Facebook advertising can be very complicated and quite different from Google AdWords advertising. To save yourself the heartache of spending a lot of money on Facebook advertising only to produce zero results, I highly recommend you first become fully trained in Facebook advertising by investing in a complete Facebook advertising training program from an expert like Jon Loomer, Amy Porterfield, Dennis Yu, or Mari Smith.
If you do not have time for training, you should consider hiring a highly trained Facebook advertising expert like me ...hint hint… to build, manage, and optimize your Facebook advertising program for you. By the way, I received my Facebook training by becoming a paid member of Jon Loomer's “Power Hitters Club” which is arguably the most in-depth Facebook advertising training program in the world. The only problem with Jon's training program is he has produced so much training material (videos, guides, and private member blog posts) that it is difficult to know where to start.
Quick and dirty checklist for setting up Facebook advertising
1. Create a professional looking Facebook company page with high quality graphics and well written sales text. Make sure your Facebook company page is more attractive and impressive than the Facebook company pages of your top 3-5 competitors. First impressions are everything, so make sure that when people see your Facebook company page for the first time that they are impressed. https://www.facebook.com/business/products/pages/
2. Create an advertising account with Facebook using the Facebook Business Manager. https://business.facebook.com/
3. In your Facebook Ads Manager create a Custom Audience Pixel.
4. Take the custom audience tracking code pixel Facebook gives you and add it to every page of your website in the header HTML code section: <head> put it here </head>. If you use Google Tag Manager (and you should), you can create a new tag in Google Tag manager using your Facebook pixel tracking code, and Google Tag Manager will add your Facebook tracking pixel to every page of your website.
5. In your Facebook Ads Manager, create a Facebook conversion tracking pixel and add it to the website thank you page a person is taken to after they subscribe to your opt-in email list. If you have multiple email lists and multiple thank you pages, you will need to create a new conversion tracking pixel for each list and thank you page so you can track the results for each list. Put the conversion tracking code pixel in the header code section of each thank you page. If you use Google Tag Manger, you should use it to place the conversion tracking code on your thank you pages.
6. Create a Facebook conversion tracking pixel and add it to the thank you page a person is taken to after they complete your lead generation contact form. If you have multiple contact us lead generation forms and multiple thank you pages, you will need to create a new conversion tracking pixel for each thank you page so you can track the results of each lead generation contact form. You put the conversion tracking code pixel in the header code section of each thank you page. If you use Google Tag Manger, you should use it to place the conversion tracking code on your thank you pages.
7. Now that your tracking pixels are installed, in your Facebook Ads Manager create a Website Custom Audience for 180 days. This will create an audience database of all the people who visit your website from now on who have Facebook accounts. This audience will become the foundation for your Facebook marketing program and sales funnel.
8. If you have an opt-in email list of at least 500 people, download that list as a CSV file with one email address per line. Only save the email addresses in this file. Do not use an email list you purchased from an email list broker. Only use your in-house email list of people who have opted-in to your email list and know your company.
9. Go to your Facebook Ads Manager and create a new custom audience for your email list. You will be prompted to upload that CSV file you created. Each month you should update this audience by uploading the most recent version of your email list to it.
10. Now that you have created your Facebook custom audiences, you now need to promote your blog posts to those audiences. You do this by using the “Promote Your Post” tool inside the Facebook Ads Manager and selecting the saved audience you want to promote that post to. This will get people to click on your post to go to your website, where they will then be tagged and added to both your Facebook and Google Remarketing lists. This is how you get targeted traffic to your website and build your remarketing audience lists and your opt-in email list.
In regard to budget, that depends on how much traffic you want to send to your website and how quickly you want to grow your business. At minimum you should start with a budget of $5 per day per each promoted post ad. Your cost per click may be anywhere from $0.10 per click to $2.00 or more per click or more depending on how people respond to your promoted post ad.
If your promoted post ad has a catchy title, an eye grabbing image, and the promise of very valuable free content that your niche market really wants, you will get a lot of clicks at a low cost per click. On the other hand, if your promoted post title is boring, your image is not eye catching, and the content your post is promoting does not seem valuable to your niche market, very few people will click on your promoted post ad and your cost per click will skyrocket, sometimes upwards of $5.00 or more per click. Yeah, ouch! If that happens, kill that promoted post ad and either rewrite it to make it much more catchy with a better image and a promise of more value, or just kill it and promote a new blog post on your website. The last thing you want to do is waste your money by promoting a boring post that nobody clicks on because Facebook will charge you for showing your ad even though nobody is clicking on it. The average charge for Facebook to show your ad to 1,000 people is $10. So, if Facebook shows your ad to 1,000 people and nobody clicks on your ad, you just spent $10 (or more) for nothing.
If your promoted post is really popular, and you are getting tons of clicks at a very low cost per click (under $0.30 per click), increase your budget to $10...$20... $100 or more per day and ride the wave, especially if your audience size is 1 million people or more. However, every day you need to monitor all of your Facebook promoted posts because they do have a shelf life and after your custom audience has seen your ad 2-3 times, they will become bored with it and your cost per click will go up very quickly and you will stop getting clicks. Then it is time to kill that promoted post and start promoting a new post to that audience. Another option is you can take that very popular promoted post and start promoting it to a new audience that has not seen that promoted post and ride the wave again.
11. Rinse and repeat item 10 above with every new blog post you write to continue to drive highly targeted traffic to your website to get them added to your remarketing sales funnel.
12. As a final tip, Facebook advertising works best for driving targeted traffic to your website to get people to enter your remarketing sales funnel. Facebook advertising does not work very well for trying to directly sell products or services, especially if your products or services cost more than $20.
The 12 items above will make total sense to you once you have become fully trained in Facebook advertising. Again, if you want to learn how to do everything yourself, Jon Loomer provides what I consider to be the most in-depth and advanced Facebook advertising training system in the world. His training program is available if you join his private membership “Power Hitters Club.” You can learn more at http://jonloomer.com.
If you do not have time to be trained and to build, manage and optimize your Facebook advertising campaigns, you can hire me to do it for you. For more info email me at peter@geisheker.com.