Setting Up Your First Facebook Ads Campaign

With Facebook now at over 250 million members, it’s never been a better time to take a stab at Facebook Advertising. I continually get requests through email on how to setup a Facebook Ads campaign, and what offers to work. Instead of writing back to everyone individually, it’s better to just write out a whole post. “Warning” – This is entry level stuff for Facebook Ads. If you’re already advertising on Facebook, you can probably skip this post… if not, learn something new and maybe make some money in the process.

For some reason, whenever you start talking to someone about Facebook Ads, you either get the response, “I just kept losing money, so I went away”, or “Facebook Ads is awesome! I love it!”. The truth is, Facebook Ads can make you money, just as easily as it can make you lose your shirt. It’s all about testing, setting your ads up correctly and managing your daily balance.

Let’s go forward with setting up a Facebook campaign. For this walkthrough, I’m going to use a “3G iPhone” email submit from Tatto Media, which pays $2 per submit. This will be a good example to use for when we go over targeting.

1.) Design Your Ad
– Destination URL: You can use your affiliate link, or a landing page. There are no quality scores, or full sites needed. In most cases, you can link directly to the affiliate url.
– Title: The title is what your user is going to see, and make them click. The better the title, the higher the click through rate.
– Body Text: This is usually the generic information that helps in deciding if Facebook will approve your ad. In this particular example, Facebook likes you to list the process needed for the viewer to take to receive their free iPhone. Again, the better the writing, the better the click through rate.
– Image: Usually more important than your title, is your image. Depending on the ad used, you can get creative with this. Draw attention to your ad by using a funny picture, or something out of the ordinary… but still relevant to the ad. Take some extra time to choose  a high quality image and do any necessary cropping so it fits correctly.

2.) TARGETING
The ad copy is the face of your ad campaign, but the targeting is where you setup who should see your ad. There is no reason why a single guy in Florida should see an advertisement for “Married Women in New York“. Thanks for Facebook Ads targeting, this will never be a problem again.

Most of the targeting options are self explanatory. Just for demonstration, I checked off that I want to target only “Married” “Males” interested in “iPhone” and living within the “United States” to see this ad. You can then see that 56,540 Facebook users match this description.

Keywords: The keywords are what will make or break your ad campaign. If you don’t place any keyword specifications, your advertisement will be shown to over 66 million Facebook users in the US. This will result in not only a horrible click through rate, but can also deplete your account of funds in no time.

As you can see in the picture below, I selected “iPhone“, “iphones“, and “Apple Iphone 8gb“. This means only people with these listed interests will see my ad. In addition to the keywords I selected, Facebook listed a few “Suggested Keywords“.

3.) Campaigns & Pricing
Now that your ad campaign is created, you just need to set everything up for going live and setting your ad pricing. The most important setting in this whole step, is your “Daily Budget“. The thing with Facebook, is that their audience is so huge, you can go through a few hundred or even thousands of dollars in just minutes. When setting up a campaign, you will need to test what CPC amount is right for you to spend. While testing, I would set the daily budget in the $5-$20 range. As for the CPC rate, I usually put 30-50% of what their actual suggestion is. Once you have some traffic flowing through the campaign, you will have a better idea on how to manage you CPC and daily budget.

4.) Review Your Ad
The last step is to simply review everything you have just setup. Once you verify everything is correct, you simply need to click “Place Order” and you campaign will go into que for approval.

Important Notices for Facebook Advertising:
– Your daily spend limit will increase in increments til you meet $1000, then you can contact an ads manager to get boosted to $5k+ daily range.
– Facebook ad team will deny your ads all time. Keep submitting new ad copies and resubmit whenever they are denied.
– Take advantage of NON-US traffic. Facebook is BIG worldwide, and these markets are less saturated then US.
– Facebook Coupons: For new accounts, several networks and sites offer $50-$100 coupons for Facebook advertisers.
(Visa used to offer $100, looks like they don’t anymore. Search around for the latest coupons to go live.)
– Setup multiple offers and ad copies. Keep higher CTR converting offers, and close out the others.
– The higher the CTR, the lower you will have to pay per click.
– Once you master CPC, move over to CPM advertising for better ROI results.

