons that digital ads fail:

The Ad Targets the Awareness

Stage But Is Focused on the Brand
& Not on the Pain Point You Solve

Don’t assume that your audience knows who

you are because, likely, they have never heard
of you. If they don’t know who you are, what
you do, or what you offer, they won’t click.

And if they know who you are and don’t like

you, they won’t care that you can solve their
problem. At this stage, focus on what you
solve, not who you are.

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Your Ad Is Showing up in the

Wrong Place

Ad placement is important because you

want to meet your audience where they
are.

Brands like Gatorade and Nike buy

commercial placement during sporting
events because they know that a segment
of their audience is watching the game.

Digital ad placement is no different. If

your audience uses LinkedIn more than
Facebook, your ad budget should be spent
on that platform.

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You Haven’t Invested Enough

Time in Learning What Motivates
Your Audience

One way to ensure your ads perform well is

to create ads that speak to your audience’s
needs.

Your Ads Don’t Match Your Offer

Message match is a huge issue for users.

Clicking on your ad means that something

resonated with them, but the content
they saw post-click fell flat, and often it’s
because there is a disconnect between
the advertisement and the content being
shown.

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Why Marry Your

Marketing Ads With
Your Buyer Journey
It is smart to use paid advertising tactics in
tandem with your buyer journey strategy.

Each stage of the buyer journey is an

opportunity to provide your prospects with
relevant information that will encourage
them to take the next step in their journey.

PPC campaigns can be highly valuable

in the buyer’s early stages when your
audience is just starting to be aware that
they have a problem to solve.

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Retargeting and remarketing can be

highly effective in the buyer journey’s
consideration and decision stages when
your audience is more educated about the
problems and is not searching for ways to
solve them.

The customer journey consists of four

stages:

Awareness
The awareness stage is when a buyer
understands that they have a problem that
needs to be solved, but they have not yet
determined how to solve it and who will
help them.

Ads at this stage should include messaging

that focuses on the pain point or challenge
the customer is facing.

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Ads could drive users to a piece of content

that talks about this challenge and how it
can be solved, such as a blog post or ebook
on the topic.

Consideration

During the consideration stage, buyers are

starting to look for solutions to their pain
and compare brands or products against
each other.

At this stage, your ads can be retargeting

or remarketing ads that drive users back to
your site to learn more about your solution
and how it compares to others.

Users are more likely to engage with deeper

funnel content such as white papers or
long-form ebooks that talk about the
challenge and your product or service.

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Decision

At this stage, the buyer has decided on

what product or solution they will use and
are ready to purchase.

Your audience has determined what their

challenge is and has identified ways to
solve it; now, it’s time to convince them that
you are the right solution.

Ads can have clear messaging about your

product and your unique selling proposition.
Why are you the best at solving the user’s
problem, and why should they buy your
product over others?

Users that have already interacted with

your content in the previous stages are
likely to click on an ad that talks about your
product at this stage.

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Content offered could be product

comparison charts or interactive tools
such as ROI calculators, solution finders, or
configurators.

Retention
Once a prospect becomes a customer, the
work is not yet done.

Your customers may still be evaluating

other tools against your own and may
consider leaving in the future. It’s up to you
to keep them engaged and interested in
your offering.

Focusing on the customer journey when it

comes to your ads will help you:

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Reach Buyers When

They’re Ready

Ads created for a specific time in a buyer’s

journey will be more impactful than sending
the same message to everyone.

Capture Higher Qualified Leads

Have you ever received a lead and
wondered how that user ended up on your
site? Leads are great but if they aren’t your
target market, they will likely not turn into a
customer.

Minimize Interruptions
Ads are interruptive, and there is no way
around that.

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But, if you create ads that are not self-

serving and provide value to your audience,
they will be less of an interruption and will
be seen as helpful.

Create Custom Offers for Existing

Customers

Existing customers need attention too.

Creating custom offers for customers is a
smart way to cross-sell products.

Tools like Facebook Custom Audiences can

help marketers create targeted campaigns
for existing customers, while Google Ads
could remind customers to visit your site to
learn about what you offer.

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Let’s Get to Work

Ads are a great way to educate, engage,
convert, and retain customers. Applying
inbound marketing principles to your ad
strategy is a great place to start. Using ads
can influence prospects no matter where
they are in the buying journey.

