How To Create an Effective Facebook PPC Campaign

By Cass Lowrie in Facebook Marketing, Facebook News 0

Creating an effective Facebook PPC campaign

Creating an effective Facebook PPC campaign can quickly become the life blood for a business. With every brand you can think of vying for the customer’s attention, almost everything we can put our hands on has an ad of some sort slapped on it, telling us how a particular service or product will aid us get rid of a problem, or help us express our individuality. You’ve got ads on the TV, on grocery receipts, in restrooms, at the train station, in your inbox, and superimposed on other ads. Even Facebook allows ads for various products or services. But, you know what. Ads matter, especially for brands that are looking to break into new markets. Speaking of Facebook, one of the most common ads to be found on the social platform are PPC ads, and that makes sense.

One of the reasons why most brands turn to Facebook PPC ads is because of its incredible reach. This is possible by using various targeting factors which a brand can use to select a group based on their age, gender, location and a bunch of other factors to target a specific demographic. This makes Facebook PPC campaigns an indispensable tool in the marketer’s arsenal. But, only if it is done right.

Here, we will take a look at the best ways in which businesses can use Facebook PPC campaigns to get the most out of their marketing campaign.

Getting Started

For those who are looking forward to just get started with their Facebook PPC campaign, the various steps and factors that need to be taken into consideration will seem somewhat intimidating at first. But, once you get a hang of the various parameters that need to be followed when firing up a PPC campaign on Facebook, the rest will be just a matter of following the same procedures, closely monitoring the results and making some quick fixes to your campaign for a more targeted approach. So, without any further ado, let’s get started shall we.

Getting the Pixel Right

If you plan on using Facebook ads as part of your marketing campaign, one of the most crucial factors that will either make or break your Facebook PPC campaign will be setting the Pixel. This feature helps businesses create powerful ad campaigns that are able to deliver. So, how does it do that?

Facebook Pixel is basically a small string of code that you will need to place in the HTML of your site. This enables you to track user engagement across your business site and the ads you use. The small string of code enables businesses to track conversions of their Facebook ads and provides businesses with a few other benefits:

Keep Track of Conversions – This enables businesses to get a better understanding on the way their customers interact with their site after they have been sent there by the Facebook ad. The features also allows brands to track the amount of visitors across multiple platforms, which can then be used to tweak the PPC campaign on certain devices that aren’t performing well enough.
Remarket – By tracking important data on your Facebook PPC campaigns, you can create more targeted ads and direct them to customers that have already been identified after they have shown some interest on your website. This is ideal for winning back those customers who forget items on the cart while visiting an ecommerce website.
Build a Lookalike Audience – This feature also allows you to get a better understanding on your reach, which will be useful for future campaigns. By creating a lookalike audience, businesses can keep their Facebook PPC ads more focused on similar audiences rather than starting from scratch and identifying their audience.

Follow Facebook Ad Guidelines

A good way to stay abreast on the rules and regulations of using Facebook ads is to follow Facebook’s ad guidelines. Since the social media giant is constantly working on ways to improve its services by evolving its ad approval algorithm, being in the know will put you in an advantage with the time comes to fire up your Facebook PPC campaign. Facebook makes it very clear that advertisers have the responsibility for understanding and complying with Facebook’s Ad Guidelines and all other applicable regulations and laws so it pays to know what Facebook thinks at any given moment.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a great way to squeeze every last drop of customer from your previous Facebook PPC campaign. But, the only challenge remains to be creating an effective audience for the purpose of remarketing. The trick here is to build your audience manually, rather than just relying on the tools that Facebook provides you to build your Facebook audience.

While Facebook Pixel can be used as a step to remarket on Facebook, it’s just one of many steps, but don’t let that discourage you. Here are a few tips to build your Facebook audience:

Website Traffic – The normal rate of conversion via a website is around 1.5%. While this isn’t much, using remarketing ads to win these customers back may force some conversions from those who forgot to make the purchase the first time. The Facebook Power Editor is a nifty way to segment your remarketing list with the URL and the duration to attract the right traffic. In this way, you can focus on those who are interested in buying, rather than on those who are not.
Facebook Engagement – Using Facebook Engagement is a great way of building a targeted and engaged audience. With the “Custom Audiences” panel you can retarget that segment of an audience which have shown an interest on the content you have posted or have spent some time browsing through your posts and videos.
Email Database – By using the Customer File Facebook Power Editor option you are able to input an email database of emails that have already been collected. This is a great option for those who already have an email list since the leads are already interested in what you have to offer. But, if you do not have an email list, no worries, you can start by running a few campaigns with the goal to establish your email list. Then you will be able to remarket your products or services to that email list.

