5 Facebook Advertising Tips I Wish I Had Known

I’ve been working on Facebook Ads for a few years now. Looking back I wish someone had provided me with a few tips to make the learning process a little easier and my ads more profitable. Here are 5 tips I would have found the most useful.

1. Stale Content Gets Expensive
   

   Imagine you create an awesome ad. The image is beautiful and the ad is bringing in new traffic to your site and increasing your likes. Kudos. Eventually, however, you will notice your cost per action creep up as reach decreases. Why? Well, Facebook users may have loved your ad originally but now they’ve seen it and they’re over it. As less people interact with your ad Facebook will charge you more to show it and actually decrease its visibility. After all, they want to make money.

   So, what can you do? The quickest solution is to change your targeting so new people see your ad. If your ad is set to target website visitors only then set up a lookalike audience so new people will interact with your ad. The other obvious solution is to change the ad itself. A new image can draw in people that didn’t respond to the original ad. The key here is experiment! The great thing about Facebook is you don’t have to check it every day but check in at least weekly to keep an eye on your costs.

2. Put Facebook’s Pixel On Your Site ASAP
   

   I think everyone can agree that Facebook’s greatest feature is it’s ability to target specific users. The most important target and “lowest hanging fruit” is people that have been to your website. I made the mistake of waiting until I was ready to start my first Facebook campaign to place the pixel on my site. Placing the pixel on your site is free – Facebook does not charge you until it starts showing your ads. The pixel is great for 2 reasons: 1. It lets Facebook find the people that have been on your site, and 2. you can use this to create a lookalike audience. Lookalike audience is by far my favorite feature because it allows Facebook to find people similar to users that have been to your website, visited certain pages on your site, and converted on your site. Amazing. Simply amazing.

   The great news if you can place the pixel on your site using Google Tag Manager.

3. Upload Your Newsletter Subscribers
   

   I was thrilled when I learned about this feature. If you have a large newsletter subscriber list then it is worth the effort to export all those email addresses into a csv file and upload them into Facebook. You can create wonderful ads specifically tailored to your subscribers to promote special VIP promotions or simply to remind users that there is value in opening your newsletters.

   Bonus: After you’ve uploaded your newsletter subscribers you can create a lookalike audience to find potential new subscribers! Again, the targeting on Facebook is wonderful.

4. The Wonder of Power Editor
   

   When local awareness ads first came out I was super excited and quickly created an ad targeting Facebook users within 50 miles of a business I was working on. The problem I quickly realized was that I could only target users by location and nothing else. Ads Manager let’s you use OR targeting but no AND targeting. For instance, you can target users that are either within a 50 mile radius OR users that were interested in your product space. Lame. With power editor, however, you can use AND targeting. Once I figured this out (sometime later) I was able to adjust my local awareness ad in power editor to target users that were within 50 miles of the business location and interested in my product category. Suddenly my ads were now reaching a smaller but more qualified audience than before. If only I had known sooner *doh*.

   Key takeaway: Everyone should take the time to play in Facebook’s Power Editor. Sure, it doesn’t have the prettiest UI and can be a little intimidating but the features in Power Editor can bring your ads to the next level.

5. Put UTM Parameters on everything!
   

   This last one goes out to any newbies to Google Analytics. UTM parameters should be placed on any links you have pointing to your website both on your ads and page. This will let your Marketing Analyst see the amount of traffic that was brought in by a particular ad you created and do some ROI analyses. You can use the URL builder to create a link with UTM parameters for you.

Have any tips you would like to share? Please feel free to comment below.

CPC Tips to Handling “Limited by Budget” – Part 1

So you’ve set up your campaigns and your ad is performing well – then you gasp as you see this warning “Limited by Budget”. What does this mean? What do you do?

When building a new campaign a lot of effort is put into finding keywords to get your ads to show up and drive clicks. If you hit your daily budget, however, then your ads will stop showing until the next day (or hour depending on how your campaign is set up). In part one of this budget-stretching series I will discuss negative keywords. Hint: This post will be useful for both text ads and PLAs.

Aside from knowing how many impressions and clicks your ad is receiving it’s good to know what search terms people are using that gets your ad to appear. You can do this by clicking on the “Dimensions” tab and then hitting the “View” button and select “Search terms”. Make sure your time frame is set to a long enough period to account for any anomalies – I usually look at a time frame of 3 months.

Here, you will see all the search terms people used where your text ad or PLA appeared. If you sort by impressions you will probably find search terms that are unrelated to your product or site.

example:
Your site sells custom eye glass frames. The search term report shows your ad appears when people are searching for things like “glasses”, “glasses frames”, “custom glasses”, etc. which is great. Then you notice your ad is also showing when people search for “ABC glasses store hours” and “ABC glasses promo code”. Not only that but people using these ABC related search terms have actually clicked on your ad incorrectly – you know this because there have been no conversions and Google Analytics tells you these users have a 100% bounce rate. Meanwhile, you’ve spent $3 for each person that incorrectly clicked on your ad. 

This is where the beauty of negative keywords comes into play. You can adjust your campaign so that your ad will not show up when people use certain search terms. Click on the “Keywords” tab and then click on “Negative Keywords”. From here, you can hit the “+Keyword” box under Campaign level.

Continuing the example above you could enter “ABC glasses” as a negative keyword. This way when a person search for “ABC glasses store hours” your ad will not show up – saving people from clicking on the wrong ad and more importantly saving you the money on that incorrect click.

The money you save from incorrect clicks can now help stretch your budget so you can reach the traffic you want to reach.

Part 2 of this series can be found here.