The Five Most Common Facebook Ad Questions I Get Asked
I’ve been running Facebook Ads for myself and my clients for over 3 years, and over that tim...
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Facebook Ads: 8 Golden Rules of Ad Creation
At The Marketeer, the core strategy we use for our done-for-you event, webinar and challenge marketing services is Facebook Ads. We’ve been running them for years, spending several million of clients money in that time. We live and breathe them, 365 days a year.
And over that time we’ve developed many golden rules to follow to ensure we get the best results for our clients. By that, I mean…
- High numbers of event/webinar/challenge registrants, leads, etc.
- Of high quality – most interested, most engaged, most likely to buy
- At the cheapest cost per lead
Just one part of our golden rules involves the creation of the ads themselves. We’ve learnt the hard way, what works and what doesn’t. We know the best ways to get the best results for clients.
And in todays blog, for the first time publicly, I’m going to be sharing what these golden rules of ad creation are… so you can start filling your events, webinars and challenges cost effectively.
And as the blog title suggests, there’s a total of 8 of these…
A little caveat first. Whilst we specialise in event, webinar and challenge Facebook Ads – many of these rules apply to any type of Facebook Ad – ecommerce, brand awareness, lead generation – the works.
How do I know this? Because we do all of those ads for clients too. It’s just the event/webinar/challenge side of things that we specialise in – that we focus on the most.
Golden Rule 1: Multiple Short/Long Copy
First things first, let’s talk copy. Copy is an essential part of your ads, allowing you to hook your target audience in and convince them to take the action you want them to.
So what copy works best? Good question!
It varies. People are all different. Target audiences and industries vary. There’s no best practice for the most perfect copy.
But there are best practices and rules to follow to find out what works for YOUR audience.
It’s called testing.
And the key to testing with copy is the size – long and short.
Short copy ads are preferred by some people, and others prefer long.
Some prefer a quick read – others love and crave for detail, data, statistics.
So test both!
Golden Rule 2: Multiple Images/Video
Following the testing concept, which by the way is absolutely CRITICAL to Facebook Ads success, is the media.
You have the option of having a single image/video, or a carousel of images per ad.
And which works best? Nobody knows – and if they claimed they did, they’re lying.
Because again, different people and different audiences have different preferences.
So test different images, different videos, and find out what your audience prefers!
How will they tell you what they prefer?
By taking the action you want them to – or not. Read your results carefully, it’s your audience telling you what they think of your ads!
Golden Rule 3: Multiple Warm/Cold Ad Sets
OK, onto more testing. Next we’ve got different ad sets (audiences) that you’ll be testing. These come under two categories: Cold and Warm.
Cold are people who might not know of you already, or have very little prior knowledge of who you are and what you do.
Warm people do know you. They might even like you. They might even follow you. They might be on your email list already. Heck, they might have bought from you already and are raving fans!
See the difference?
But ads perform differently depending on these cold and warm ad sets. So you need to test them both to identify what works.
And by the way, some cold audiences may perform and others might not. Same for warm audiences.
TEST-TEST-TEST.
Golden Rule 4: 1% Lookalikes
Speaking of ad sets and audiences, you MUST run lookalikes. If you didn’t know, this is where you upload your email list (for example), and Facebook will analyse the list and give you thousands of people with similar demographics/interests as these for you to run ads to.
Hence lookalike.
But the key with lookalikes is how precise you create them. When setting up, you have the choice of configuring a % from 1 to 10. 1% is a smaller lookalike audience, but they’re people with most in common with your list. 10% is many more, but less quality – less in common.
So the rule here is use 1% lookalikes ONLY. I’ve found these to produce the best results, and in good numbers too despite it being a smaller audience size versus the higher percentages.
Golden Rule 5: Fixed Equal Budgets – Starting Small
So far it’s mainly been about testing.
Testing different copy, different media, different audiences.
But what is the key to accurate testing that you can rely on the data from?
FAIRNESS and EQUALITY.
If you’re going to test all of this, you need to test them fairly. What does that mean?
Setting small budgets equally across all of the ad sets and ads. That way they end up spending more or less the same amount of money.
Thus you can accurately see which works best – and which doesn’t.
P.S. When testing always start with small budgets and when you start to get data, identify trends and see what your audience prefers – you can start to scale your spend confidently.
Golden Rule 6: Conversion Tracking Software
Unless you’ve been living in a hole the last 12-months, you’ve probably heard about the iOS changes implemented in 2021. I’m not going to get technical, but these changes make the majority of the data and stats Facebook Ads shares with you – unreliable.
Sometimes the results are higher than actual, sometimes they’re lower. Either way, you cannot rely on them.
The solution? Invest in 3rd party tracking software. We use a UK based tracking software company who we’ve found to be awesome for support and cost-effectiveness. If you’d like to find out who we use, email me on info@themarketeer.info.
Golden Rule 7: Clear Labels
Ok onto a bit of house keeping now.
Facebook Ads have many different elements – campaigns – ad sets – ads.
So many different options to configure for each.
It’s easy to get lost and forget what options you’ve set for which.
What copy you’ve used for an ad, or what media.
This makes it difficult for you to accurately measure the results of your testing. So you risk misreading your data and running ads that do bad, and turning the good ones off!
Avoid this by clearly labelling everything. It doesn’t matter how, as long as you know what the labels mean.
Golden Rule 8: NO Expanded Audiences
Last but not least, there’s a fairly new setting in all ad sets called Expanded Audiences. You’ll find it under your interest targeting, and often it is set to ON as default.
The golden rule here is to have this turned off always.
The option is deceptive. It is a method of Facebook to automatically show your ads outside of your chosen ad set targeting, if it believes you will get results from it.
Sounds great, right?
But even if it does get you more results – which by the way is up for question in the first place – it doesn’t actually help you. How?
Because you can’t see where your results came from. You can’t accurately, reliably and with confidence run your ads to an audience of shadows. That’s a fast way to spend all of your ad budget for no results.
Say no to expanded audiences!
So, those are my 8 golden rules of Facebook ad creation. These are what works best for us from years of running ads and spending millions of our clients budget. We know they work.
That said, different ad experts have different strategies – different methodology and their own golden rules.
So whilst I’m utterly confident that our rules gets results, they’re not the only way to get results.
Keep that in mind.
A Gift For You
As a thank you for reading today I want to offer you a free copy of our guide: The 9 Key Components For Running Facebook Ads To Your Webinars And Events.
Helping our clients fill their events and webinars, or supporting them to do so themselves, via Facebook Ads is something we do 365 days a year.
How do we do this?
Through our done for you and done with you services that you can learn more about here.
Whilst you’re here, I’d like to invite you to learn how The Marketeer continually filled the UK’s market-leading portfolio builder and property educator webinars and events over the last 24 months.
Finally, I have an ever increasing catalogue of free resources to help you fill your events and webinars.
Sell more. Inspire more. Change more lives.
Take care,
Dan
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