What to Do When You Want to Start Using Facebook Ads?

Hi there!

Thanks for reading my latest blog 🙂

Let’s get right down to it shall we? Because now that I’ve told you all about generating traffic for free through Facebook, it’s time to dive into paid Facebook advertising! And let me tell you, it was quite a hassle to set everything up…

What you need to start Facebooks ads

Before you can actually start doing Facebook Ads, you are going to need a business Facebook account (you can easily connect this to your personal account). This is one of those pages that people can like and follow, but you can’t befriend anyone through.

While you can already use this page to promote your business (which I don’t), the real Facebook Ads happen behind the scenes in the Facebook Business Manager. This is where the real struggle begins…

Setting up a Facebook Pixel

I had followed the course Bulletproof Facebook Ads to help me understand all that I needed to do to create an ad.

This course was really helpful and I learned so much from it (btw, you can follow this course for FREE once you are an InternetProfits partner)! But there was also still a lot that I had to figure out on my own.

One of the most confusing things was that Facebook had decided to change it’s user interface, making everything so much harder to find… Thanks Facebook…

During the course, I was told that the first thing I needed to do was create a Facebook Pixel. This is a piece of code that you place on the website where you want to lead your traffic to. Once this pixel is on your website, Facebook can track if, how, and when it sends potential customers to your product. That sounds great, right?

Yeah, I thought so too! But actually finding where I needed to create the Facebook Pixel took me a really long time… I’m not even going to bore you with explaining how and where I finally found it, because, knowing Facebook, they will have changed it again anyways!

Determining the right audience

Okay, so now that I had set up my Facebook pixel and would be able to track the traffic going to my website, it was time for the next step: determining the right audience for my product.

This is one of the most important parts of a Facebook ad, because even if your text, image and title are amazing, if you don’t show it to the right audience, you won’t be able to sell anything (or at least a lot less). Makes sense, right?

Demographics

Fortunately, Facebook has a lot of options to fine tune your perfect audience! There are, of course, the options to filter on gender, age, country, and other demographics. You can even filter on people who have just gotten engaged! This would be perfect if you are a wedding photographer for example 😉

Interests

But I think that the greatest filters are the ones about the interests of people. This way, you can find exactly the right people who will be interested in the product you’re trying to sell!

The audience can be made as broad or as small as you like! For example, if you want to reach out to entrepreneurs that are interested in affiliate marketing, you can make your audience broader by telling Facebook that your ad should be shown to people who are interested in self-employment OR affiliate marketing. And if you want to decrease your audience size you can say that the ad should be shown to people who are interested in self-employment AND affiliate marketing 🙂

Don’t choose an audience that’s too broad because that’s like finding a needle in a haystack for Facebook and won’t give you the results you want. The more specific you are, the easier it is for Facebook to show your ad to the right people!

Actually finding these interests is another struggle entirely… There are so many interests you can choose from, but there’s also a lot that you can’t choose. This is definitely something I really struggled with!

Let me give you an example: if your target audience is ‘struggling entrepreneurs’ (like I used to be), you can’t just choose ‘struggling entrepreneurs’ as an interest. You have to find out what exactly your struggling entrepreneurs are interested in. That takes a lot of research! Pro tip: don’t just think of interests as hobby’s or other larger concepts, but also think of certain books or writers, for example, that your audience would be interested in.

Excluding audiences

Another way to filter is to exclude a certain audience. These can be people who are, for example, already on your email list, or people who have already bought your product. After all, you don’t want to pay money to show people the product that they’ve already bought, right?

It takes a lot of fine tuning to find the right audience (I’m still doing a lot of fine tuning myself, and I’m definitely not done yet), but one of the tips I can give you is that you should definitely not make your audience too broad. As you can imagine, your ad will then also be shown to a lot of people who aren’t actually interested in the product you’re trying to sell.

There is so much more to talk about when it comes to Facebook ads, but I will dive into that during my next blog. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think about Facebook ads?

Is there anything you’re struggling with? If so, what is your biggest challenge?

Let me know!

Until next time!

Sandra