Introduction

There are many kinds of Facebook Ads formats, however, they fall into two categories: dynamic ads and static ads. Both types of ads are set up in your Facebook Ads Manager or Business Manager account.

• For static ads, you use a combination of images, videos, and text to create your advert. Essentially, your final ad will look exactly like what’s in the Ad Preview section right before you submit your ads for approval.

• For dynamic ads, these are not going to look anything like what’s in the Ad Preview section. What you’ll see in the preview is just going to be a placeholder.

This is because the image, headline, description, price, and more, will depend based on your leads’ activity on your website or app. Facebook will be dynamically pulling the information from your data feed.

For instance, if user 1 was browsing through some jackets on your app, when they go into Facebook, they’re going to see dynamic ads for jackets.

If user 2 was looking at some nice t-shirts, then they’re going to be served dynamic ads for t-shirts. User 1 is not going to see some t-shirt ads because he wasn’t looking at t-shirts.

To answer the question of which type of ad is best for your business, the answer will depend on the type of business you have. Static ads are used by a vast majority of advertisers on Facebook because they only have a few products to sell.

To use dynamic ads, you’d need to upload a product catalog to Facebook. If you only have 1 or 2 products, you don’t need to have a catalog.

Dynamic ads are used by businesses with a large inventory of products – whether it’s a few hundred, thousands or millions of products – businesses of this size will benefit from dynamic ads. While the initial setup of dynamic ads will take a considerable amount of time, the result is worth it.

Once dynamic ads are set up, it’s pretty much on autopilot. You don’t need to manually update the price or your stock levels every day. You can do it one central location and your Facebook data feed will automatically reflect the new information.

To sum up, if you’re a business with only a few products to sell, use static ads. If you’re a large business with many divisions or markets, create dynamic ads to streamline and lower your ad costs.

How To Optimize Your Facebook Ad Design

You can have all the money in the world to pay for Facebook Ads but if you don’t have the kind of design that will resonate with your target audience, then you’re spending your money for nothing.

Ad design is a very important aspect of Facebook Ads. Not only does Facebook allow you to advertise in a variety of formats, but they also give you a very thorough reporting tool so you can see which ads are working and which ads aren’t.

When you have this information at hand, you can easily adjust your design so you can increase your click-through rates and your conversions.

Here are a few ad design strategies you can use to optimize your Facebook Ads:

Use High-Quality Images

No one likes to look at images that look like they’ve been shot by a 3-year old. Messy amateur shots and stock product photos are two of the biggest pet peeves of Facebook users.

They see enough amateur photos from their friends’ updates and stock photos from every other advertiser on the planet, so you need to use high-quality images to catch their attention.

Use Location-Specific Images

If you’re targeting a local area, then you should use local images. Or you can shoot a video in a popular local hangout. When people see you know their area intimately, they’ll like you immediately.

It’s refreshing to see an ad that offers up something not many other advertisers do – like capturing the local scenery. It’s much easier to relate to something local than something that’s thousands of miles away.

Use Visual Contrast, Filters Or Overlays

Even if you aren’t artistic by nature, you can use a photo editing software with nice filters on it. If you aren’t confident of your skills, you can look up some inspiration online.

Check out popular graphic design sites, find the kind of designs you think your audience will like, and use that as inspiration to come up with your own design.

Use Carousel Ads To Create A Visual Story

When done right, carousel ads can actually tell a story. You just need to have a series of interconnected images that form part of a whole picture. People love stories so try to think of a twist to your story to get them engaged with your advert.

Easy Ways You Can Lower Your Facebook Ads Budget

There are plenty of Facebook Ads marketers who are reporting conversion costs of anywhere from a few cents to a fraction of a penny. Others aren’t so lucky.

In fact, most inexperienced marketers are reporting quite the opposite and are getting burned due to astronomical ad costs.

Now there are plenty of factors that come into play when talking about Facebook ad costs. But obviously, before you even get started you should have some sort of budget in mind (unless you have an unlimited supply of money).

Here are three ways you can lower your Facebook ads budget:

Know Your Target Audience

Ideally, you should already have an idea of who’s going to be interested in your product or service. Whether you are a first-time entrepreneur or a battle-hardened businessman, you must know who your target audience is. Is your product geared towards women or men? Are you targeting young professionals or travelers?

Knowing your target audience will help lower your ad budget because there’s a higher probability these people are going to be interested in what you have to offer.

Targeting an audience who doesn’t fit your ideal user will lead to higher ad costs because they won’t be paying your ad any attention.

Set A Bid Cap

You can set a daily or lifetime budget for your Facebook ads. But did you know you can also set a bid cap? If you didn’t know before, well now you do. A bid cap is like what the name suggests – Facebook will put a cap on your bid. So, for example, if you can only afford to pay $0.5 per click, then you can put that amount as your bid cap.