To get started, marketers must first identify

who they are targeting, how they can solve
their problems, and what motivates them to
make a decision. Only then can you create
tailored ads on the right network for them.

Focusing on the customer journey is

essential to the success of your paid
campaign.

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Chapter 7

14 Facebook Remarketing
Strategies to Test

Amy Bishop
Owner & Marketing
Consultant, Cultivative, LLC
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Facebook offers so many ways to reach prospects

in unique and cost-effective ways, not the least
of which is remarketing! The great thing about
Facebook remarketing is that it is so incredibly
versatile.

Nearly any company can find a way to re-engage

their prospects through remarketing, even if they
don’t view Facebook as their personas’ primary
watering hole.

There are some great ways to narrow focus and

the inventory is often inexpensive. Not to mention,
Facebook’s bidding algorithms arguably rival
some of the best in the PPC landscape.

What that means is – even if you don’t leverage

Facebook for prospecting campaigns, there’s
probably still low-hanging fruit for you in
remarketing.

Let’s talk about some of the ways you can

leverage Facebook to reach your target audience.

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Remarketing Page Visitors

The easiest and most obvious remarketing strategy
is to create remarketing lists from page visitors.
Sometimes, if you have a small audience, starting
out by remarketing all visitors is best as additional
segmentation may make the lists too small to get out of
the learning phase.

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If your audience is big enough, though, it’s

ideal to create audiences based upon visits
to pages that indicate intent – such as people
that visited a page to sign up for a free trial or
request a demo but then didn’t complete the
request.

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Creating Audiences From

URL Parameters
To take page visitor remarketing one step
further, you can create audiences off of any
part of the URL string, even if it isn’t part of the
page. Put simply: you can create audiences off
of URL parameters as well as subfolders.

This can be handy if you want to remarket

visitors of a specific source separate of your
other audiences.

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For example, if you were running a

campaign in Linkedin targeting specific
Linkedin groups or skills and decided to use
Facebook as an additional remarketing
source, as it is often more cost efficient,
you could use your UTM tags to create
an audience of only folks from just that
specific campaign.

This way, you know that people in that

audience had a specific set of skills or
were involved in specific groups, which
would allow you to speak directly to those
interests in your ads.

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Visitors by Time Spent

You can further segment your URL-driven
audiences by selecting to segment them by
time spent. You can choose to target people
by the top 25%, top 10%, or top 5% of time
spent.

This can be a useful way to try to zero in on

folks with the highest engagement.

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Remarketing Conversion
Events
If remarketing page views don’t allow you to build the
audience that you need, Facebook also offers the ability
to build audiences off of the events that you’ve created
for conversion tracking.

This can be handy both for targeting your audience

to get them to the next stage in the funnel but also for
exclusions, to ensure that you aren’t targeting people
that have already taken a certain action – even if
Facebook wasn’t the source that drove the action.

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Remarketing Your Offline
Activities
Facebook also makes it easy to remarket offline
activities, which is really cool! There are two ways you
can do this: through audience lists and offline events.

Let’s delve into each!

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Uploading Audience Lists

One of the most well-known ways to remarket

offline activities is to upload user lists.

There are a ton of different ways you can

segment this data.

You can target existing customers, or leads

that were once warm but never converted,
or folks currently in the pipeline. You can also
remarket folks that took a high-funnel action to
get them to take a low-funnel action.

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Remarketing Offline Events

You can also remarket people from your offline
event sets if you’re tracking offline events. So if
you’re importing events for text messages, for
instance, you can remarket them to get them to
the next stage in the funnel – maybe to let them
know of a sale on certain products.

If you have access to store visit tracking and

have at least 10 measurable stores set up, you
also have the ability to create audiences off
of store visits – which opens up a wealth of
opportunities for brick & mortar.

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Remarketing On-Facebook
Activities
You also have the option to remarket Facebook
engagement, which presents a whole host of
ways that you can engage and re-engage your
audience as they move through the customer
journey.

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Remarketing Engagement
on Facebook or Instagram
One super easy way to create audiences
from engagement is to remarket people
that have engaged with your brand on
Facebook or Instagram.

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Unfortunately, you can’t select a specific

post (though there are ways to be a little
more specific with the categories below)
but you can choose to remarket:

People that have engaged with

your content.

People that have visited your

page.

People that clicked a CTA

(Facebook only).

People that sent you a

message.

People that saved your page

or posts.

Everyone that engaged with

your page (which would
include all of the above).

