Marketing + Margaritas Episode 3 - Facebook Ads

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We’re back with our third episode of Marketing + Margaritas! Want to make the most of those advertising dollars? Then you might want to have a listen as we talk you through Facebook Ads Manager. Chances are, your business is already on Facebook - so you might as well up your digital street cred, and give your business an online boost!

EPISODE 3 SHOW NOTES

Topics we cover in this session >>

• What is Facebook Ads Manager?

• Why use Facebook Ads Manager?

• How to use Ads Manager

• How to create a Facebook ad

• Setting up creative for a Facebook ad

Facebook Ads Manager link: https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager

Tip: Don’t forget to bookmark Ads Manager, and enable Ads Manager on your brand’s page.

Hi, welcome to Marketing + Margaritas. Today we're talking about Facebook ads. There's a bit of a misconception about what a Facebook ad is. There's two ways you can spend your money on Facebook. One is boosted ads, and one is by using the Facebook Ads Manager. Why do they differ, Jade? 

With boost posts, basically once you hit the 'boost post' button, you get a very limited range of options for targeting, how much you can spend, and the timeframe. It's sort of a really, really, really watered-down version of being able to use the power of Facebook ads. Whereas if you go to Ads Manager, that's where it's an actual proper digital advertising platform. Even though it's Facebook's Ads Manager, it actually goes across more than just Facebook itself. Whereas a boosted post does just live in Facebook, and it's not going to get you anywhere near the return on investment. Ads Manager does take a bit longer and you do need to practice it a bit to really get the most out of it. But it's not as overwhelming as what people might think - it can look a bit complicated, but once you know what you're doing and what you're looking for, you'll notice a huge difference between just doing a boosted post and having something through Ads Manager.

Fantastic. So that's what we're going to talk about today - we can tell you what, why, how - and hopefully you're going to get some great tips out of it. Jade, you touched on just then, Facebook ads show up across all Facebook platforms or partners. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Basically, in Ads Manager, your ads will show up across all of the apps owned by Facebook. That's Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Marketplace, etc, etc. But just like Google, they have an audience network. Think of it like advertising partners, where there's an agreement where you might do an ad in Ads Manager, then next minute, you could be playing a game on your phone, and your ad will show up there as well.

Pretty cool.

That's because whoever creates those apps and stuff, have an agreement with Facebook that they can put their ads across there, and then they then get a cut of your advertising dollars.

Nice. So, it's not just Facebook? We're getting so many different other touchpoints.

Which is pretty cool. If you create an ad in Ads Manager, and you're just sitting there on a different app, doing something on your phone or whatever, literally playing a game and then all of a sudden, "Oh! There's my ad!" It's like man, I'm pretty important.

For those of you who don't think you've seen an ad, have a look at your Facebook feed. I guarantee there'll be an ad in there for either a page you do follow or a page you don't follow. And just at the top, next to their business name, it will say "sponsored" - that is an ad. It's either in your feed, or it's down the side. Like Jade said, it's on different platforms.

There's banner ads, there's all kinds of things but it's one of those things that people don't realise sometimes - they think it's a normal post, like the ones that are in your feed. You can see that little "sponsored" thing - that's actually paid advertising that's getting to you.

Side note, I've actually been using advertising to get better deals on things. I'm shopping for a specific item at the moment - a household item.

What's that household item, Alanna? Share it! Share it with everybody.

It's just a kitchen appliance. I've done some online shopping for it. And I'm like, "I'm not sold on that particular one or that price." And now the ads keep coming up on my Facebook feed. So, I'm actually specifically stopping on those ads, maybe clicking having a look around - I’m "Facebook shopping". Hoping that those ads keep targeting me because I haven't bought the one I want yet.

Why do the research, when the research can come to you?

It can come to you. There's both ways you can do it. That's a little insight into my personal life. There you go. So, Facebook Ads Manager - we're going to put a link into the show notes as to where you can find it. You do need to turn on the function for your brand page to be able to do that, which is just hiding in your settings. We'll pop that in the notes as well.

Yeah, it's a bit tricky to explain where to find it, especially if you've never used it before. We'll just pop the link in there and that way you can just bookmark it and use it to your heart's content.