Otherwise, Facebook may charge you $1 per click, or more, depending on the competition. A bid cap helps ensure you don’t go beyond your budget.

Don’t Advertise Around The Holidays

During holidays, people tend to buy a lot of things online. This buying frenzy drives marketers and businesses to create Facebook ads to get buyers’ attention which in turn drives up the advertising costs for everyone.

So, if you don’t want to compete with many other businesses, it’s best to not advertise during peak seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other important holidays. There are 365 days in a year – you can always advertise before or after the buying season to help lower your ad spend.

Reasons Why Facebook Ads Are More Effective Than Boosted Posts

If you’ve ever created and/or managed a Facebook page, you’d know where to find that ubiquitous Boost A Post button because it appears on virtually all of your page’s posts.

It’s quite simple to get started with boosting a post – all you have to do is just click on that button and follow the onscreen instructions. In just a few minutes you’ll have your very first Facebook advert.

However, if you want more control over the creatives you can use for your advert, as well have more campaign objectives to choose from, you should use Facebook Ads. It’s more complicated, yes, but you get far more out of Facebook Ads than just a simple boosted post.

Here are three reasons why Facebook Ads are more effective than boosted posts:

You’re Not Stuck With Using A Boring, Old Post

With boosted posts, you can only boost published posts. This means that you need to write a post first, publish it, and only then can you boost it.

With Facebook ads, you have so many options to choose from – you can even create dark posts which are posts that are created specifically for ads. Dark posts don’t appear on your news feed, unlike boosted posts.

You Have Plenty Of Choices Where You Want Your Ad To Appear

Facebook Ads allow you to post your ad not just in the news feed but also in the right column, on Instagram, on the Audience Network, and more. You have a lot of options that are just not available with boosted posts. If you boost your post, it will only appear on mobile and desktop news feeds.

You Can’t Schedule Your Boosted Post

Though you can set an end date with your boosted post, you can’t set a start date. Once you boost your post, it will start automatically. With Facebook Ads, you can set a start and end date.

This means that if you plan on being away on holiday for the next week or so, then you can schedule your ads in advance. 

With that being said, boosted posts do have advantages. It’s a great way to test the waters, so to speak. You can get a taste of advertising on Facebook, but pretty soon you’d want to scale your ads.

When you do, you’ll need to get up to speed with Facebook Ads and the Ads Manager.

Your Business Should Use The Facebook Pixel and Retarget Marketing

The pixel is a cute name for what is probably Facebook Ads’ most powerful weapon for advertisers. Not only does the pixel track what your visitors are doing on your website, but it also transcends any device and IP address.

Once your user is tagged by the pixel, you can be sure that your ads are going to be shown to that user regardless of whether they’re using another device or traveling in another country.

Here are five reasons why retarget marketing is so effective in Facebook Ads:

You’re Targeting A Warm Or Hot Audience

Unlike cold audiences, it’s easier for warm or hot audiences to convert because they already know your brand or business. Only a very small percentage of first-time visitors (cold audience) actually buy anything so retargeting them in your next ad campaign helps increase your chances of getting them to buy from you later on.

Increase Brand Awareness

On the second point of contact with your business, your prospect or lead may start opening themselves to your business. They may not be ready to buy from you yet, but slowly they’re becoming more aware of your brand.

At this stage, they are in the middle of your sales funnel (consideration stage). With just a bit more push, you can get them down to the bottom of the funnel where it’s easier to convince them to buy.

You Can Generate More Sales

People familiar with a brand are more likely to do business with that brand than someone they don’t know.

If you use a sales funnel for your business, you can implement different techniques and strategies to move people from the top of your funnel (awareness stage) down to the bottom of the funnel (conversion stage).

Retarget marketing helps ensure you get more sales down at the bottom of the funnel.

Higher Conversion Rates

Retarget marketing will help you increase your conversion rates. As people go on down your sales funnel, your conversion rates will be higher. They’ve seen your ads plenty of times, so they know you and probably trust you by now.

Lower Ad Costs

With higher conversion rates and optimized adverts, your ad costs will be much lower. This is because Facebook rewards advertisers with high ad engagement and conversion rates.

With lower ad costs, you can then look into scaling your campaigns and reaching even more people. 

Reasons Why You Need To Install a Facebook Pixel

Many advertisers on Facebook don’t have the pixel installed on their website. Most think setting it up is complicated while some are only interested in getting a few quick sales and don’t think it’s worth the hassle.

However, smart marketers and advertisers know that if you want to truly succeed with Facebook Ads, then you need the Facebook pixel.

It’s free to start with, and if you are not technically inclined, you can always hire a developer to install the code for you. They can most likely get it done in just a few minutes.

So here are three reasons why you need to install the Facebook pixel on your website today:

You Can Create A Custom Audience

Facebook’s audience targeting tool is very useful – it will let your hyper-target people based on their location, their age, gender, interests, hobbies, and so much more.

