Facebook is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal as a modern digital marketer with numerous personalisation and demographic options. These allow you to very effectively narrow down your target customer to ensure that your advertisements are reaching the right people.

The platform has over 1.5 billion active users allowing your brand to reach people far and wide. This large user base combined with countless customisation options allow for targeted campaigns that reach the perfect target audience.

There are three main campaign objectives to choose from when creating a Facebook advertisement: Awareness, Consideration and Conversion. These three objectives align with the ACD model of the buyer’s journey.

If you use the awareness objective, you may have the goal to:

• Promote your page to increase your likes and follower count
• Find people within a close proximity of your business
• Increase engagement and interaction on your post
• Reach the highest number of potentially interested individuals

When using the consideration objective, your goal will be to:

• Increase the number of video views
• Drive traffic to a landing page on your website or app
• Generate leads for your business through contact information or emails
• Show your products to more people based on the target audience
• Promote your event through offers or awareness

Using the conversion objective, your aim will be to:

• Increase the number of conversions on your website
• Have people visit your physical store
• Increase installs or engagement in your app
• Get people to claim your offers, free trials or other coupons

There are three different audience options within Facebook that allow you effectively target your campaigns.

Main Audience:

• Locations: Choose the location that is most beneficial to your business and target those who live in the area, recently visited or currently travelling. You can target by postcode, city, country or radius to really narrow down your audience.
• Age: Decide on the minimum and maximum age to fit your target customer
• Languages: Target only those that speak the post’s language so that the advertisement is understandable.
• Detailed targeting: Add demographics, interests or behaviours that most closely align with your target audience.
• Connections: Find individuals that have a personal connection or previous interaction with your page or brand.

Custom Audience:

Target your existing contacts and connections on Facebook through a number of different means:

• Customer file: Using your mailing list or current data that you have on individuals that have interacted with your brand
• Website traffic: Creating a list of people that have taken certain actions on your site that were measured and recorded by facebook pixel
• App activity: Creating a list of people who have downloaded, launched or taken certain actions on your app or game
• Offline activity: Creating a list of individuals that have interacted with your business in-store, by phone or other means
• Engagement: Creating a list of those who have interacted with your posts on facebook or instagram previously

Lookalike Audience:

Advertise to individuals that are similar to your current audience using Facebook’s algorithm. This method should only be used once you have a significantly sized audience base that engages with your brand effectively already.

• Location: Choose the country or region in which you want to target. You can use focus on free trade areas, app store regions or other places, or decide on individual countries.

Audience size: Decide on a scale of 1-10% of the individuals in the target countries/region that most closely align with your current audience

• Carousel: Using two or more scrollable images or videos, you can create an experience for a user that allows them to learn more about your brand or scroll through your products. This option is particularly effective on mobile.
• Single image: Use a single, eye-catching image to grab the attention of your audience. You should consider using text in the image on top of a high-quality image to best present your brand.
• Single video: Use a video to explain your products or brand. The video should contain subtitles as many people view them on silent and must catch the person’s attention within the first few seconds.
• Slideshow: Use 3-10 images to create a video experience that draws on your existing photos. Can be useful for quick and easy ads, but a video highlighting these products or features tends to perform better.

Add an Instant Experience: This feature lets you create effective landing pages for your ads that can be used to acquire customers, explain your business or sell products.

You can effectively manage your ads using the ad manager to assess which ones are proving profitable and their subsequent ROI. Facebook automatically optimises your ads to ensure that right people are seeing them.

However it is important to also monitor yourself and to implement A/B split testing to see how you can improve your ads. A/B split testing is where you run two almost identical ads that have only one difference and measure the success to see which one better performs.

Below are the factors that you should be considering in measuring your ad performance:

• Engagement: The number of times a user took an action on your ad and can include link clicks, shares, comments and reactions. This metric allows you to gauge how your audience is responding to your ads and which they find most engaging.

• Reach: This represents the number of users that have seen your ad and includes both organic and paid results. This is useful for brand awareness campaigns in understanding how far your message was sent.

• Impressions: The number of times your ad was seen. If a user sees the same post twice, it will count as two impressions, but only one reach.

• Click-through-rate (CTR): This is the number of people who see your ad and click through to your landing page. If your CTR is below average of around 1%, it is important to test multiple ads to see which performs best.

• Cost per action (CPA): The number of individuals that take a certain action (ie. app download or free-trial sign-up) from your ads.

Now you’re ready to start your own facebook ad.

Here’s some more tips to get you started:

• Run multiple ad groups with low bids and target different demographics or interests to find which ones perform best and then optimise.
• Ensure that your images or video content is high quality and effectively conveys your product or brand simply.
• Split test your landing page to work out which one performs better and leads to a lower CPA.
• Don’t aim to convert new users who aren’t yet aware of your product or service – instead allow them to learn more and discover your value proposition, before retargeting them.