The Ultimate Guide to Launching Your Digital Course with Facebook Ads in 2021

If you’re reading this post there’s a good chance that you’re looking to launch a digital course in the near future, and you’ve heard that Facebook Ads could really amplify your results.

I like to use the word amplify because I think it’s important to start by saying that Facebook Ads will not sell a broken offer. If you’ve never launched your course before, don’t spend more on Facebook Ads than you’re willing to lose collecting data.

This ultimate guide will walk you through understanding exactly what it takes to get results with Facebook Ads for your digital course launch.

Facebook Ad Prerequisites…

Before you decide that you’re going to run ads I think it’s important that you have (3) things going for you…

An offer/course that you’re confident in
A budget for Facebook Ads
A strategy for your launch.

1. AN OFFER YOU’RE CONFIDENT IN

The first ingredient to a successful Facebook Ad campaign is to have an offer that you’re confident is going to convert. I don’t just mean that you’re confident it’s a good offer; I mean that you have data or past results that show you’ll make money on the offer.

This could include a beta launch or an organic launch to your list.

I really want to impress upon you that if you run ads to something and the OFFER isn’t something that converts - then no amount of money, traffic, or advertising will make it right.

IDEALLY, you’ve launched to a small audience and generated sales to validate the offer, worst case scenario you haven’t made any money - but you understand the risk of spending ads on the first run.

2. A BUDGET FOR YOUR FACEBOOK ADS

Look, you don’t have to spend THOUSANDS to be successful with your Facebook Ads campaign, but you do need to have a budget. Later in this article we’ll break down how you figure out your budget for a launch.

If this is your first launch and you have no idea what to spend, I recommend that you budget at least $400-$500 for the first launch.

Remember, this is money that you should be willing to SPEND. Don’t bank on your first ads to make you money - generally the first launch with Facebook Ads is about buying a lot of DATA to determine what converts and where to spend more money next time.

3. A STRATEGY FOR YOUR LAUNCH

You can’t run ads directly to your course (unless it’s a very low ticket course, like under $50) you need to have a strategy to launch your course.

My personal recommendation is a 5-day challenge or a webinar. I’ve found the most success in my business with those two methods. And I’ve taught 1,000+ students how to launch with challenges, that’s my zone of genius.

If you don’t have a strategy, I recommend a challenge, and if you need to learn how to run a challenge, here’s a couple free resources from my blog:

These two posts will give you everything you need to develop a challenge launch strategy.

What To Do BEFORE Your Launch Starts

Before your launch starts there are things that you need to do to set the stage for success with your Facebook Ads…

Install your Facebook Pixel
Prime your audience with 4-12 weeks of content
Calculate your launch goals & budget
Build your launch mechanism for lead generation
Create your copy and creative

1. INSTALL YOUR FACEBOOK PIXEL

Before you do anything with ads you MUST install your Facebook Ads pixel on your website, blog, & landing pages. Basically, anywhere you’re driving traffic you need to have the pixel present.

The pixel is really just a line of code that you place on any pages that are getting traffic so that Facebook can track the activity and allow you to target your website traffic later, and track your results.

Depending on what you’re using for your blog (SquareSpace, WordPress, etc) it’s going to be a different process to install the pixel.

Here’s the “secret hack” I give to all my students…

GOOGLE: How to Install Pixel on [Your Platform]

I almost guarantee that you will find a YouTube video that walks you through exactly how to do it - and most software and website providers actually have it in their help section these days.

Do not run a single ad to any page without the pixel. We’ll talk more about using it later.

2. PRIME YOUR AUDIENCE WITH 4-12 WEEKS OF CONTENT

A LOT of people are under the impression that you can simply run ads to a cold audience, generate some sales of your course, and just “do it” in a few weeks.

I don’t recommend that line of thinking. Instead I recommend that you take 15-20% of your total ads budget and you spend 4-12 weeks promoting your content to your ideal audience and warming them up.

For example, when you go into the ads manager to create a new campaign, one of the options is “traffic” and one of the options is “engagement”.

If you’re writing a blog every week, take that blog post and run it to a cold audience to generate new traffic to your website.

Basically you want to spend $20-50/week in the 4-12 weeks leading up to your launch driving people to your website, and getting likes, comments and shares on your content.

Why do we do this?

