by Want to run Facebook ads to promote your products or services? Wondering which type of Facebook ad campaigns to start with?
In this article, you'll discover three types of Facebook advertising campaigns you can use to start promoting your products and services on Facebook.
#1: Advertise to People Who Visit Your Website
If you've already installed the Facebook pixel on your website and have more than a few thousand visitors each month, start with a website remarketing campaign.
This is an “easy win” campaign because you're targeting the highest quality of the three audience temperatures: hot audiences of website traffic using Facebook's Website Custom Audience feature. In this type of campaign, you'll present an offer to people who have visited your website but haven't yet converted into a lead or customer.
Create a Website Custom Audience
The first step is to create a custom audience of website visitors. These are people who've been successfully pixeled when they've visited your website.
Start by navigating to the Audiences dashboard in Ads Manager. To do this, open the Ads Manager main menu, and in the Assets column, click on Audiences.
When the Audiences dashboard opens, click on Create Audience, and from the drop-down list, choose Custom Audience.
In the Create a Custom Audience window, select Website Traffic to open the website custom audience creation window.
To set up your website custom audience, select ANY along with your Facebook pixel. In the condition section, choose All Website Visitors and change the duration to 180 days. These settings will create the largest website custom audience, which is particularly useful if you have a small volume of traffic (say a few thousand visitors each month).
Currently, this audience will also contain people who have converted on your website into leads or customers. You want to save budget by not showing ads to people who are already customers. Therefore, you need to add an exclusion for the relevant standard event, such as purchases or leads.
To do this, click on Exclude People and in the new field that appears, click on the condition, and from the drop-down list, select the relevant event—in this case, Purchases. Then as with the first condition, change the audience duration to 180 days to include the most people in your audience.
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GET THE DETAILSTo recap, this audience will group everyone who has visited your website in the last 180 days but exclude people who have triggered the purchase event action in the last 180 days. This leaves you with a highly qualified audience of people who have looked at your website but haven't converted into customers yet.
Repeat the process outlined above and create the following website custom audience durations: 90 days, 60 days, 30 days, 14 days, 10 days, and 3 days. You can test these audiences after the 180-day audience duration. The more consistent website traffic you have, the smaller the audience duration you can use to create the most responsive website custom audience.
Set Up Your Website Remarketing Campaign
The next step is to create your campaign. As with all Facebook advertising campaigns, you start at the campaign level by selecting your campaign objective. If this is your first website remarketing campaign and you aren't running any other ads that are driving people to your website, start with the Traffic objective, optimizing for landing page views.
If, on the other hand, you're currently running Facebook ads driving people to your website and generating some results such as purchases or leads, use the Conversions objective, optimizing for the Purchase event action or the Lead event action.
To set up your campaign, open Ads Manager and click Create.
In the Quick Creation workflow, select Traffic from the Campaign Objective drop-down list. Then name your campaign, ad set, and ad, and click Save to Draft.
When your draft campaign has loaded, navigate to the Ad Set level where you'll set your budget, select your website custom audience, and choose your placement and bidding optimization settings.
First, set your budget. Because website remarketing audiences have the smallest number of people in them compared to warm or cold audiences, they should be your lowest budget campaigns but also your most effective. Start with $10 per 1,000 people matched in your website custom audience.
Now move on to the Audience section and in the Custom Audiences field, select the 180-day website custom audience you created above. You don't need to set any other targeting options because the website custom audience has already narrowed the audience.
Next, move on to the Placements section and select Edit Placements. When the placement list appears, choose Feeds on Facebook and Feed on Instagram. Select the Instagram placement only if you and your buyer personas are active on Instagram.
Finally, in the Optimization and Delivery section, change the Optimization for Ad Delivery from Link Clicks to Landing Pages Views.
To finish the campaign, move to the Ad level. Here you'll set up a testimonial ad type. In the ad, use social proof in the form of a customer testimonial, alongside a product or service offer. The goal is to build trust with your target audience so they'll engage with your ads, come back to your website, and convert to a customer or lead.
There is no “most effective” ad format for this type of campaign. However, if you're using Facebook video ads in any other campaigns that are driving traffic to your website, a format change to single image can significantly change what your audience sees in their news feed.
At the Ad level of your campaign, select Ad With an Image or Video.
Now move on to image selection. Click on Select Image and from your image library, choose an image that you've already uploaded or upload a new one from your computer.
Select an image related to the offer you're promoting in the ad. For example, if you're an eCommerce business, make the focus of your of the ad an image related to your most popular product. The same goes for service providers but using your most popular service.
Pro Tip: With single image ads, try to use an image that's 1:1 square ratio, because it will take up more screen space in the news feed compared with rectangular 16:9 images.
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Next, move on to the text section of your ad, also known as the copy. Here you want to adopt the following copy structure:
- Testimonial
- Offer
- More social proof (optional)
- Call to action
Start your ad with the testimonial itself. Follow this with your offer, such as a discount on your product or a free consultation for your service. Then add any other social proof (such as overall rankings on review websites or how many customers you have). Finally, include a call to action to take advantage of the offer.
