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This week I completed LinkedIn Learning’s “Advertising on Facebook: Advanced” hosted by Social Media Strategist, Megan Adams.

If you are in e-commerce this is a must-watch. Adams shows us how to “crack the Facebook code” to make your ads exceptional (Adams, 2020). It is advanced, so I would advise you to watch it once and then come back to watch it again. This makes it more practical for you. Facebook makes advertising on the platform very simple but there are lots of advanced tools and tips that are worth taking the time to learn. 

Through this blog, I will identify some of the practical key takeaways and encourage you to watch the video for yourself for more ‘know-how’. 

Of course, you need a Facebook page first. 

Now meet Facebook Business Manager. 

If you have multiple ad accounts, multiple pages, and many people publishing on your pages, this is the tool for you. Megan Adams introduces us to this useful resource step by step.

Simply go to business.facebook.com

Now you can set up the criteria for your ad account. If you have multiple Facebook pages, you can add them all. Then you can add and assign roles to the people who collaborate on the page(s). You can set up access and permissions for your team with an email invitation instead of using their personal Facebook accounts. This is an excellent feature of the Facebook Business Manager tool.  

The setup guide is super easy to use and will walk you through the process. 

Get familiar with the Dashboard and pay special attention to notifications. You can choose how you want to receive your updates. 

Adams’ best advice here is to take the time for the setup. It will help optimize your advertising efforts, keep you organized and provide security. 

How to Manage Ads and Campaigns

Creating campaigns in Ads Manager is as simple as selecting the “Create” tool, then following a 3-step process: 

1. Choose your Campaign. This is your marketing objective and Facebook will help you with this. 
2. Select your Ad set – here is where you define your audience, set your budget, and your schedule for the ad
3. Create your Ad – the creative step is the most fun. Determine if you want your ad to show up as a Carousel or a single image or video. Select your media and the text, call to action. 

Once created, campaigns will show up on the Ad Manager Dashboard to help you manage and keep track. Every campaign gets an ID for tracking purposes.

The dashboard tools allow you to create multiple campaigns effectively. Adams highlights that use of tags is a best practice that will help you better manage and group your campaigns in Ads Manager. 

Next up, a game-changer for E-commerce… 

Facebook Pixel 

Highly recommend by Adams, Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that connects to your website (Adams, 2020). The code can track activity and insights, build a new audience set, and target your messaging and ads. It’s a great strategy to target the people that have taken some sort of action on your website. With Pixel, you can track ROI specific to your Facebook advertising. 

The Pixel is created under Ads Manager along with the criteria. Once you have the Facebook Pixel ID and a base code then you, or even better your Developer, can manually add the pixel code to your website. 

Pixel could be the secret weapon for your next marketing strategy. 

A Pixel is key to setting up Custom Conversions, another tool on Facebook Advertising. A conversion can be assigned to a specific page, or page activation, like a thank you page, or the shopping cart page, or just your website URL. The conversion allows you to see every time someone goes to your thank you page or other noted pages. You can then assign a monetary value, activity, and rules. 

Go to Facebook Pixels dashboard to track your campaign’s success. This will give you fantastically detailed analytics to see what is happening in your campaign. Get a snapshot of traffic sources, time spent, and engagement metrics. You can see active users by the hour, you can find the people metrics and the location. This is important data to develop says Adams, it helps to inform and create a marketing strategy. The more curated your campaigns are the better they will perform (Adams, 2020).

And there’s more… 

Custom Audiences 

Custom audiences are set up through ad manager and the audience dashboard by choosing “Create Audience”. First, you want to know who you are targeting and where to find their contact sources. Create a custom audience with the fan base of your Facebook page, or only with the people who have engaged with a video, post, or event on your Facebook page. And now, thanks to Pixel, you can create a custom audience of your website visitors. Adams says this is huge. This is called retargeting or remarketing (Adams, 2020).

Facebook also offers a “LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE” FEATURE that helps you reach new people who are likely to be interested in your ad.  Facebook will create an audience that is like the audience that you have had success with.  You can choose a source – ie matching the demographics of the Cart Abandonment group or an audience based on the current fans of your page. 

Advanced Advertising Techniques

The customized product ads delivered to you on Facebook are called Dynamic Ads. Basically, you set up and create an ad template that pulls in your product images. Now you can quickly create hundreds of custom ads. Dynamic ads use Pixel to target people who have engaged with previous ads. Then they continue to target those audiences with the product that they are likely to be interested in. To create a dynamic ad you upload your catalogue and tell Facebook what products to pull. 

Facebook Ads Manager now offers SPLIT TESTING (A/B testing) to test the effectiveness of your creative campaigns. Set up is easy, you create your campaign, ad set, and advertisement as you normally would. Then you choose the “Create Split Test” option. Facebook will walk you right through the process. You take two creatives differentiated by images, text, music, or messaging and test to different subgroups. You can also test headlines. Once you are set up, a beaker icon on your dashboard denotes that you are split testing. 

The campaign dashboard allows you to review the metrics to see if one ad performed better than the other. 

Adam’s Conclusion 

Megan Adams says that with online advertising, the climate is always changing. To help you stay on top of those changes, she offers a few resources: (Adams, 2020)

1. Go to the Developer for Facebook site
2. Check out Jon Loomer’s Facebook Advertising blog
3. Read “Growth Hacker Marketing” by Ryan Holiday 

My Thoughts 

As mentioned earlier, I feel that this tutorial is invaluable for anyone in e-commerce. It’s been super interesting to understand how to crack the Facebook code. And to find out, as a consumer, how online retailers are targeting me, following me, and finding me on Facebook. 

While I am not in the retail industry, there is a real way of integrating some of this insight into my business. The conversion campaigns with Pixel, could be coded through contesting. With a pixel code on an online contest entry page, you could track the entries receive. Targeted Facebook ads are then delivered to that contest entrant the next time they log in to their own Facebook page. Now all I need is a grand prize and a Facebook ad budget. 

References

Adams, M. (2020, January 14). Advertising on Facebook: Advanced. Retrieved from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/advertising-on-facebook-2

_{Author: Rhonda Halarewich}

_{Keywords: Facebook Ads; Facebook Code; Facebook Advertising; How To}

_{Readability: Grade 7}