Creating Your Lookalike Audience

To create an effective Facebook PPC campaign, you need to locate an audience that converts easy and will often times involve an unrelenting wave of iteration upon iteration of targeting ads. The problems don’t end there. Once you have boiled down your audience numbers to those who are actually interested in your product or service, it quickly becomes over-targeted, which is why Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences features is a great way to gauge audience information based on demographics, interests and other factors to build an audience for you that will be more responsive to your ad campaigns. Since Facebook, with its 2 billion users, has an unmatched amount of data the Facebook Lookalike Audience feature is like a gift to marketers. While you will require some form of audience development up front, it will make scaling automation much easier than before, when targeting an audience for your Facebook PPC ad campaign.

Use Visually Appealing Content

Your Facebook ad is going to have just one chance to capture the attention of your audience. This is a tall task mainly because it is going to probably be while your audience is going to be engrossed in scrolling through their Facebook newsfeed. This is where using visually appealing content never fails. That being said, the images you choose as part of your Facebook PPC ad campaign should be unique and visually appealing enough to capture your audience’s attention. More importantly, the images you choose as part of your PPC campaign should make it easy for your audience to create a positive psychological association with your brand. If the first image you choose does not work well, change it and monitor the performance of your ads with every change.

Set Aside a Budget

While Facebook does allow its users to monitor and analyze the performance of their PPC ads slightly faster than Google, it will take time and patience to truly understand who your Facebook audience interacts with your ads. Putting aside a low budget for your daily ads will rob you of more clicks to analyze how the ad is performing, on the other hand, pulling your Facebook PPC ad campaign prematurely means that you will be missing out on a ton of value of you current Facebook ads. The key is to have patience when using Facebook PPC ads and waiting for each ad to get at least 100 clicks before carrying out any assessment or tweaks to your existing strategy.

A/B Testing Optimization

Every marketer worth his salt knows the importance of testing multiple variations of the ads they use in their marketing campaign. A/B testing is one of the best ways to find out whether or not a PPC ad campaign is performing as expected or needs to be tweaked to increase its performance. The following are some determinants for a Facebook PPC ad campaign:

Which images perform better in your Facebook ads?
Which combination of words are more effective?
Which demographic converts better?

While the questions above may not apply to your particular PPC campaign, it gives you an idea of the factors that matter when using A/B testing for your ad campaigns. Also, when using A/B testing make sure you keep all the variables similar apart from the one you will be testing.

Validate Your Campaign with Facebook Audience Insights

The Facebook Audience Insights tool is a great way to help you understand your entire audience. Facebook Audience Insights will reveal what a certain demographic looks like, and behaves, provided you have your target demographic and their interests pinned down. Apart from that, the tool is used to dive into an audience at the most minute level, enabling you to find out more about your audience, or find out something new about your audience you never knew of before. For any marketer, this information is pure gold. It is a spectacular tool that can be used to gauge who your audience is at a personal level, and what they like so that you can tweak your PPC marketing efforts.

Master of the Funnel

With the level of competition increasing in Facebook marketing on a daily basis, it’s becoming harder and harder for businesses to attract new leads, let alone new customers who will happily pay for whatever it is you’re pushing that day. While a marketer or business owner has to take the customer through 5 major touch points before they can actually get their audience to make a purchase and become a customer, the sales funnel is undoubtedly, the most crucial stage of the buying cycle. That’s because this is where you are going to guide the visitors to your site through the process of providing them with the information they need and satisfy their concerns before getting them to make a purchase. While the steps vary depending on the type of business and market niche, the four areas that will stay the same are; awareness, interest, decision and action. Getting a better understanding on your sales funnel will enable you to craft more effective and targeted ads on Facebook. Since this stage is extremely important for a sales conversion, it will make your Facebook PPC ad campaign easier as well.

For instance, you would want to send a Facebook ad that highlights a problem and how you will solve it to someone in the “awareness” phase, while you would want your Facebook ad to focus on your brand’s credibility if you are targeting someone who is in the “decision making phase”.

Constantly Monitor Your Facebook PPC Campaign

One of the mistakes that businesses make during their Facebook PPC campaigns is only studying their data at a surface level. While click through rates and the number of impressions your ad gets are two valuable metrics there’s so much more that you can do when using Facebook for your PPC ad campaign. Going below the surface will provide you with a better understanding of the type of ads that work, which are the ones you should take full advantage of. Facebook’s also offers tons of super detailed reports that are free and can give you a better understanding of what your Facebook PPC ads should look like.