This is this common misconception that Facebook Ads no longer work.

This is a big fat lie!

Considering the fact that there are over 2 billion users on Facebook, it’s still a goldmine for advertisers (who have perfected the art of running Facebook Ads).

No matter the industry you are, your customers are most likely on Facebook.

If you have never created Facebook ads before or you plan on running one soon, here are 5 important things to do before you set it up.

 

1. Know Your Goals

The first and most important thing to do before setting up an ad is to know your goals.

Because you heard Facebook Ads is quite affordable doesn’t mean you should delve in without knowing your goals.

If you really want it to work out, you need to know what is your objective for the campaign?

What exactly are you trying to achieve?

Is it awareness, traffic, conversions, leads or page likes?

If you must write it down, please do.

Doing this will give you something to measure your success against.

 

2. Research your Ideal Target Audience

Not having an ideal target audience can be likened to going for a battle blindfolded.

We all know how that will end.

Once you have established your goals, the next step is to carry out research on who your ideal target audience is.

Find out things like:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Interests
• Behaviour

With Facebook ads, you can reach over 200 million people, many of whom will not be interested in your offer.

Having a target audience will help narrow down your ad to target people who’ll be interested in your ad.

 

3. Set up a Facebook Pixel

If you do a quick search on Google, you’ll realize a lot of websites don’t have a Facebook Pixel installed.

[Tweet “A Facebook Pixel is a snippet of code you place on your website.”]

This pixel collects data that helps you track website visits.

With this data, you can retarget people who have visited your website with Facebook Ads.

Quick Tip: Use this Google Chrome extension to check if any website has a Facebook Pixel Installed.

 

4. Create Multiple Ad Sets

For a single campaign, it’s a good practice to create multiple ad sets.

The ad set level is the part you set the targeting, budget, schedule, bidding and placement of a campaign.

What this means is that you can have different ad sets targeting multiple people according to age, gender, location or interests.

Each ad set can also have multiple ads with different creatives and captions.

The idea is to get the best ad set(s) and scale which brings us to our fifth and final point.

 

5. Test Test Test!

The whole idea of having multiple variations of ads and ad sets is to run split tests.

You need to test them long enough to know which one is bringing results at a lesser rate.

For best practices, test each ad set with a small amount for like a week.

Once you figure out the ones that are performing well, increase the budget and pause the rest.

 

Over to you

There you have it! 5 important things to do before setting up your first Facebook Ad campaign.

As a recap, here they are:

• Know your goal
• Research your ideal target audience
• Set up a Facebook pixel
• Create multiple ad sets
• Test!

We hope you find it helpful.  If you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment below.