Facebook advertising for beginners: FAQs, how to set up and time-saving tips

As the world’s largest social network, Facebook can be a great way for marketers to reach their target audience through advertising.
With around 2.7 billion active users per month, it’s a digital channel worth keeping an eye on.
But if you’re new to Facebook advertising, how do you ensure you’re making the most of your precious budget?
Here are some Facebook advertising tips to help you get started and gain an edge on this popular platform.

3 Quick Answers to Common Facebook Advertising Questions

Firstly, let’s address some of the biggest concerns and questions people have about Facebook adverts.

How Much Do Facebook Ads Cost?

When it comes to the cost of Facebook ads, it really depends on the context.

Recent research by AdEspresso shows that the main factors that affect the cost of Facebook ads are:

AdEspresso also calculated the average cost per click:

How do Facebook adverts work?

Facebook Ads are sorted by campaign.

A new Facebook campaign can contain one or more Facebook Ads.

Facebook adverts target users based on their location, demographic and profile information.

Ads appear on a user’s screen as they scroll through the Facebook stream.

The number of views is recorded as impressions.

Likes and comments on Facebook ads are recorded as engagement.

Clicks – which, depending on the campaign objective, can take the user to another website, online shop or Facebook page or offer – are recorded as clicks, cost per click, click-through rate, and more.

You can read about how Facebook advertising actually works to learn more.

Is Facebook advertising worth it?

If you want to get more visibility, get more leads and convert more customers, then Facebook advertising is definitely worth trying.

Start by setting up your Facebook Ads Manager account

To start advertising on Facebook, you first need to set up your Facebook Ad Manager account.

Facebook Ads Manager will create an account for you and walk you through setting up your first ad campaign.

You can also create Facebook adverts and new Facebook campaigns through your Facebook Business Management Platform account by clicking on the drop-down arrow in the top right corner of your Facebook page and selecting Ads Manager.

It’s time to create your first Facebook campaign!

Click the ‘+ Create’ button in the Campaigns tab and let’s get started with Facebook advertising!

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

Firstly, determine what your Facebook advertising campaign is going to do. Do you need more website traffic?

Do you want to grow your email database with Lead Gen?

What do you want Facebook users to do with your Facebook ads?

Facebook Ads offers 11 objectives to support your overall goal.

Choose one.

Conversion-based goals (such as sales and installs) in a Facebook ad campaign will be charged per action, while exposure-based goals (such as website visits and views) will be charged per display.

Step 2: Set a budget and timeline

Enter the name of your Facebook advertising campaign at the top of this screen.

This is for your records only. Set up and select the pages you want to promote.

Set your budget by selecting a daily or lifetime budget and a start and end date.

You can schedule your advert to go live in the future or choose to publish it immediately.

Facebook Advertising Tip: Using Campaign Budget Optimisation

Campaign Budget Optimisation (CBO) is a worthwhile feature offered by Facebook Ads.

CBO allows you to determine your budget at the campaign level rather than at the ad group stage.

Doing so will allow Facebook to optimise your budget for the different ad groups in your campaign.

Why is this good?

The majority of your budget will be spent on your target audience or the audience that will deliver better results.

This will result in more conversions and a lower cost per conversion.

Step 3: Choose Your Audience

Scroll down a bit to build your target audience.

Facebook advertising tip: Use custom audiences.

Your first choice (and in our opinion, the best choice) is to target a custom audience.

This can be worrisome for first-time Facebook advertisers, but here are the tips you’ll need to win over Facebook advert custom audiences.

Most businesses find their ideal customers by targeting people who are already familiar with their brand.

These include:

Targeting your Facebook adverts to these more enthusiastic people will get you better results than targeting indifferent audience segments.

This is done by creating custom audiences.

We recommend starting with your customer profiles and website visitors.

However, if you are unable to create a custom audience, use the audience builder provided by Facebook.

Choose your target location (city, country, etc.), age, gender and language.

With detailed targeting in Facebook campaigns, you can keep or remove audiences based on their demographics, their interests and behaviours.

Use it to micro-focus, for example, by selecting people who are interested in car and home insurance but not life insurance.

You can also include or exclude people who follow your Facebook page or app or have attended or joined an online event to get more leads.

Tip: Leverage Facebook Similar Audiences

Facebook also offers Similar Audiences.

This type of audience replicates an existing audience to help you find people you’ve already identified as ideal customers.

This means you can use existing leads or customers (100 or more), upload this list to Facebook, and then Facebook Ads can send your ads to people who are similar to your ideal customer.

Step 4: Choose where to place your Facebook Ads

At the bottom of the page, you can determine where your Facebook Ad will appear.

Facebook Advert Tip: Utilise Automatic Display Locations

By selecting this option, Facebook automatically places your advert on its platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.

They decide on which platforms to deploy ads for best results.

Step 5: Develop a brand safety and bidding strategy

Next, you can scroll down to the Brand Security section.

You can choose to avoid sensitive content and add specific blacklists, such as specific websites, videos and publishers.

Facebook Advertising Tip: Choose the Least Costly Bidding Strategy

This is one of the lesser known Facebook advertising tips.

Facebook offers two bidding strategies for Facebook ads:

Estimates of potential reach and conversions are displayed on the right side of the screen. These are just estimates and can be used as a reference.

Step 6: Create your Facebook advert

There are multiple ad formats to choose from.

Our recommendation is that you test different Facebook adverts to find the one that best suits your audience.

News Feed Adverts: these adverts are displayed in your news feed.

Right column adverts: very basic adverts with a headline, description and single image. Suitable for desktop.

6 Smart Tips on How to Get Creative with Facebook Ads

It starts with a compelling headline.

Your headline affects click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC).

A recent study showed that 59% of people will only read the headline of a Facebook share before commenting and sharing.

Thankfully, Facebook Ads allows us to run multiple A/B tests to find out which headlines people respond to!

Here’s how to write great headlines.

Keep headlines short

A recent study found that headlines of 60-100 characters have the highest click-through rate.

Your headline needs to be short and compelling.

Use Emotional Words

Use powerful words in your headline.

Words like:

If you need more, here’s Buffer’s list of 898 Power Words.

Using Numbers

You can also use numbers. People are more likely to click on adverts with headlines that start with a number.

Consider including these numbers in your Facebook adverts:

Create a Sense of Urgency

Scarcity and urgency inspire consumers to take action.

Make sure your advert has some sort of deadline, limit or cut-off time.

Use clear calls to action and words of action

Where is the best place for your call-to-action phrase or verb?

Right in the headline of your advert.

Include words such as ‘Get, Download, Get Started’.

Be specific and relevant, such as ‘Start learning now’ or ‘Get a free trial’.

Try to avoid stock photos and use videos

Real photos work better than stock photos, and nearly 35% of website visitors are more likely to sign up when they see a real image.

Facebook video adverts can increase the number of clicks, lower the cost per click, and are just as easy to create as regular image adverts.

To create a Facebook video ad, go to the Facebook Ad Manager, create a new campaign and upload a video.

Now you can track and optimise your Facebook ads!

The Facebook Ads Manager dashboard allows you to closely track your campaigns.

This ensures that you are investing in adverts that are working well, rather than campaigns that are not.

Add the Facebook Pixel to your website’s login page to track the effectiveness of your adverts.

At first, you may want to run adverts with a smaller audience and budget.

From there, once you’ve determined the best results, you’ll have a better idea of which ads work best and can become the main campaign.

So now you have everything you need to get started with Facebook advertising.

No matter what level of Facebook advertising expertise you demonstrate, you now have the necessary tips and tricks to get your product in front of the customers you are most interested in.