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Video View Remarketing

One way that you can zero in on your
engagement audiences is by remarketing
video views.

With video view remarketing, you can’t

technically pick the exact post but you can
choose to create audiences off of only
specific videos or all videos.

You can determine if the video views need

to be 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 15 seconds (or
thru-play if less than 15s). Alternatively, you
can select to target people that watched at
least 20%, 50%, 75%, or 90% of the video.

So for example, you might leverage a

higher funnel campaign promoting videos
and then you could remarket people that
watched at least 50% of the video.

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Remarketing Lead Gen Forms

With lead generation form remarketing, you can

remarket people that opened a form, opened but didn’t
submit the form, or people that opened and submitted
a form. You can choose which form(s) that you want to
build the list off of.

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So for example, if someone filled out a lead

gen form for a piece of content and you
wanted to remarket them to get them to
the demo, you could build and remarket
an audience of form submissions for that
piece of content.

Or, if you were testing two different forms

for the same action, you would want to
exclude submissions of the other form in
the test so that you didn’t pay for or receive
unnecessary visibility from people that
have already submitted the form.

Or, if you wanted to remarket people that

opened the form but didn’t submit it, you
could do that, too.

Since the form doesn’t automatically open,

people that have opened the form are
showing intent signals.

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People That Engaged
With Your Events
If you create events on Facebook, you
have a lot of remarketing options.

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You can remarket people

that have:

Responded that they are

planning to go.

People that are interested in

attending.

People that visited or engaged

with the event (even if they
didn’t RSVP).

People that began to purchase

tickets but abandoned the
purchase process.

People that completed the

process to purchase tickets.

For example, if you decided to

host another event in the future,
you may want to remarket
people that RSVP’d or only
people who purchased tickets.

Or you may want to create

such lists and use them as the
seed for lookalikes!

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Remarketing Instant
Experiences & Your
Facebook Shop
I’m grouping some options together here but
if you’re an ecommerce, you have a ton of
different in-platform remarketing options.

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For example, if you have a Facebook shop,

you can remarket people that viewed your
shop, viewed products (or you could further
qualify by targeting people that viewed and
clicked through to your website), people that
saved products, added to cart, and more.

You can also remarket engagement with

your instant experiences. You can remarket
people that open the instant experience
or further qualify by targeting people that
clicked links in the instant experience.

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Test Layering Qualifiers If You

Have a Niche Audience And/
Or Find Remarketing Isn’t
Converting Well
If you have a really niche audience and you
find that remarketing isn’t working well, you
can also test layering other interests and
demographics to better qualify your list.

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The need to do this could happen for a host

of reasons with one being that if you recently
added a new high funnel traffic source
to your website that doesn’t seem to be
performing – it can junk up your audiences
as you’ll now be remarketing that low quality
traffic (sigh).

Adding interest or demographic qualifiers

can help clean up your audience list to zero
it back in on the right folks.

Keep in mind, doing this will shrink the size

of your audience quite a bit, so you have to
really consider whether it makes sense for
you. Read: Can you get out of the learning
phase with an audience of this size?

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Dynamic Remarketing
Using the catalog objective, you can configure
some really cool remarketing campaigns. There
are so many options.

The most popular format is remarketing to

people that viewed your products and didn’t
purchase, sending an ad to follow folks around
with the exact products they appeared
interested in.

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You can further qualify those folks by only

targeting people that added to cart and
didn’t complete the purchase. Or you could
target folks that purchased but add an
exclusion for a certain length of time – say,
targeting people that purchased 30 days
ago but haven’t come back to purchase
since then.

This is especially valuable for businesses that

are selling products that drive a lot of repeat
purchases (think products that get used up).
You can filter which products you do or don’t
want to include in your product set.

If you are a shoe company that also sells

shoelaces, you probably don’t want to
remarket people that were looking at laces
as it would be hard to get a good ROAS on
that.

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You may also want to create different ad

sets for different types of shoes so that you
could make sure the ad copy was really
relevant. So if somebody was looking at
tennis shoes and dress shoes, you could
create ad copy that really drove the value of
each, without having to be too generic.

But if your audiences are small, you could

keep them grouped together to pull all the
data together.

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Dynamic Up-Selling &

Cross-Selling
The catalog objective is also excellent for up-
selling and cross-selling. So you could target
people that purchased specific things with
accessories or other items that they may like!