Awesome. Make sure you check that out at the end or when you have a moment spare. So Jade, why would we use Facebook Ads Manager?

Ads Manager, as far as an advertising platform, is incredibly targeted. When you think about boost posts - yes, you can choose your demographic, age and location but there are things beyond just those basic demographics, and actually go, "Okay, I'm going to be doing an ad and I might have different audiences, so my ad could appeal to different people." You can create multiple ads. Like a lead ad campaign, where it's like, "This ad is specifically for 20 to 30 year old females," and "this ad is specifically for 30 to 40 year old men." You can target different regions and all that type of stuff. When you say "targeted", it's not just about like with TV, where we're like, "Oh, this is really popular amongst, females 25 to 45, or whatever." It's targeted, as in specifically will not show to anybody who is outside of the targeting that you put in there. It's very specific. Also, on the psychographic side, you can do interests as well. If someone's interested in cars, or gardening, or - I won't get into gardening again... But when you say targeted, it's not what we traditionally know as targeted advertising.

It's very pinpoint.

You can really drill down deep. You can really get very specific with your ads and your language and your imagery and all that sort of stuff.

Really nerdy stuff that we love.

I'm trying not to be nerdy... Another reason I really love it is because it is one of the most cost effective advertising platforms available at the moment. Think of - again, I don't mean to pick on TV, I still like TV - but think of what it costs to create one really, really high quality good TV ad. Just one ad the appeals to everybody, and the airtime to get the frequency in the right audiences, all that sort of thing. Say that you did want to spread that across not just where your region is, but you wanted to go into other areas as well - that expense just mounts up and up. Then say there was something wrong with the ad, or there was something that you wanted to add on to it or change, you know, it's bloody expensive. The thing is, TV viewership is declining.

Yeah. Why only absorb media in that sense?

That’s it. We’ve got streaming and all that sort of shit. But TV pricing, the cost of advertising TV is not declining.

And you can't see your analytics! We'll get into that later.

They can go "Okay, The Bachelor is really popular with... I don't know, people?"

We don't watch TV.

Someone said "The Batchi" the other day, and I'm like, "What are you talking about?" They're like, "Uh, The Bachelor?" I'm like, "Oh, sorry."

Anyway, it's very cost effective. Jade was talking about running different types of targeted ads. You could do that for still a fraction of the price of running a more traditional ad campaign. If you weren't running a traditional ad campaign, adding on Facebook, for a portion of your budget, is going to maximise your results. No matter which way you're going, it's very economical.

If you do want to make changes, or you've got new imagery, or there was a special offer or anything like that, it's costing you nothing to go in - I mean, if you're doing it yourself - it costs you nothing to go in and make those few changes. You could be changing your ad up every couple of weeks, if you wanted to. Turning one off, turning on another, it's completely in your control, it's at your fingertips, you can play with it as much as you like. The actual spend in dollars to be in front of exactly who you want it to be, when you want to be, there is really no other platform that gives you that kind of 'bang for your buck'.

Yeah, and it's data driven. So, if you're running your ad for a few days, a few weeks, and you go, "This isn't hitting the mark" or "I'm not loving the results I'm getting." You can see all your analytics, you can see who's looking at it, opening it, following through to either your sales page or however you've set up your goals. You can go, "Right, I want to tweak this, I want to change the visual, I want to play with my wording." You've got all that data there so you can see if it's being effective or not, and tweak it.

And it's being able to evaluate whether something was worth your time and money at the end of the campaign as well.

Absolutely.

Again, back to TV. There could have been 30,000 people watching that night, but were they watching during your ad? Did they flick across? Did they actually pay attention to it? Did they then go to your website? There's no way of actually tracking that at all.

Isn’t an ad break when we go to the toilet or get something to drink?

Pretty much. I mean, that's if you even do ad breaks anymore, like seriously who watches normal TV? But for a Facebook ad, you can see the amount of impressions, the rates, you can see the click throughs, you can see unique click throughs. So you know exactly how many people saw your ad and then how many people clicked on it.

Super. Yeah, that's awesome. We've talked about why you would do a Facebook ad. How do we do a Facebook ads?