Because with Facebook Ads we can retarget everyone that’s been to your website (as long as you install the pixel) and you can also retarget your social media engagement on Facebook and Instagram.

So when it comes time to launch you’re not just putting an offer in front of strangers, you’re targeting people that are already in your sphere of influence.

3. CALCULATE YOUR LAUNCH GOALS & BUDGET

So many people jump into their course launch knowing that they want to hit a certain revenue number, but they don’t stop to think about how they are going to achieve that number…

The good news is that I’ve got a calculator that helps you figure out your goals and your budget. Just click the picture below to make a copy for yourself.

To figure out your launch goals and budget, start with a few things…

Your revenue goal
Your program cost
The number of leads you think you can generate organically
Your anticipated conversion rate (if you don’t know use 2% - if you have data, use your past launch data)
Your highest cost per lead with ads to date
Your lowest cost per lead with ads to date

Plug those into the calculator and it will spit out the total number of leads that you need to generate from ads, how many programs you need to sell, your estimated Earnings Per Lead, and your estimated total ad spend & profit.

With this calculator you can change ANY of those 6 data points to determine how you’re going to achieve your goal. So play with the price of your offer, play with the conversion rate, play with the ad costs until you have a clear set of GOALS and METRICS that you’re trying to achieve.

4. BUILD YOUR LAUNCH MECHANISM FOR LEAD GENERATION

Just to make it super clear, let’s talk about the high level Facebook Ads strategy for a launch.

First, you pre-launch (which we talked about above) by putting content in front of cold audiences to build up your warm audience

Second, you run lead generation ads to get people signed up for your Challenge or Webinar.

Third, once you open the cart for your course, you retarget everyone that signed up for your challenge or webinar and drive them to the sales page.

That means that BEFORE you start running ads you need to have the challenge/webinar mapped out and the sign up & thank you pages for it ready to go. You’re not going to run ads for an event on Facebook, or to a group, or to get followers - you’re going to run ads for sign-ups to your launch event.

So before you start the ads, make sure you’ve got the mechanism mapped, and the landing pages built.

5. CREATE YOUR COPY AND CREATIVE

At this point in the pre-launch, you’ve done a lot of work. You’ve calculated your launch budget, you’ve planned your content and built your landing pages, so now it’s time to start writing the copy and drafting up the creative that you’re going to put into your ads…

The copy breaks down into (4) fundamental sections

Text
Headline
Description
Link

The Text is what shows up right above the image that you use for your ad.

The Headline is what shows up right under the images that you use for your ad.

The Description shows up under the headline

And the link is just the URL that you’re driving traffic to.

I recommend that you take a minute to write all the copy for your ads BEFORE you ever open the ads manager. I usually do it in a Google Doc…

I usually write one set of longform copy (2000-2200 characters - so it’s long but still fits in an Instagram caption) and one set of shortform copy (under 600 characters).

Which one usually does better? There isn’t a clear answer; it's going to depend on your audience, your offer, and your landing pages.

So write out your copy - and then move on creating your images (what we call “creative”).

There are (4) types of creatives that I like to test each time I do a promotion…

A stock photo or illustration
A stock photo with text
A photo of me
A text based image

Here’s what that could look like…

I recommend that you use Canva and Creative Market to get stock photos and to create your images for the launch.

While I want to focus on the high level Facebook Ads strategy in this guide, I do get into how to write copy and create images in 1-2 hours inside my complete Facebook Ads for Launching Workshop.

RECAP: What To Do BEFORE Your Launch Starts

Install your Facebook Pixel
Prime your audience with 4-12 weeks of content
Calculate your launch goals & budget
Build your launch mechanism for lead generation
Create your copy and creative

Now that you’ve set the stage for success, we can dive into setting up your Facebook Ads for your launch.

What To Do During Your Lead Generation Phase

This is the part of the launch where we’re trying to get people to sign up for your webinar or challenge, so we’re going to start setting up your Facebook Ads.

Now this is a text based post, so it’s going to be a LOT of information, but don’t stress! The nice thing is that this post isn’t going anywhere, you can come back and reference it at any time - and if you want a complete over-the-shoulder-walkthrough of launch ads as a video, you can check out my Facebook Ads for Launch 2.5 Hour Workshop for just $37.

But for now - let’s start with lead generation.

