HSH 037: Facebook Ad Fundamentals: Basics, Budgeting, and Boosting
In this episode, we’re talking all about how and when to boost your Facebook posts, setting goals for your campaigns, the importance of testing your ads and so much more!
The intent of this show isn’t to say that boosting doesn’t work, but the issue is when people are pressing the button to boost their posts they are looking for “more” (in terms of likes, reach, etc.).
The problem with “more” is that it’s not definable, and my Golden Rule of Facebook ads is that you need to have an end goal before you start. What are the measurable metrics or outcomes that you want to achieve from your ads? This could be something like getting five people to enroll in your premium program, or “X” amount of sales of your online product.
If you’re putting your ad in front of people who don’t know who you are and you want them to take action, you need to tell them what action to take. It may be easy to get people to do something like reading a blog or opt-in for a free product, but it’s hard to get people to buy from you the first time they meet you! For this reason, you should be driving people to your opt-in because it’s measurable, and then you can nurture the relationship with your potential customers from there.
How and when to boost
Boosting posts can work if you’re targeting people on your list, or already connected with you. When targeting people that don’t know you, there are now expanded features and options within the Power Editor (Facebook’s advanced ad management panel). It’s free, and with it you are able to target by country, age, cold markets and more. Why would we want to use that boost button when we can go into this tool, which provides a much more robust version?
You should be checking in on why you’re boosting your post in the first place. Likes, shares and hearts on social media don’t pay your bills. Remember, profitability is way more important than popularity! Instead of getting love on social media, if you are able to have a potential customer opt-in to your free product, you can then follow up via email and invite them to purchase your paid product.
Understanding goal setting
The “$5 a day” theory works, and you don’t need to spend a ton of money on Facebook ads. However, if your cost per lead is $1 and you want to bring in $300 leads a month, you’re going to have to spend more than $5 daily to do it. Reverse engineer your revenue goals; step back and consider that number, then look at what budget would be required to do this amount. As you scale your business, you’re going to have to scale your spend along with it too.
Budgeting and testing
As you run your Facebook ads, you’re going to have to set aside some of your budget for testing. For our most recent launch, the first thing we did was come up with 100 different ad sets, and over half of them didn’t convert to sign ups for our free challenge! Ads are not an exact science, and if we don’t put money into testing them, we’ll never know what works and what doesn’t. This leads to another downside of hitting the boost button for your posts: you’re not collecting data on what converts for your audience.
Facebook pixels
Pixels are a couple of lines of code, an invisible little square that goes on your page and will redirect to Facebook when loaded. We’ll want to put the page view pixel everywhere we want our audience to go, and Facebook will track who’s going there. Regardless of the website or sign up page you’re using, almost every one will integrate with Facebook ads now and if you’re ever stuck, instructions are easy to find online.
Custom conversions and standard events are both types of conversions, but Facebook will only count conversions that come as a result of the ads. Both are very similar, but standard events are more standardized. Examples of standard events you can use are “add to cart”, “purchased”, “leads” and more. Whatever it’s called, the standard event is just a placeholder, which is tracking clicks.
As a final call to action, step back and look at the first $50 to $100 you’ve spent on Facebook ads. Where did that money go and how did it directly grow your business? Start thinking critically about where you’re investing and what it will take to get the results that you want!
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