Okay, when you go into Ads Manager - and this is why I think sometimes people use boost posts as well, because it's really quite simple...

Like the buttons just say "hit boost post", and then you put a budget?

Exactly. When you click it open, the options are very streamlined, anyone can understand that sort of thing. Whereas when you go into Ads Manager, it can seem a little bit overwhelming - there's more options, there's more details, there's things that you might not know what they mean, etc. But if you go into Ads Manager, if you're not sure on something, leave it on the default setting. As you learn to use it, you'll get to understand what different things are and how they can add value to your ad. But really, the default settings or the recommended settings that Facebook has in there, come from their aggregated data across years and years of all different industries and locations and ads, etc. They do sort of know a little bit about what they're doing. So if there's something where you're like, "I'm not sure about this, and this is a recommended setting," just leave it on the recommended. You don't need to fiddle with everything in Ads Manager just because it's there to fiddle with.

Alright, we're going to set up our first Facebook ad.

When you go into Ads Manager, the first thing that comes up is that it asks you to choose a goal. The difference here is Facebook's actually got it set up so that it mimics the sales funnel. There's awareness, and then there's education, and then there's conversion. Basically, the first step to someone buying from you is they actually have to know you exist.

And what you're selling.

And then second is education or consideration - it's got different terms for it. Basically, that's where they actually get to know you a bit more and start qualifying whether or not you are something that they are looking for. And then conversion is them actually becoming a customer. That's the first part of a sales funnel and that's how Facebook have the goals set up. For example, if you were to choose traffic as one of your goals, it means that alongside you choosing your demographics and psychographics, Facebook will also show your ad to people who they know are more likely to click on an ad. Apart from just how old we are and where we live, we also have online behaviours. For example, I hate video so bad, I really don't like watching video. If you had a video ad and you were to choose the video views goal and you had targeted at 30 to 40 year old women in Mackay, they were more likely to show it to another 30 to 40 year old woman in Mackay, as opposed to me.

Not you.

Yeah, because I won't actually watch your video. I'm less likely to.

Based on your behaviour on Facebook.

So the goal there is basically, if you're like, "I want reach. I just want to reach as many people as possible," it'll just send a really broad net. If you go for something like traffic, it'll show up more to people in your targeting who are likely to actually click on something - because a lot of us are online stalkers, we don't click on shit.

Yeah, that's me at the moment.

For example, video views  - they will show it to people who actually do consume video content, as opposed to those who have a deep hatred for it.

So, Facebook's pretty smart in that regard?

Yeah, look, they're pretty skeezy. They're watching us in all different kinds of ways.

Yay marketing!

It's not like they're specifically going, "Oh, this is how Jade McAuley acts online." It's more like this is how this user behaves online. So, take comfort in that.

Alright, so we've set our goal. Our next thing to do is our targeting?

Yep, so in targeting you set your location. We did a recruitment campaign for client recently where we actually specified it down to just a couple of major airports that we wanted to target.

Well, that's pretty neat.

If you think of how much airport advertising costs, I mean, the signage and stuff, there are some amazing options there - don't get me wrong. But for a short term campaign, being able to target people while they're at the airport was pretty useful. We did that across Facebook and YouTube, it worked really well.

Well, there's a few things that people do at airports, it's scrolling on their phone, on their laptops or read a book.

Yeah, it's a good audience. You can choose your location, or you can be really broad. You can choose Queensland, or you can choose the regional centres, you can go Cairns, Townsville, Rocky, Mackay... I think that's it?

You can do that kind of targeting. Then you've got age, you've got gender, then you've also got interests - and interests are what we would call psychographics.

Okay, so how do interests work? Because I've had a different thought pattern on this, and you've enlightened me recently.

Facebook determines what interests you as a user, firstly by obviously what pages you like, so things that you actually have clicked 'like' on and you follow. What content you interact with - so things that you like, comment and share. It can tell what you're interested by that. However, as I said before, a lot of us are kind of just online observers, we don't necessarily always interact. So, Facebook also has it that if you pause on something for three seconds, that's clocked as an interaction. You don't actually have to engage. For example, you might not have liked a car page or be interested in car content, you haven't actually liked or commented or followed any car stuff, but every time you see a post about a car, you stop and read it for a few moments, or just the picture catches your eye or whatever. That's clocked as an interaction and that's basically determined that you're interested in cars, even though you've not physically clicked something.