For example, one of my clients sells a popular

food product. We remarket recent purchasers
with their cookbook if they didn’t buy it when they
initially purchased the food product.

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Recency Based Lists – If

You Have Enough Data
If you have enough data to segment it further, you
further segment your audiences by recency.

Think about it – if you visited a store and added a pair

of shoes to your cart but forgot to check out, you’re
likely way more likely to complete the transaction in the
next day or next few days if you are reminded vs. if you
are reminded 30 days later.

By 30 days later, you may have changed your mind or

bought something else. Heck, if you were buying the
shoes for an event, it may even have already passed.

As with all audience segmentation, you have to be

careful that extra filters don’t make the audience too
small to drive meaningful data collection.

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Creating Audiences off of

App Activity
If you have an app, you can create audiences based
upon your app user base. You can create audiences off
of anyone who opened the app, your most active users,
users by purchase amount, and users by segment.

You can also target app events but keep in mind your
app needs to be measuring app events to create a
Custom Audience from it. The app events your app is
set up to measure for will automatically populate in the
drop-down menu.

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Audience Sharing
Facebook also offers the ability to share audiences with
partners. There are a couple of different instances where
this makes sense.

For one, sometimes it makes sense for sister companies to

share audiences (if they are targeting similar personas).

And two, if you’re working with partners to cross-promote,

you can also share audiences between business
managers so that you can each target each other’s
audiences.

The additional perk of sharing audiences in the case of

custom audiences is that the business sharing the list
can upload any email addresses into their own business
manager and then share it to partners without ever
sharing the actual email addresses themselves.

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Follow Your Buyer Journey

Remarketing is a great way to support your funnel.
You know exactly what actions folks have taken,
what pages they’ve visited – so you can track
those actions and remarket them with the next
step to continue moving them forward.

Your customer journey could be multiple steps

with multiple remarketing audiences moving
things forward (and always excluding lower-funnel
audiences from higher funnel ad sets to keep
things moving in the right direction) or it could be
just a few steps.

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Even if your buyer journey isn’t that long,

you can take a look at your journey to see
where people are dropping out and then use
remarketing to bring them back.

For instance, remarketing people that add-

to-cart but don’t complete their purchase
or people that sign up for a demo but then
don’t attend, and so on.

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Planning Your Lists Around

Other Marketing Activities
Another cool way to use remarketing lists is to help
plan your campaigns around other marketing
activities – typically email.

So let’s say after someone makes a purchase, you

may want to advertise cross-sell/upsell options
to them. Let’s say before you do that, you take a

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look at the bigger picture of other marketing

opportunities and you see that email
with a cross-sell or up-sell opportunity is
automatically sent post-purchase 24 hours
after the sale.

Your company has already paid for the email

marketing platform so it would be silly to try
to get sales through PPC that you could have
gotten through email.

To work around that email, all you have to do

is add an exclusion for purchasers that made
a purchase within the past 1, or maybe 2 (to
be safe), days. That way your ads will start
running after email has a chance to drive the
sale.

This doesn’t have to only be used for cross-

sell/up-sell, this can be used for any part
of the funnel where email has automated
triggers in place, including emails following
micro-conversions.

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Try Testing Different Campaign

Objectives
It can also be worth testing different objectives
with remarketing. Often, people lean toward
conversion remarketing but, as I mentioned
above, it absolutely makes sense to test the
catalogue objective if you are an ecommerce
as it often will perform even better.

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It also makes sense to test the lead gen

objective if you are set up to be able to
accept lead gen submissions through
Facebook or if you want to drive calls!

Even beyond that, though, because

remarketing lists are often very warm, it
can make sense to test awareness, reach,
traffic, and even video view campaigns
to see if you can get to a lower cost of
acquisition because the CPMs are typically
cheaper.

Facebook’s bidding algorithm is getting

better and better all the time, so it may not
beat your conversion-objective campaign
but it is worth a test.

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Chapter 8

12 Facebook Ads Features Every

Marketer Should Know

Andrea Taylor
Outreach Manage,
Clix Marketing
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Facebook is a channel that is changing all the

time, which doesn’t always make it easy for busy
marketers to keep up with each and every small
change.

Aside from the common powerful marketing

tools like lookalike audiences, there are additional
Facebook features that are less prevalent but
can make a world of difference for the right
campaign.

