Advertisers often think that planning their campaigns, setting goals, and wrangling budgets is a mysterious process, but the reality is that there is a lot you can do before your campaign begins to ensure that it is a success.
Here are 3 steps you should take to make sure your campaign is predestined for success, rather than fated to flop.
As much as someone who is new to Facebook ad campaigns might want to just jump into it, you need to have a goal in mind before you build any part of your campaign. Your goal should include the following:
You need to understand what you hope to accomplish before you ever start creating your ads. There are a lot of goal options for Facebook ad campaigns, so knowing which one you'll be using will help you avoid wasting any time or retracing your steps if you try winging it.
You also need to know what deadline you want to set for your campaign, as campaign length can have an impact on daily ad spend, if you start out with a short campaign and then lengthen it halfway through, you may have already spent half of your total budget before you decide you actually wanted to stretch out your campaign.
Finally, to understand how your campaign performed you need a clear picture of what a successful Facebook ad campaign looks like to you.
Before you ever build an ad for your Facebook ad campaign, you'll first be asked who you want to target at the ad set level. This is a key decision that will decide how successful your campaign is in meeting your goal. You need to reach a targeted audience that will have an interest in what you're offering if you hope to get value out of your campaign.
This is typically accomplished by using a persona. You'll want to know some general demographics, interests, and behaviors of the group you want to target. Once you have this information, you can try multiple Facebook Audiences using different combinations of this data, until you find an audience that is targeted (not too big), but large enough to run a good campaign with (not too small either).
Facebook provides you with a meter when creating your ad set that helps you with this. Ideally you want to aim for the center of the arch, which will give you the "Your audience is defined" message.
More than anything, reaching the right target audience is key to the success of your campaign. No matter how well crafted your ads are, no matter how well they appeal to the right people who will convert or buy, if those right people never see your ad, your campaign will be a failure, despite how much effort you put into the rest of your campaign.
A common question is "How much should I be spending on my Facebook ad campaign?" or "How much should I spend each week?" or any variation of this, ad infinitum.
Many advertisers set out without really understanding how much they're willing to spend, or how much they should spend.
The reality is that you can get by spending as little as $5 a day, but some audiences are going to have a higher cost per action/1,000 impressions, and those audiences are going to burn through small budgets quickly without reaching a larger audience, making it difficult to learn from your results.
You can estimate how much your audience will cost per action/1,000 impressions based off of the recommended bid that Facebook provides when you're creating your ad set. Based on this, you can figure out how much you'll need to spend to reach a reasonable number of people and hopefully reach your campaign goal.
Budget is another one the cruxes of your campaign. No matter how great everything else is, if you don't have enough budget to reach your goal with the audience you're targeting, your campaign is going to be a flop.
This blog post is based off of content from our guide to Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign. It's a premium, step-by-step guide that makes building successful Facebook ad campaigns easy! If you'd like to learn more about building campaigns, the various options and settings, and learn from our tips and in-depth explanations along the way, purchase the guide!
It includes the PDF guide, a full set of walkthrough videos, and an Excel spreadsheet full of tools that will help you build better campaigns faster and with more consistency.