Right. So by setting interests, when you're doing your targeting, you set things that people are potentially looking at that may fall into your target audience?

Yeah, exactly. That's why sometimes, you might notice that something that you don't like could be appearing in your newsfeed all the time. That's because you're potentially pausing and looking at the content, even though you don't want to interact with it. You're actually telling Facebook you're interested in that, so you're going to see more of it. Then on the advertising side of things, it means that if I was doing a car show, I can put in cars as an interest and know that it's not just people who have actually liked car pages that I'm going to be advertising to, it will just expand to anyone who tends to slow down for a few moments on a car post.

Yeah, because Facebook can't hear you going, "What is this rubbish?" Like, "Oh, you stopped, you like it. We'll just keep going."

Basically.

Awesome. Okay, so next is timeframe and budget.

So pretty much you just put in when you want your ad to start and when you want it to finish. Facebook automatically puts in, I think it's a month range. But honestly, you can run an ad for a day, you don't have to go with what's there, you can change it to whatever you want. Then the budget is a daily budget, or there is a lifetime budget. A daily budget is basically a maximum that would get spent each day - doesn't mean that it will necessarily get pushed out for the whole day. But that's a maximum that it could spend. And then a lifetime budget, obviously, that's a cap for the entire lifetime of the ad. Which is where you can have a bit of a play, once you get to understand the settings a bit more as well. You might do an ad to a smaller audience and run it for just three days, but put $100 on it. So, Facebook's got no option then but to just really pump your ad out and give you a big bunch of exposure in a short period of time, which can be very useful for certain campaigns like events. Last-minute tickets and that kind of thing.

Is there a timeframe that you would kind of float between? If you're doing the same ad for a month or two months, would you bring that down? So if you did have a budget that was running that long, would you change the visual and the content so it keeps it fresh? Or is that not best practice?

No, because there's also a frequency cap that happens within Facebook as well, which you can play with, but I just leave it on the recommended settings. Say you, Alanna, as a user, might be in my targeting for whatever I'm promoting. My ad could be running for two months, but you would only see it once every eight days. Or once every eleven days.

Okay, so I'm not going to get sick of it, hide it, unfollow you, go away.

Exactly. Sometimes when we change things too much as well, people can get a bit confused. They're used to seeing an ad and then that ad coming up again, and being a reminder and we start to recognise it. If it's something we're not interested in, it'll become white noise. If it's something that we are interested in, then it will pique our attention each time because we'll visually recognise certain elements of it before we consciously understand that we're familiar with it. But because it's spaced out, it's not like TV where you see like three ads in the same ad break and you're like, "Yeah, I get it!" But you know what I mean, it's a lot more strategic.

Okay, awesome. Next up, we're talking about the creative, I kind of jumped ahead then. So, when we're setting up the creative for an ad, what are we looking at?

Yep, so the creative - the creative bit is the actual ad itself. It's your copy, it's your visual, it's the button, it's the links, that kind of thing. So first up, I think you select the format for whatever ad you want - so you might go slideshow, video, single ad, catalogue, whatever. Upload your images, or your video or that type of thing. With your visuals, if you're going to have a video, I highly recommend putting captions on it, because a lot of us do have our phones on silent as well. So even if someone's got the autoplay, you know with certain settings or whatever,  it starts playing, it doesn't mean that they necessarily can have the volume turned on. So captions are good because people like to scroll through Facebook at work, so they might not necessarily want people knowing that they're scrolling through Facebook.

No...

Yeah, no, no, we never do that. We're a marketing agency, we're allowed to do that. It’s part of our job to do that.

Exactly.

If you have a video, put captions on there. And that's a setting you can do in Facebook? Or is that something you do manually?

You upload the captions, or have captions on the video already.

Perfect.