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Facebook Tools
In my opinion, Facebook has a lot of great tools
for advertisers that fly under the radar.

Many of these make advertising on Facebook

easier, but you may not know about several of
them.

Let’s hop in.

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1. Third-Party Tag Integration

Setting up the Facebook pixel used to entail

several steps, especially when it came to
shopping carts and event tracking. Back in
2017, Facebook made this process much
easier with the integration tool that can be
found within Business Manager.

Advertisers using Google Tag Manager,

WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, or
BigCommerce can implement the Facebook
pixel without touching the code to their
website. Click on the link for each platform to
see step-by-step instructions.

Get started by selecting Events Manager in

the Facebook navigation sidebar.

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In the left navigation, you’ll see a green plus

sign button. When you hover over it, it will pop
out options to connect data sources, edit data
sources and add custom conversions.

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Click Connect Data Sources.

Select the type of data source you want.

(If you already have a conversion pixel
created, the Web option will be grayed out.)

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Click Get Started and follow the instructions to

finish the process.

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2. Pixel Helper

Before getting started in any channel, it’s

important to not only set up your conversion
pixel but also confirm it is firing properly.

Facebook’s Chrome extension allows

advertisers to double-check implementation,
troubleshoot their pixel and learn how to
improve performance before launching
campaigns.

Check out this list of error messages once you

have downloaded the tool.

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3. Creative Hub

Creative Hub is an ad mockup tool that allows

users to test different ad types, placements,
and ad elements.

Single image or video and carousel ads can be

tested.

These mockups can be saved for later

reference.

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Slideshow, video and interactive ads can also

be tested here.

This tool can be very useful when pitching new

ad types to clients.

You can find Creative Hub in the Facebook

navigation sidebar by clicking the “dot” button
and scrolling down to Advertise > Creative Hub.

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4. Facebook Analytics

This tool offers additional insights on

Facebook performance.

You can access this tool in the Business

Manager navigation bar by using the
menu and scrolling down to Analytics
under Analyze and Report.

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Similar to Google Analytics and other tools,

you can see user metrics, engagement
metrics, page metrics and user
demographics.

You can create Funnels that include a

sequence of actions you’d like to measure.

You can also create Cohorts of users to track

behavior over time, create pivot tables (called
“Breakdowns“) for on-going data reporting,
create Dashboards and review Lifetime Value,
among other features.

To get started with Facebook Analytics, I’d

recommend checking out the Analytics blog.

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5. Audience Insights
This interactive audience tool offers
additional details on your Facebook audience
that you aren’t able to gather from Facebook
Analytics.

You can access this feature through the

navigation menu and scrolling down to
Analyze and Report > Audience Insights.

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You can build your ideal target audience and

gather demographic, Page likes, Facebook
usage data, and interests.

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If you have additional information you want to

provide about your audience, click Advanced.

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Each of these sections has multiple options

available for selection.

Below is a look at how categories of Pages

that my audience likes.

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You can also see Pages that are likely to be

relevant to your audience based on their
interests and how likely your audience is to like
these pages (vs. the rest of Facebook).

If you’re looking for ways to put this data

to good use, here are some ways to use
audience insights data to further your
marketing efforts.

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Facebook Ad Features
6. Campaign Budget Optimization
Introduced in November 2017, this feature allows
advertisers to balance their ad spend across
ad sets. By setting one central campaign
budget across multiple ad sets, Facebook can
distribute the budget to the ad sets that are
performing best.

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This option can be found when creating a

new campaign and is applicable to either
daily budgets or lifetime budgets.

Note that due to the introduction of iOS

14, estimated daily results are no longer
available for campaigns using campaign
budget optimization.

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7. Ad Scheduling
Many advertisers prefer to restrict their
budget by only running ads at certain
times of the day.

Currently, Facebook only allows

advertisers to use ad scheduling when
using a lifetime budget.

When creating a new campaign, after

you have set your lifetime budget, you’ll
see the option to run ads all the time or
run ads on a schedule.

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The remaining ad scheduling options must be

set within each ad set. Select to use the viewer’s
time zone or the account’s time zone.

Now just make your ad schedule by clicking on

the times you want to serve ads.

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8. Location Targeting
Location targeting is set at the ad set level and
has several additional options that I think are
really useful.

Once you have set your location targeting, you

can select radius targeting or target the city
only.

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You can select 4 additional settings for location

targeting:

Everyone in This Location

This is people whose location was recently this

location(s).