You have to understand that the strategy we’ve used with our clients for launches ranges from $10,000 to $1,000,000... and we always start with the same strategy.

We’re going to CREATE warm audiences. We’re going to CREATE look-a-like audiences. Then we’re going to research the cold audience.

CREATE YOUR WARM AUDIENCES

Warm audiences by definition are people who are already in your sphere of influence and the (5) that I create are…

An audience of everyone that’s visited my website in the past 180 days
An audience of everyone that’s on my email list
An audience of everyone that’s engaged with my Instagram profile in the last 365 days
An audience of everyone that’s engaged with my Facebook Page/Ads in the last 365 days
An audience of everyone that’s watched at least 25% of any videos I’ve posted in the last 365 days

This can be done in the “audience section” of your Facebook Ads Account.

Once you go into the audience tab of your ads manager, click on “create custom audience” and you’ll be prompted with this screen.

WEBSITE: Use this source to set up your audience of website traffic in the last 180 days. This will allow you to target anyone that has seen ANY page you have your Facebook Pixel installed on in the last 6 months.

CUSTOMER LIST: Use this source to upload a CSV of your email list from your autoresponder, if their email on your list matches their email on Facebook… viola, you can now run ads to them.

VIDEO: Use this source to create an audience of people that watch any video you’ve posted on Facebook or Instagram in the past year and watched at least 25% of the way through that video.

INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT: Use this source to target anyone that has liked, commented, DM’d, saved, or otherwise interacted with your Instagram profile in the past 365 days.

FACEBOOK PAGE: Use this source to target anyone that has liked, commented, messaged, saved, or otherwise interacted with your Facebook Page & Ads in the past 365 days.

Each of these audiences you create will be saved as a CUSTOM audience, and we’re going to use them later…

CREATE YOUR LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES

On the same audience tab of your Ads Manager account - you can now SELECT the audience that you created and create lookalike audiences from them.

A lookalike audience is a fancy way of saying that you can give Facebook a warm/custom audience and ask them to find people similar to those in that list but that are COLD audiences. Basically you can create a similar audience to audiences you already know convert - and let Facebook do the heavy lifting on targeting.

I recommend that you create the following (3) lookalike audiences…

A 1% Lookalike of Your Email List
A 1% Lookalike of Your Website Traffic
A 1% Lookalike of your TOP Social Media Platform (Facebook OR Instagram)

It’s super easy - simply select your audience in the audience list, click the “...” and choose “Create Lookalike”

Once you’ve created those three audiences, now we can turn our attention to cold audiences.

FINDING COLD AUDIENCES

If you’re just starting out with your online course business you may find that the warm audiences and the lookalike audiences are too small or can’t be populated, which means you have to do interest targeting.

Interest targeting is basically targeting people based on what they are interested in. For example, people who like or are interested in Amy Porterfield.

For this we use the audience insights tool.

In this tool, you can type in a single page that you think your audience would be interested in, and it’ll kick out dozens of related pages.

I recommend finding 10-20 cold audiences that you can use in your Facebook Ad lead generation phase. Make a list of 20-30 interests that you’re going to test during your initial launch.

Start with something you KNOW your audience is interested in, and do the research to find more.

CHECK-IN: What You Have Now…

Now you have (3) sets of audiences…

Warm
Lookalike
Cold

We’re going to create ads for each of these “sets” of audiences; that allows us to run ads to our audiences to test what works.

Setting Up Your Lead Generation Ads (Warm)

NOTE: The following sections are going to actually go into the ads manager and walk you through setup. I don’t go into how to name everything, but I recommend that you name your campaigns, ad sets, and ads for easier data evaluation later.

Now that you’ve created your audience, and you’ve got your copy, it’s as simple as “plugging in” the information…

So, the first thing you do is you’re going to set your Warm Ads Campaign.

To do that, we head over to the Ads Manager...

Click on “CREATE” and click on ‘Conversions”....

Now, on the next page enter in 30-40% of your total lead generation budget as the Campaign Budget, and make sure Campaign Budget Optimization is turned “on”. Then click next…

Now you’ve created your campaign with the goal to be sign ups, next we’re going to dive into the ad set level and we’re going to choose who to target…

At the ad set tab you’re going to select the custom conversion or standard event that you want to connect to your challenge sign up.