But there's free apps that can put captions on video and you just tweak it, so it's not a hard thing to do. Or if you're going visuals, if you upload your images, then you pop in your copy. When you create a Facebook ad, Facebook actually starts updating the ad preview in real time, so it tries to keep up with you as you're creating the ads so that you can see it. You're creating on the left, it's making it actually appear on the right, which means that especially when it gets to the copy part, it can be a real pain in the ass. So I highly recommend just actually writing the copy that you want into a Word doc.

It's good for spell check too and grammatical issues. If you're spending money on this ad, you want to make sure that you've got everything right, you don't have a typo in there.

If you put it into a Word doc, then you can just copy it across in one go. Then Facebook ads will refresh and create the ad and you don't have to be sitting there swearing at it, because it's being all delayed.

And the amount of times my internet's glitched or Facebook has spazzed out and I've had to start my ad again - you don't want to lose your copy that you’ve already written. Because like I said, you're spending money on this, you're wanting this to go to quite a few people. You've spent some time and effort crafting a clever post that's going to help you achieve your goal. So, write that in a Word document, don't lose it.

Take advantage of the different sections. When you use Ads Manager, because it is getting used in all different platforms, sometimes the image is on top, sometimes the text is underneath. Sometimes the text is on top and the image underneath, etc. One thing to remember is that for your copy, don't put things like, "check out below" or "click the link below" or anything like that, because if it was getting shown on Instagram - which is obviously owned by Facebook, so that's one of the platforms that it goes to.

It can go there, if you've selected it.

It could be saying, "click below" but the text is actually below the link. So just be very wary about putting directions into your copy. Also, just remember, your page name will always appear there. Sometimes people will write an ad, like they were writing a press ad or something and be like, "At Rebel Nation, we do blah-di-blah blah, blah." But it's like no, no Rebel Nation. It looks like a post, so 'Rebel Nation' will appear beside what you're doing - you don't actually need to waste that valuable character space.

To introduce the business. You can go, "We do blah, blah, blah."

That's the thing, when you think about copy, just think about your own behaviour when you're scrolling online. That first line really needs to hook people. It needs to be something that piques their interest - clear, simple or funny or really relevant to where they are, "Hey Mackay business owners, struggling with blah blah?" Really think about what's going to capture their attention from the start, just like with when you do news stories - don't bury the lead, put that stuff, the cool stuff, right front and centre.

And that's why we pop on our consumer hat and we go, "What do our audience want to know? Let's get to the bones of it and put it up front."

Yes, absolutely. You'll have the main copy, then you can choose a button and where that clicks to. You can put your website in there and it actually shows the URL - which is just good for branding awareness - you can put a heading in there. There's all kinds of fields, doesn't mean you have to use all of them every time, but just think about it. Because you've got that ad preview there - it doesn't even just show you a normal preview - it will show you a preview of what it looks like on desktop, what it looks like on mobile, what it'll look like on Insta. If you really wanted to, you can scroll through and have a look at all the different previews and get a real sense of how your ad’s going to be seen by somebody who may not have ever heard of you before. You just want things to be really clear and simple, but to take advantage of the different fields and spots that are there. Then if you have a Facebook pixel, you click the button across to enable that. That's a whole other conversation, sorry, and then you hit ‘Publish’.

Awesome. So we've published our ad, then what are we doing, McAuley?

Before you publish your ad? If it was us, we'd also be making sure that the landing page - basically, wherever the ad clicks through to - you might have people clicking through to your home page, you could have people clicking through to a download page on your website. Anything like that. You could have them clicking to a Facebook event, whatever it might be, before you hit 'set live', make sure that your landing page is optimised. For example, if we're running a campaign for a client, and they want it to go to their home page, but the home page has nothing about the campaign - then that's a real disconnect for the audience. You know, they've clicked through and they're not gonna go searching for that stuff. If it's not front and centre for them, you've lost them.

Absolutely.

Optimise your landing page and optimise it for conversions. For example, if you were doing an event and you had an event page on your website, then you would click straight through to the event page - don't just go to the main 'events' tab or anything, put it straight through to that particular event. And make sure that things like your 'buy tickets' button are prominent on there a couple of times, depending how big it is. If you've already sold someone, don't make it hard for them to buy from you.

