Guide to Facebook Advertising

This guide from Lee Strike outlines key information about Facebook Advertising, relevant at July 2019. It covers the fundamental principles in the planning, creating, testing and evaluation of a paid social campaign. This article includes excerpts, download the full PDF from the box at the bottom of the page.

Contents

• Facebook Advertising Overview
• Facebook Advertising Implementation Methods
• Process
• Facebook Ad Plan

Facebook Advertising Overview

Nine Tips For Facebook Success:

1. It should only be used as one-channel in a multi-channel approach and as part of a broader strategy. The strategy should never be “let’s run a petition and acquire supporters via Facebook ads”. 
2. There is no one-size fits all. There is no secret recipe to what works and what doesn’t work. There are no benchmarks other than your own testing and campaigns. If you’re going by a ‘what’s worth it’ generally and take this very loosely that $1 – $2 a click is about average for a social campaign and $5 – $10 for a lead acquisition.
3. Facebook isn’t always going to be fair. The bigger your following/fans are, the more likely that your conversion costs will be lower. This also has to do with secondary factors like brand awareness. For example, lead acquisition for Marriage Equality was optimised to $0.67 a lead.
4. Always create multiple distinct messaging tests. You’ll always be surprised on what you think works and what actually does works.
5. Always think through the supporter journey. Supporters taking action is biggest determiner for success even when the purpose of the advertising is to test messaging and creative. If you’re just making this about reach or likes or comments you might be losing out on a real opportunity to acquire new supporters.
6. Be obvious when writing your ad copy. You have seconds if that to engage your audience to stop and click on your ad out of the 1000s they’ve seen that day. The better ads have an immediate call to action. For example: Call on parliament to hold a vote and pass marriage equality for all Australians. Sign Up.
7. Use videos wherever possible including making an image into a video. It’s stupid but it works because the algorithm says so.
8. You can’t polish a turd. If the campaign or content isn’t resonating adding money won’t fix your problems. It’s better to amplify what is working then try to bump something up that isn’t working.
9. Record and report. When resources are limited it’s important that you record what works and what doesn’t. This will ensure that you’re building better and bigger campaigns each time you do it. 

Facebook Advertising Implementation Methods

There are two methods for paid Facebook advertising:

Process

Facebook Ad Plan

Objective

The objective of a paid social campaign doesn’t have to be big. The more precise or clear the objective is the more likely it is to achieve it. 

In paid social the objective should cover all three objectives below:

1. Awareness | How many people can I reach?
2. Engagement | How can I get people to take their first action. For example How many clicks can I get to a website? How can I get someone to my event?
3. Conversion | How can I get someone to do the final action in the user journey. E.g. the user signs up through a lead generation ad or is interested in joining an event 

Example objectives:

• I’d like people in this area to come to my event 
• I’d like 10 people to sign my petition from this electorate 
• I’d like to increase the number of my organisation’s Facebook fans

Targets

Targets can be specific benchmarks you want to reach. For example increase our Facebook community to 2000 fans or determine that a specific gender is more responsive to our services. 

Channels

The most common paid social channels are Facebook and Instagram. Twitter has been used successfully specifically in a targeted political advocacy and in a media targeting capacity.  

Budget

The total spend of this campaign.

Approach

This is a handy diagram I’ve used before to describe a standard paid advertising campaign approach. 

Audience

Facebook and Instagram targeting are best used by location, gender, age, broad interests and custom lists e.g. using a database list or putting a cookie on the site to retarget users to take actions or people who have liked your page. 

Twitter audiences are best for broadcast rather than targeting a specific group. You should aim to have a defined target audience but not so specific that it will cost an arm and a leg to reach those specific people and not too broad that you’re serving ads at random.  

Audiences can be different for different online channels.

Overarching Campaign Plan

Paid Campaigns work on three organisation levels that fit within each other like a Russian Doll.

Ad Organisation

• Campaigns | Campaigns determines your objective
  • Ad Sets | Ad sets determines your audience targeting
    • Ads | Ads are the images and copy that are served to your audience based on the objectives 

Example overarching campaign plan

Media plan

See here.

See also Lee Strike’s presentation on Facebook advertising to Progress 2019.