The Struggle of Facebook Ads

Hi there!

Welcome back 🙂

Last time, I told you all about the first steps of starting a Facebook Ad but there is so much more you need to do before you can actually launch an ad.

Let’s dive right into that!

Setting up a campaign

When you want to launch a Facebook Ad, you do that by setting up a campaign in the Facebook Business Manager. This campaign can contain multiple ad sets as well as multiple ads. However, I’ve only launched one Facebook Ad per campaign until now, because I find that that’s just easier when you’re trying to get familiar with all of it.

The first thing you have to do when you want to set up a campaign is to determine your campaign goal. Facebook has many different goals; all for a different purpose. For example, you can choose ‘page likes’, ‘traffic’, or ‘conversions’. These are the three options that I’ve tried out until now.

Something else that you have to take into consideration is your campaign budget. When you’re just starting with an ad you shouldn’t go for a really big budget since you don’t know if your ad will really work as you hope it would. I started with a budget of 20 euros per day and that’s working pretty well for me right now. And don’t forget, (although this may sound obvious) when you have multiple ads in your campaign, your budget will be divided between those ads 😉

Warming up your Facebook business account

It’s always a good idea to start with ‘page likes’ to kind of warm-up your business Facebook account. After all, Facebook doesn’t really like it all that much when you immediately use your account to send traffic to places outside of Facebook.

This way, when you want to start your actual ads, Facebook won’t disapprove of them as easily 🙂 I started with my actual ads after getting about 75 likes, so you don’t even have to wait that long!

The struggle of finding the right campaign goal

After my ‘page likes’ campaign, I started with a ‘traffic’ campaign. However, that wasn’t really working as well for me as I’d hoped it would. So I reached out to Dean (my mentor) and asked him what I was doing wrong…

Turns out, I had to choose ‘conversions’ instead of ‘traffic’, since that will make way better use of the Facebook Pixel I had set up. And duh, of course it would! After all, Facebook can see if the traffic it sends to your landing page actually buys the product you’re offering. This way, it can optimize your ad to show it only to people who would potentially purchase your offer.

However, don’t forget to add a small piece of code to your Facebook pixel, which is specially made to optimize for purchases of your product! Don’t worry, Facebook will tell you if you still need to do that as well as exactly what piece of code to add 😉

Payment issues

Just when I thought I’d finally had it all in place and thought I could actually start seeing some results, I came across the next struggle: payment issues…

Apparently, Facebook will turn off all your ads if a payment doesn’t go through. Although that makes sense, it didn’t make sense to me at first why my Facebook ads were suddenly turned off. Facebook doesn’t just let you know the reason for shutting down your ads… Nope, I had to find out for myself why that suddenly happened!

After many Google searches, I finally found out that my ads were turned off because of some payment issues Facebook had (and I didn’t even find it on a Facebook page! I found the answer on some forum…).

I’m using Paypal for my payments, and apparently missed one payment because there wasn’t enough money on my account. So, I’d transferred some money to that account. However, it turns out that there’s a 5 to 9 working days delay before Paypal processes the money and it can actually be used for payments )-:

I tried to use a “transfer money directly” button in my Paypal account, but somehow that payment method was not allowed! At the end I had to use a credit card. It took several days before the issue was finally resolved!

So as a pro tip to you: always make sure you have enough money in your account because it will cost you precious days to fix the problem!!

You may have noticed that I haven’t said anything yet about what kind of text, title, and image etc. you should have for your Facebook Ad, and you would be right. However, this blog is already way too long so I will tell you all about that in my next blog post 🙂

Please let me know if you’ve had similar experiences using Facebook Ads!

I’d love to hear I’m not the only one haha, but I also would love to help you fix your problems.

Until next time!

Sandra