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People Who Live in This Location

This is only people who have listed their home

as this location. This option is great to select
for home-related businesses or anywhere
that you are targeting homeowners only.

People Recently in This Location

This is people who have recently used

Facebook in this location.

People Recently Traveling in This Location

This is for people who have recently used

Facebook in this location, but whose home is
listed as more than 125 miles away.

Using Key West as an example, this targeting

would be great for businesses offering
activities to tourists. It’s a great way to
differentiate residents from tourists if that’s
something you need.

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9. Connections
If you have an app, use Events or want to
reach folks connected to your Facebook
page, this is a great feature for you.

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You can target people who like your Page,

friends of people who like your Page or
exclude people who like your pages. You can
also target people who used your app, friends
of people who used your app or exclude
people who used your app.

For events, you can target people who

responded to your event or exclude people
who already responded.

You can create different combinations of

these options as well. Scroll to the bottom
of the list of Connections to find Advanced
Combinations.

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10. Saved Audiences

After uploading audiences, selecting

specific location targeting, and adding
additional layers, you may want to save this
audience for later use.

At the bottom of the Targeting section of

the ad set (before Placements), you’ll see a
button for Save This Audience. This will allow
you to save this audience with a specific
name.

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This audience will now be available in your

Saved Audiences which can be found at the
top of the Audience section in each ad set.

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Note that any edits to your audience will impact

all ad sets utilizing that audience.

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11. Block Lists & Publisher Lists

In 2018, Facebook released its Publisher List
of thousands of URLs where your ads might
appear across the Audience Network, in-
stream videos, and banner/interstitial ads.
Facebook recommends reviewing this list
every 30 days for updates.

Once you review the ads and identify URLs

that you don’t want your ads to appear on,
you can add them to your Block List.

You can access your Block List, the Publisher

List and Publisher Delivery reports in the Brand
Safety section of the navigation menu.

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Review the Publisher Delivery report by placement

to see a summary of performance.

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Since the data is only a summary of the last 30

days, this is something you’ll want to review on
a monthly basis.

Once you have identified URLs and pages

you want to exclude, save the URL column
in your file. You can delete headers and the
impressions column.

The URL column is what you’ll need to

communicate to Facebook what to exclude.

Navigate to the Block List option in the left

navigation bar. Select the green Create Block
List button.

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Make sure your list is saved as a .txt or .csv file

and named appropriately. Upload it and click
Create Block List to finalize.

You can apply, remove, replace, download or

delete block lists using the three-dot button
beside each block list.

It is possible to apply the list to multiple

accounts if needed.

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12. Automated Rules

Automated rules can be a lifesaver when it

comes to activating, pausing, and managing
campaigns.

While Facebook’s options are not as

advanced as you may be used to in other
channels, they are still helpful.

Get started by heading to Automated Rules

under Advertise in the navigation menu.

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Click the green Create Rule button in the top

right corner.

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As of January 2021, you can only apply rules to

all active or paused campaigns, all active or
paused ad sets or all active or paused ads.

In the action field, you can select to pause,

activate, send a notification, adjust budgets or
adjust bids.

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Tip: If you select Turn on Ad Sets in the Action

field, you’ll see the “apply rule to” field will
change to paused campaign, ad set or ad.

There are infinite combinations of automated

rules you could create. Instead of running
through the intricacies of these options,
important things to know about automated
rules are below.

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Some additional areas to acquire

audience data include:

You have the ability to scale

budgets by target field.

Meaning that you can update

your CPA, CPA or other cost
goals.

Bids can be adjusted in the

same manner as budgets.

Options for action frequency

are bi-weekly, weekly, daily
and hourly.

You can add conditions, such

as “cost per result is greater
than $50,” with a time range
that can be from today all
the way to the lifetime of the
account.

The attribution window can

also be adjusted if you would
prefer a different window than
what your account is currently
using.

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Rules can run as often as

every 30 minutes, daily or on a
custom schedule.

You can also opt to get an

email notification in addition to
your Facebook notification.

Additional subscribers can be

added if there are others on
the account who would like
updates on rules.

Automated rules are a

great way to leverage some
automation in Facebook
without giving up too much
control.

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Conclusion
Facebook has many hidden gem tools and features
that are often buried in the complicated interface.

By utilizing these features and tools, you can take your

Facebook campaigns from good to great!

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