You’ve set up your Facebook page, you’ve run a few ads and you’ve got some results. (If you haven’t, check out this guide to getting starting with Facebook ads), but what comes next? Like anything in online marketing, the key to getting good results is constant improvement. In this guide, you’ll get tried and test tips that will allow you to get the most out of Facebook advertising.

As always, if you have any questions about anything in this guide leave a comment at the bottom of the article and I’ll get back to you. Let’s get started.

Aims and goals

Like with any marketing campaign, your Facebook advertising will be much more effective if you know what you want to get out of it. That means setting aims and goals that can be measured to see whether you have achieved them.

Now you may be thinking that the overall goal for your Facebook page is to get as many fans as possible, but if you think in terms of numbers and nothing else then your Facebook advertising will likely fail. Why? Well, when you consider that fake fans can be bought for next to nothing it becomes clear that the real challenge isn’t increasing the number of fans, the real challenge is attracting Facebook fans who might become customers.

Ultimately, attracting this kind fan will be dependent on the ads you create and the people you target (something we’ll look at later). However, you still need an overall goal to aim for. This might be something like “increase by 10% the number of people who complete a purchase after finding your business website via Facebook”. In order to measure this kind of goal, you’ll need to have Google Analytics set up. You can learn how to do that in this guide and doing so will give you a much better idea of how your website is performing in general.

If your Facebook adverts are targeted towards a common goal, then you’ll have more chance of getting good results out of your campaigns.

Posts

Next you need to spend some time thinking about the posts that you are promoting on Facebook. There are two elements you should focus on here to ensure people are more likely to interact with your ads.

Images

Adding images to posts is best practice for Facebook posts in general. However, there are some extra things to consider if you’re going to be promoting a post. The first of these is the 20% text rule – Facebook won’t let you promote a post if the image contains more than 20% text. You can learn how to check your images to see if they comply with the rule here.

• Here are some extra tips for picking a good photo for your posts.
• If you the post you’re promoting is a product ad, use a product photo.
• Include a person wherever possible.
• Avoid staged looking stock photos.

If you’re struggling for quality images, you can find out more about creating your own here, and you can find sites where you can download quality photos you can use in your ads if you’re still struggling.

Copy

We’ve covered best practice in social media copywriting in this guide. However, there are a couple of other points to bear in mind when it comes to Facebook advertising.

The first is that you need to keep things short – a significant proportion of people will see your adverts on a mobile device and Facebook will cut off your post text after about 80 characters. Ideally your posts should be no more than 80 characters. If that’s not possible, ensure you are communicating the benefit a reader will achieve by clicking on your advert in those first 80 characters.

Targeting

Facebook offers a huge range of targeting options and you should spend some time familiarising yourself with them. Clearly, selecting the right targeting options for your ads is vital, but this is a process that starts long before you get to the targeting stage.

The first step is understanding your audience and what they want from a business like yours. If you haven’t done that, then you’ll struggle to make any kind of impact. You can learn more about defining your audience in this guide. If you already understand your audience, then finding groups to target in the Facebook ads manager should be relatively easy.

When picking a group to target you should be able to answer the question “why would someone with this interest want to click on this add?” If you can’t come up with a good answer, then you shouldn’t be targeting that group.

Custom audiences

Custom audiences are a powerful way to connect with people who are interested in your business and you should take the time to set them up. There are two main ways to use custom audiences for your website – building a list based on people who visit your site, and using a list of contact details you already have.

Website traffic

Building audiences based on your website traffic does involve a bit of technical work, so you may need to ask your web developer to do it for you. However, once you’ve set up the tracking pixel required to create custom audiences you can do the following targeting options at your disposal.

People who have visited your website: This is great for getting the attention of people who already know about your company, but might not yet be customers. Use it to show interesting content to encourage people back to your site.

People who have visited a specific page: Not everyone buys a product the first time they visit a page. With this option you can show product adverts to people who have visited a product page and increase the chances they will become customers.

People who haven’t visited in a certain period of time: You can use this to entice people back to your site with special offers and deals.

Remember though – if you haven’t been attracting the right people to your website in the past, then you won’t get any value out of targeting them again.

Customer lists

Facebook also allows you to create a custom audience based on data lists you’ve gathered. For example, you can build an audience based on email addresses you’ve collected. (Just be sure that people agreed to receiving marketing messages from you when they gave you their address.)

You can use this to connect with existing customers on Facebook, as well as showing them content that will encourage them to keep coming back to you site.

On top of that, with a bit of Facebook magic, you can create a lookalike audience. You can use this to target people who have similar interests to your existing customers, increasing your chances of attracting new customers through Facebook ads.

Testing

Finally, make sure you test your adverts to understand what works for your business. The best way to test is to run a number of ads on the same post at the same time, but ensure that each ad has one different element.

For example, if you wanted to test whether a particular blog article appealed most to people interested in WordPress or people interested in Joomla, you would post the article to Facebook then set up two adverts – one targeting the interest WordPress and the other targeting the interest Joomla. When the ads are finished, you’ll have a better idea of the audience most interested in that blog article.

Remember – if you change more than one element when conducting a test you won’t get any useful information from it as it will be impossible to tell what has caused the difference in results.