Now complete the final components in your ad creation, which include adding the link to the relevant page on your website, a headline that appears under your image, the news feed link description, and a call-to-action button.
For your website link, don't just link to a generic page such as your homepage; link to the page that's relevant to the product or service you're promoting in the ad.
Repeat your offer as your headline, such as the discount on the product you're offering or the free consultation for the service. If you're presenting a discount with a code your audience can use, repeat it as your news feed link description.
Finally, choose the most relevant call-to-action button. If you want your audience to buy from you, the Shop Now call to action is the best. If you're generating leads, the Sign Up call to action can work well.
#2: Advertise to People Who Interact With Your Business on Facebook or Instagram
If you don't have pixeled website traffic, look at which warm audiences you can target. These are people who have engaged with your business on Facebook or Instagram.
To set up this type of campaign, follow the steps outlined in the website remarketing campaign creation above, starting with audience creation and then campaign creation, but make the following changes.
Create Instagram and Facebook Engagement Custom Audiences
You want to create two types of engagement custom audiences for this type of campaign. For one custom audience, choose Facebook Page as the source. For the other, select Instagram Business Profile. Check out this step-by-step guide on how to create engagement custom audiences.
Set Up an Engagement Remarketing Campaign
As with the website remarketing campaign, choose Traffic as your campaign objective. At the Ad Set level, select your Facebook page engagement custom audience. Again, you don't need to narrow the audience using the detailed targeting feature because the engagement condition has already narrowed it enough.
In the Optimization and Delivery section, ensure that Landing Page Views is selected.
When targeting warm audiences like this, you want to present an offer in your ad to drive website traffic and increase your sales or leads. Therefore, at the Ad level, use the snap-benefit-action method to introduce a product or service offering and link to the relevant page on your website.
After you review and publish your new Facebook page engagement remarketing campaign, duplicate the ad set and change the targeting to your Instagram engagement custom audience.
You'll now have a campaign with two ad sets: one targeting Facebook page engagement and the other targeting Instagram business profile engagement.
At the Ad level of the new ad set targeting Instagram engagement, select Use Existing Post and from the selection matrix, click on Ad Posts. Then choose the same ad that you just created in the Facebook page engagement ad set.
#3: Advertise to People Based on Interests Related to Your Product
If you don't have any website traffic you can remarket to or any engagement audiences, start with cold audiences. This Facebook campaign type is known as a “cold purchase test,” and the goal is to trigger the hyper-responsive segment of your cold audience who will buy straight from the offer ad you place in front of them.
Don't rely solely on this type of campaign to deliver the best results, however. Eventually, you'll fatigue the hyper-responsive audience segment and your cost per acquisition will increase. Once you have people engaging with your ads and visiting your website, you can then implement the other two types of campaigns alongside this one.
To create this type of campaign, follow the steps outlined in the website remarketing campaign creation process above, but make the following changes to your audience and campaign creation.
Create Saved and Lookalike Audiences
Create saved audiences based on interests related to your industry and any relevant lookalike audiences. Use the source audience selection process outlined here to determine what lookalike audiences you should create first and test them alongside regular interest audiences related to your industry.
Set Up Your Purchase Test Campaign
When you set up your campaign, select the Traffic campaign objective and optimize for Landing Page Views. At the Ad Set level, change your audience to one of the saved interest or lookalike audiences you created above.
When you create your ad, use the snap-benefit-action method mentioned above to present a relevant offer to your cold audiences. The aim is to drive website traffic, build consideration, and start populating your pixeled website visitors so you can implement website remarketing campaigns.
Conclusion
When you're ready to start running full Facebook advertising campaigns, as opposed to just boosting posts, the process may seem daunting. Facebook Ads is no longer a simple platform like it was in 2012. There are now 14 campaign objectives to choose from and that's just at the start of the campaign creation process.
When you get to audience targeting at the Ad Set level, you can choose multiple audiences—cold, warm, and hot—including interests, lookalikes, video engagement, page engagement, and website custom audiences to name a few. In addition, Facebook gives you a choice of 15 different placements, some of which deliver better results than others and have a significant impact on campaign performance.
Finally, at the Ad level of your Facebook campaign, you have even more decisions to make, such as the ad format, headline, and call to action.
The sheer number of decisions you have to make can be overwhelming, and if just one of them is incorrect, it can have a drastic negative impact on campaign performance. And setting up your campaigns is just the start; the real work begins when your campaign goes live and you have to actively manage it to reduce the impact of ad fatigue.
The campaign creation process outlined above will help you set up the most profitable campaigns first, based on your marketing assets and the different audience temperatures you can target on Facebook and Instagram.
What do you think? Which type of Facebook advertising campaign will you start with? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
More articles on Facebook ads:
- Discover seven reasons why your Facebook ads don't convert.
- Find out how to create customized reports in Facebook Ads Manager.
- Learn how to research and test interests that yield new Facebook ad audiences.
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