This is a topic that could be its own multi-thousand-word-blog-post, not to mention that it would derail the flow we’ve got going here.

So, I’m not going to go into how to set up a custom conversion here, but I will give you two options to learn how…

Google this exact phrase “How to setup custom conversion Facebook ads 2021”
Join my $37 Facebook Ads for Launching 2.5 Hour Workshop that walks you through the entire custom conversion and standard event process.

You also want to set an end date for your ads - I usually do 2-3 hours before the start of my webinar or the day that my challenge is set to start.

Once you’ve got your date set, then you’re going to scroll down to the audience section and put in the 5 warm audiences that we created above. Then, make sure you REMOVE the location.

For a warm audience I don’t like to adjust the age, location, or gender because they have interacted with my brand so I don't want to narrow the audience any further.

And for the final sections of the Ad Set level you can leave placements as automatic (feel free to select your placements, but we like to test automatic to start), and then leave the Optimization and delivery alone.

Now, we click the “Next” button at the bottom right, and we move to the Ad level…

The good news about the ad level is that it’s super straightforward… you’re simply going to load up one set of copy/images into the boxes provided from the content that you wrote during the “before you run ads” section.

Make sure your Instagram Account & Facebook Page are selected, and choose “single image or video” ad..

Then, fill in the following fields with your information.

Note: Media is what you click to upload your picture…

Now that you’ve filled everything in, we’re going to select your ad in the column on the left and choose “quickly duplicate”. What this is going to do is create a new ad to the same warm audience, and you’re going to upload your SECOND set of copy with the same image.

In essence, you’re going to fill in the form with new copy and then I recommend that you have (4) ads that you create total…

Longform Copy - Image 1
Longform Copy - Image 2
Shortform Copy - Image 1
Shortform Copy - Image 2

What we’re doing is giving Facebook (4) creative combinations that they can split test to help us find the winning ads combination.

Once you’re done you can hit publish, and you’re now running ads to the warm audiences that you’ve been building in the previous weeks to your launch mechanism.

Setting Up Your Lead Generation Ads (Lookalikes)

This section will be a LOT shorter because you’re going to do the exact same thing at the campaign level. Click creation, choose conversions, and set your campaign budget optimization to on, and put 30-40% of your budget into the lookalike audience.

At the ad set level instead of choosing the warm audiences, you’re going to choose ALL (3) lookalike audiences that you created in the “pre-work” and load them into the audiences.

This time you’ll NEED to choose locations. I recommend the big 5 if you’re an online course creator with an English speaking audience…

United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Australia
New Zealand

Go ahead and enter in those locations, I usually leave age alone or set it to a 30-35 year age range, then hit next and head to the ad level.

At the ad level, I repeat the same process as we did for our warm audience, fill in the appropriate fields with your copy.

Note: Media is what you click to upload your picture...

Now that you’ve filled everything in we’re going to select your ad in the column on the left and choose “quickly duplicate”. What this is going to do is create a new ad to the same warm audience, and you’re going to upload your SECOND set of copy with the same image.

In essence you’re going to fill in the form with new copy and then I recommend that you have (4) ads that you create total…

Longform Copy - Image 1
Longform Copy - Image 2
Shortform Copy - Image 1
Shortform Copy - Image 2

What we’re doing is giving Facebook (4) creative combinations that they can split test to help us find the winning ads combination.

Once you’ve got the (4) split tests created, you can now hit publish and you’ve got your lookalike campaign ready to go.

Setting Up Your Lead Generation Ads (Cold)

Now that you’ve got your custom & lookalike audiences running and testing, the last step is to test cold targets.

You’re going to go through a similar process with some subtle differences…

Click Create, Conversions, Next ----> But on this page we’re going to turn campaign budget optimization OFF.

Now, at the ad set level we’re going to do the same first tasks. Choose your conversion event, and set your dates for the campaign.

Now we’re going to set (4) pieces of “cold” information…

Budget
Locations
Age/Gender
Detail Targeting
Languages

Daily budget: I recommend $5/day to start if this is your first launch. Keep it simple and don’t overthink this part - we’re going to spend $5/day/cold target you researched, so know that it’s not $5 for the whole campaign - JUST FOR ONE TARGET.

Then in locations I recommend the big 5 again.

Gender and Age - I set an age range of 20-30 years MAX.