Once you hit publish, then it goes into review. Sometimes that can take like a minute, and sometimes it can take longer. If there are any issues, like sometimes we do ads for real estate and finance as well - sometimes we'll do an ad and it'll automatically get rejected, because it's one of those hot topics. So we just hit appeal and say, "this is actually not selling something skeezy. This is above board." Well, we don't write that, we write something sensible and then it gets approved. If you're ever in Facebook, changing a page name or if you're doing anything where you get rejected, always hit that appeal button. It's not a hard process and it's always worth it, because 99% of time you get what you want in the end.

Awesome. And then, once the review is finalised, and your ad is live, we get to check the analytics... after it's been running.

Yes. Well, like we were saying before, when you're spending money on advertising, no matter what that might be, sometimes people forget about actually going back and having a look at how it performed. Because next time you want to do some advertising, you want to have an idea about whether that particular channel or activity works for you or not, and the beauty in Ads Manager is you can go in and see, "Okay, so we got this many impressions," which means how many times it appeared on screen. It got this much reach, so that's how many eyeballs, actually how many people stopped on it. How many click throughs it got, so how many total clicks, and then you've got unique click throughs - so Alanna might see the ad four times and click on it every time. So that's four clicks, but it's one unique click through because she's just one user. That's where you really want to tell how much you spent versus what the results were, and to determine for you whether that is a channel that is useful for using in the future for other campaigns as well.

Awesome. And it's very important when you're running a Facebook ad that you keep an eye on any comments that your users are putting on your posts. If they're asking you questions about what you're selling, or what you're doing, you want to be answering them because if they've thought it, someone else has thought it and they haven't gotten around to commenting themselves - if you haven't replied and it's been there for days and days, it's not going to look great.

It's like you don't care. You're like, "Oh, come buy from us." Then someone's got a question and you're like, "Yeah....."

How much is that? When do you open? If you're not answering that for one person, you're not answering that for multiple people.

It just makes you look like you don't give a shit about the people who are actually wanting to buy from you, which kind of defeats the purpose.

You've gone through all this effort, keep it going.

Just to wrap up when it comes to Facebook ads, it does seem a bit more technical, but if you get in there and have a bit of a play with it, you can do it at a really low cost. It's a really easy learning curve in that respect, where it doesn't cost a lot of money. You can put $30 for one day.

Test the waters. Do one so that you feel comfortable, you get an idea of what sections Facebook is asking you to pop in, and you can see who your audience really is. If you're actually unsure about who you want to target, have a look at your Facebook analytics and see who does interact with your stuff and who is already there, and try talking to them a little bit louder.

Absolutely. That's a really good point.

Another point is if you're rolling out a campaign, so if your Facebook ad is just a part of a larger campaign, whether it's recruitment or sales, or whatever you've got going on -  you're launching an event or service - then make sure that you've got some organic posts scheduled on your....

This is a real bugbear for you.

Yeah, this is a real bugbear for me. So I had an ad come up on my Facebook page and I'm like, "that's really cool. I want to find out some more information." But I was distracted, and I kept scrolling down like, "Oh, that's right, I want to go back." I couldn't find that in my feed, so I thought I'll go over to the page, there was absolutely nothing about this campaign that they were doing on their page. And I'm like, "Well, what a waste. I've just wasted my time. They've wasted their time." Whether it's a couple of organic posts, just so people who are following you know what's going on, whether it's a Facebook cover - keep your campaign going across your whole platform. Don't waste that space you've already got.

Absolutely. With a boost post, it's already a post that you've created, and then you chuck some more money on it, so it is in your newsfeed. If I was gonna go back, I could find that one. Ads Manager? That ad is created in Ads Manager, it's not actually a post on your page.

No.

If you did want to, you could even recreate that ad as a post on your page and pin it to the top or something for the campaign, so that people could easily find it. Sometimes I think if they're used to boosting posts, they don't necessarily realise that it doesn't actually appear as an ad, or sorry, as a post on their actual page newsfeed.

You might as well be getting some organic reach for that. If you've got good news or good stuff to share, then people want to see it.

Absolutely.

Cool. Well, that is Facebook ads. Thank you so much for joining us.

Cheers.