Have You Completed Your Facebook Ad Checklist?

Whether you are starting to build your very first Facebook ad or are just looking to increasing your effectiveness, taking your business’s social presence to the next level through paid advertising can seem a bit overwhelming. Trust me. I know, I’ve been there! However, I have created a quick 5-step checklist which can assist you in streamlining the process. Please keep in mind that these steps cannot guarantee success but they do simplify things and provide a focused roadmap for measuring your advertising success.

Before we get started, answer these questions for yourself … What are your goals and objectives? Simply, why are you advertising? Write it down. Make it specific and highly measurable. This will help you out down the road when evaluating success once you campaign is live to the virtual world.

1. Audience Size:
   Making this decision will depend on your overall purpose with your audience. There are two types, warm and cold audiences. Warm audience targeting is by sending information to your email list, page engagement, website traffic and visual views such as images and/or video. Cold audience targeting is running ads to people who may never have seen you before. It is good for your business to do a mixture of advertising to both audiences. If you’re looking to grow the size of your audience then cold traffic is the way to go.
   
   
2. Run Time:
   To make an accurate judgement call, it’s best to let your business ads run for at least 24 hours before making any content adjustments to them if you’ve changed your mind or feel they are not working out as you’d like them to. As for actual run time, it truly depends on your budget. Keep in mind, you can always let them run for awhile then go into the settings and adjust one or all as you see fit. You even have the options to adjust the budget or turn one or all of them off.
   
   
3. Budget:
   Once again this is a judgement call on how much your pockets can handle. Especially if this is your first ad run, you don’t want to make yourself broke if you are uncertain of what types of ads work or don’t work for your business. A suggestion from my end would be to go no less than $5.00 per day for each ad set. This is a great way to test your audiences. If you feel the ad is working to your benefit you can adjust the budget at any time. However, if the ad is not working, you cannot just ad more money to the set and expect to get better results. Doing this will completely throw off the optimization of your ad. Add in small amounts and monitor your ad closely to see if any changes occur in conversion. On a side note, whatever you do, never adjust your ad by more than 50% a day. This will truly upset the ad set and everything you are working towards.
   
   
4. Imagery:
   Images can be lost of fun but when you’re working to engage the audience there are a few things to keep in mind. First, try not to use all stock photos. They’re great to use if you’re making the right selection and keeping a theme to match your brand but they can tend to get a bit dry if that’s all you are using. If you are going to use some of your own photography (or hire someone to take some photos for you) try to keep your brand in mind and think of the audience you are trying to engage. Also try to add in a mixture of images with text, whether you add it on to make it esthetically pleasing or download something without copyright on it.

   It is also very important to keep in mind that if you have a Facebook ad set with 3 or more images inside, Facebook is going to choose the winner within the first 3 to 4 hours of running the ad. This is way too quick and not an accurate way of evaluating what works with your audience. Separate each image within each ad set and use them all as separate ads instead of bundled into one. You will achieve better result this way.

5. Placement:
   When creating your ad(s) you will notice a “placement” option which Facebook uses and automatically shares with you all options. This means that your ad(s) will run in every placement possible within Facebook, such as in the news feed, mobile, desktop, right side panel, etc. It would be beneficial for you to turn everything off except for the mobile and desktop feeds as the other options are deemed as “junk clicks”. Junk clicks are people who mistakenly click on the panel ads without signing up for what you are offering. If you’re comfortable and feel like testing this option out and taking your chances I would suggest testing your ad separately from the others to see what kind of benefits arise from this placement.

   Once you have completed the above steps, you can start targeting your campaigns far more precisely, paving the way for a greater return on your all of your hard Facebook dollars.