Languages - I choose English (All)

And then detail targeting…

Enter ONE page/interest that you want to target, and UNCHECK the Detail Targeting Expansion Box.

As before, you’re going to leave placements and optimization alone. And you’re going to head down to the ad level.

Again, as before, you're going to put your copy and creative into the ads level, quickly duplicate the ad (4 times) and then you’ll have ONE cold campaign setup.

BUT DON’T HIT PUBLISH YET.

Now what you're going to do is mouse over the AD SET that you created in the cold campaign and duplicate the AD SET.

This is going to duplicate all the ad split testing you made and create a new ad set where you’re going to scroll down and enter a NEW interest to target. One interest per ad set.

Repeat this at least 10 times.

When you’re done you’re going to have 10 AD SETS at $5/day/ad set that are going to test various cold interests to see how your ads perform to cold audiences.

Publish and Wait

Now that you’ve got the three campaigns for lead generation, you just need to wait for them to come out of review and turn active, which means that Facebook has approved them and they are running.

If that process above seems super complex and you want some extra help, check out the Facebook Ads for Launching Workshop via the image below. That’s a 2.5 hour class where I actually set up these (3) campaigns and it’s recorded for you to fast-forward, rewind, and rewatch as much as needed.

Evaluating & Scaling The Ads

Now that your ads are running, you’ll want to check in on them every 12-24 hours (or more) as they start and watch your cost per results.

Remember above (in the budget section) we talked about what your lead cost range should be to hit your goals for the launch. If something is over that range, we need to cut it, if something is under that range, we may want to scale it up.

To see how the ads are doing you want to look at the “results” column that shows up in the default view.

Here’s a real example of what you’ll see from a campaign that we ran for a recent affiliate webinar…

Here’s my schedule for shutting things off…

I don’t touch ANYTHING for at least 24 hours
After 24 hours
1. I check the cost on the warm and lookalike campaign, but I don’t make too many judgments. I just want to check that it’s converting.
2. I open up the cold campaign and turn off the worst performing ad sets, or the ad sets that are way above my target CPL
After 48 hours I check in on the cold again, and turn off anything expensive.
After 72 hours I check in on the ADS LEVEL costs and turn off anything that isn’t in my target range
After 96 hours I check on the lookalike and warm costs again - generally speaking lookalike will stay stable, but depending on the size of your warm audience it may start to creep up to a non-profitable point.

Here’s my schedule for scaling my spend…

I don’t scale anything for at least the first 24-48 hours
After 48 hours anything that’s in my target cost range as a lookalike or warm campaign, I will scale up the budget 40-50% over 24-48 hours
After 48 hours anything that’s in my target cost range as a cold ad set, I will scale up the budget 20-30% over 24-48 hours at the ad set level

It’s that simple. I’m just going to check in, evaluate, turn off, and scale as necessary following the schedule above.

Let It Fly & Do The Launch

The reality is Facebook Ads (while challenging to learn) are meant to work - so give Facebook the SPACE to let everything happen. Don’t obsess, don’t panic, just ride the waves.

Now that you’ve got the ads running, being managed, and being scaled you just have to start working on the “launch stuff” to be ready for your webinar or challenge.

Then you simply host your webinar or challenge. And then we move into the final phase which is the cart open retargeting ads.

Cart Open Ad Campaigns

Once the cart is open and you’re selling your course in your launch, you want to run ads to everyone that registered for your content to let them know that now is the chance for them to buy the program at the end..

There are (3) retargeting ad campaigns that I recommend you run minimum.

Retargeting Everyone
Starting 1:1 convos with ads
Retargeting Cart Abandonment

These are SUPER simple to set up and I want to walk you through how you would set these up to market your launch offer to everyone that signed up for the launch.

NOTE: You MUST install the pixel on your sales page, checkout page, and course area for these ads to work correctly.

For each of these ads, you’re going to set them up the same way you set up the warm campaign, except we’re going to create slightly different custom audiences.

If you’re thinking ahead then you probably already realized that with all the custom audience options you can actually target ANYONE that’s been in your launch… So here’s how to do it:

RETARGETING EVERYONE

In order to retarget everyone you’re going to create (2) custom audiences.