But with the pixel, you can take your targeting to a whole new level. You can target only people who have been on your website, so you know these are people who know you and your brand.

You Need The Pixel To Remarket Your Existing And Potential Customers

The pixel will track what your website visitors are doing on your website. It will know what pages they’ve visited, and if you are tracking various events on your site (for instance, adding items to cart, making purchases, etc.), then the pixel will report that information to Facebook.

When you set up your Facebook Ads, you can segment your audience into people who have browsed a certain page on your website, as well as those who added your products to cart but did not check out, and so on.

With this information, you can easily offer up relevant ads to your web visitors depending on their site activity.

The Pixel Will Track Your Visitors’ Activities Across Devices

The pixel code is so powerful that it can follow your site visitors and learn about their activities whether they are on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop computer.

It offers a seamless experience for users and adds a lot of value to advertisers. For instance, if your visitor initially visited your site on their laptop, they’d still be able to see your ads on Facebook whether they’re on another laptop or a smartphone.

Top Facebook Ads Strategies To Make People Aware Of Your Business

You probably have a great product or service to offer to your target audience. And you’re thinking of creating a Facebook advert to sell it to people you think might be interested in what you have to offer.

What kind of campaign objective should you choose? Should you use Traffic, Store Visits or Conversions objective?

Depending on the nature of your product, and its pricing structure, you may get some people to buy from you immediately. However, a great majority of your target audience doesn’t know who you are. So why should they buy from you?

The right way to convert a cold audience or people who are strangers to your brand or business is to target them with Awareness ads. As the name suggests, these types of ads will make people aware of what you have to offer. It’s like an introduction advert if you will.

On Facebook Ads, you can choose between Brand Awareness and Reach campaign objectives. While both are quite similar in nature, Brand Awareness ads are shown to people who might be interested in your business and Reach ads are shown to the maximum number of people in your target audience.

In order to make your brand memorable to people, you have to make your advert stand out. Remember, you are competing with a lot of other competitors for your target audience’s attention, so you have to think of a way to grab their attention right off the bat.

Facebook lets you choose from 4 different formats to try and hook your audience in: carousel, single image, single video, and slideshow. Use the best format you think may work best with your audience.

The best thing about Reach campaigns is that you can split test your advert (Brand Awareness ads don’t have the split test option available). This helps you narrow down the best ad creative, placement, ad delivery and audience to get higher conversions. Once you know the best converting Reach ad, you can then create a Brand Awareness campaign and use the winning advert from your Reach campaign.

Make sure to offer your cold audience something of value so they’ll remember you when you target them later on in the next stage of your Facebook Ads campaign.

Why A Lead Capture Funnel Is Essential For Facebook Ads Success

Knowing what a lead or sales funnel is essential for you to succeed in Facebook Ads. Otherwise, you’re leaving money on the table because you’re not optimizing ads for every stage of the sales process.

For simplicity’s sake, we’re going to define a sales funnel as having three stages: the top, middle, and bottom. To get higher conversion rates, you need to create separate types of ads for each stage of the funnel.

For instance, at the top of the sales funnel, people wouldn’t know your brand, and what you do, so you need to introduce yourself to them. For this purpose, Brand Awareness and Reach ads are great objectives to use for your Facebook advert.

You don’t want to sell on them aggressively as it could turn them off your brand. Instead, try to offer something of value. When they engage with your ad, you can retarget them later on with another ad.

In the middle of your funnel, your audience will be at the stage where they will be more likely to consider your business as the solution to their pain point. Since this is your second point of contact with your audience, they’d be more likely to engage with your advert.

You can use different campaign objectives depending on what you want to achieve. For instance, you can choose from Traffic, Engagement, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation, and Messages objectives on Facebook ads.

Maybe a few people in your audience will be willing to buy something from you now, but most of them will need some more prodding. So, we go into the next stage of the funnel.

At the bottom of the funnel, this is where you ask people to buy your stuff. You’ve already made some contact with them – they’ve engaged with your past adverts, they’ve visited your site, signed up to your mailing list, downloaded your app, and more. They should be ready to buy now.

You can create a Facebook ad with any of the following objectives – Conversions, Catalog Sales, and Store Visits. When you create the perfect advert, one that will resonate with your bottom of the funnel audience, then you’ve got them in the bag.

You can also do a few split tests so you can find the winning advert which you can scale later on.

Conclusion

Facebook is a very powerful marketing tool if used properly. The most important aspect to remember is that it is a social platform first and needs to be treated as such. In other words, don ‘t expect people to respond to commercial messages but rather build a relationship with them first. Then, they will generate sales for you without you even having to ask.

As long as you focus on the needs of your prospects and customers and provide them with value, your sales will increase exponentially and your brand will spread like wildfire.