You’re going to upload a CSV of everyone that signed up for your launch (we already covered how to do this one above)
You’re going to create a custom website audience of everyone that saw the thank you page for the launch sign up in the last 30 days… so for example, if you did a webinar, it would be the webinar registration thank you page that you’re targeting, because if someone saw that page that means they signed up for the launch.

Here’s what the second audience setup looks like:

Now you have TWO custom audiences - we are double dipping because people will be in both places, but trust me I’d rather double dip on the audience than miss out on targeting someone.

The next step is super simple, now that we know what we’re doing…

Create a campaign for conversions
At the ad set level choose your conversion event for a purchase
Put the TWO custom audiences into your audience section
Remove any location/age/gender parameters
Write 1-2 sets of copy/creative
Hit publish

It’s that simple. Now, I didn’t do a ton of screenshots this time because it’s the SAME process as you set up the warm audience, it's just that we’re choosing different custom audiences…

STARTING 1:1 CONVOS WITH ADS

One of my favorite launch strategies is to start 1:1 conversations with people in the launch via Facebook Messenger, but it doesn’t make sense to go hunt every single person that signed up for the launch down on Facebook and invade their space.

The good news is that Facebook has an option where you can run an ad to all the people in your launch where when they click it, it opens up a 1:1 chat with your page in messenger.

This is a GREAT way to simply say “let me know if you have any questions” and people who click and get 1:1 support - conversions on 1:1 convos are insanely high.

Here’s a sample of this ad type….

The next step is super simple now that we know what we’re doing…

Create a campaign for messages
At the ad set level choose your conversion event as messages
Put the TWO custom audiences into your audience section
Remove any location/age/gender parameters
Write 1-2 sets of copy/creative
Hit publish

And now you’re running an ad with people sending you messages about your launch, and you don’t have to hunt them down. Pretty cool, yeah?

NOTE: Make sure that you WATCH your page inbox if you run an ad like this - I sometimes forget to pay attention and a missed chat is a bad customer experience.

RETARGETING CART ABANDON

This is my favorite ad to run because it’s SUPER cheap and it converts like MAGIC! You’re going to target everyone that saw your sales page and/or checkout page but didn’t make it to your purchase thank you page.

You’ll set it up as a website custom audience. Do “website url contains” your sales page and/or checkout page URL, then click the “exclude people” button, then do “website url contains” your purchase thank you page (the page they see immediately after they pay).

The next step is super simple now that we know what we’re doing…

Create a campaign for conversions
At the ad set level choose your conversion event for a purchase
Put the single custom audience into your audience section
Remove any location/age/gender parameters
Write 1-2 sets of copy/creative
Hit publish

It’s that simple.

Let Your Cart Close And Evaluate The Results

Now that you’ve run the ads for warm up, leads, and sales the last thing to do is to close your cart and analyze the results.

Most people just run ads and say “did I make money” but I recommend that you do a full tear-down on what you saw… think about things like:

What was my overall cost per lead?
What ads worked well?
What worked well in the launch?
What didn’t work well in the launch?
What would I chance next time for the ads?
Any ideas I had that I want to implement next time?

The value in your ads is not just in the ads themselves but also in the evaluation of what worked, and what didn’t - don’t skip the evaluation.

Next Steps & Putting It Into Action

If you made it this far…

I’m so proud!
You’re probably wondering, now what…

If you’re looking to go deeper on Facebook Ads for launches, make sure you check out my 2.5 hour pre-recorded training that is this post… but in action. It’s just $37 and it’s waiting for you here…

Now, if you’re still working on your ACTUAL LAUNCH MECHANISM, and want to run a challenge to launch your course, you can also check out The Challenge Launch Toolkit…

This is my complete toolkit that includes blueprints, swipe files, training videos and more to help you map out your profitable challenge launch! It’s also just $37 and it’s waiting for you here…

Last But Not Least….

Thanks for taking the time to read this post - it was a labor of love and I REALLY hope you got lots of value out of it! If you did, a quick comment and share is BEYOND appreciated! And make sure to come back and share your launch results!

See you in the next Ultimate Guide!

The Ultimate Guide to Launching Your Digital Course with Facebook Ads in 2021

The Ultimate Guide to Launching Your Digital Course with Facebook Ads in 2021

Facebook Ad Prerequisites…

What To Do BEFORE Your Launch Starts

RECAP: What To Do BEFORE Your Launch Starts