Give Facebook Ads a try.

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39 Comments

  1. I have had some good and bad with facebook. Just make sure you TEST, TEST, TEST to find out what works well for you!

  2. Zac, this is a great post. I've been hearing that FB is a great opportunity for ads, but it's hard to get your ads accepted. Why do they reject ads? Is it offer related or content related usually?

    Thanks!

    hanji

  5. <a class="replyTo" href="#comment-109789" rel="nofollow">@hanji – money-code:

    It's just a matter of continually submitting ads, and uploading multiple versions. It's also all about the timing of staff, who is approving and who isn't.

  7. I just signed up for Godaddy hosting today and they offer $50 worth of Facebook advertising. This is a very good deal considering hosted only costed $6.99

  8. <a class="replyTo" href="#comment-109802" rel="nofollow">@Donny Gamble:

    Great example. Codes like these are all over, just need to find them.

  9. Hanji,

    To be clear, it can be either the offer or your ad which will cause them to reject your ad. I think a lot of Facebook pros still have a high rejection rate because they are pushing the limits of what will be accepted.

    Danger

  10. Nice Article.

    One thing I would add is to use your own domain with a meta refresh to the offer as the clickthru URL.

    That way you can split test other offers and other networks without having to resubmit a new ad…

  11. <a class="replyTo" href="#comment-109806" rel="nofollow">@TimSchroeder:

    This also comes in handy if you have an offer that just ended or reached cap. If you have a redirect, or your own page in place, you can send the traffic to the same offer on another network.

  12. I just got a Facebook Coupon from Shoemoney.com, which I will use for Facebook campaign. Thanks for the cool instructions.

  13. Facebook is an ideal geo-targeted solution, and down here in South Africa we neeed a bit of that! The growth in memebership has been nothing short of extraordinary, with the jump from 200 – 250 million users happening almost overnight. 300 million must be right around the corner. The facebook server farm must be groaning!

  15. maybe u can try this code for facebook ads coupon,

    i found it on some site

    its valid till next year , and its $50

    YX1K-4364-FPMP-H314

  16. I used keywords in the keyword option. Number of hits at ads drastically reduced. How these keywords words. Because we all know that, no one is searching anything at facebook.

    bye

  17. Informative post Zac, the only thing that has held me back from doing a facebook campaign are the horror stories I have heard from others about spending thousands and not making a cent, but I guess that can happen with anything if you don't set it up correctly.. I was also going to sign up for tatoo media but I hate the "sign up and someone will contact you" bit lol… I want instant gratification :-p

  18. Nice tutorial for facebook Ads..!!

    I was thinking to use them.

    Now got a reason, why should I use them..!!

  20. got some great returns on my FB campaign…you did a great write up which should help more make some paper

  21. Zac you rule! You consistently explain Affiliate Marketing clearly. thank you again.

  22. The good thing about facebook is that it isn't really hard to get started using them unlike when you're starting out with pay-per-click. Again testing is essential here, I, myself have had less luck with facebook but I always see the potential in it.

  23. Definitely learned something from this! Thanks a ton for this write up, it was very informative.

  25. Great Post Zac,

    Facebook ads worked for us due to the pics in their ads.

    But the cost per click is too high for us to carry on. Too many big corporations have jumped on FB and spoiled it for smaller companies such as us.

    Must look for some of those coupons….

  26. I've been wondering how Wikipedia*, Yahoo, Google, Youtube, Facebook and other websites make money. I've also recently heard that Facebook** and Youtube were having financial problems, I see no ads on this pages so I really don't know how they make money and survive.

  27. Thanks for the tutorial Zac. Advertising on facebook is a great idea. There are so many people on there and you can target specific demographics you want. It is best to jump on that bandwagon early before competition heats up.

  28. great article ,i’ve heard a lot about advertising on facebook , but never knew how it worked, your article will help me a lot thanks

  29. I'm not even on facebook, but considering how many people are, it is surely a good advertising platform to explore. I really like that you can advertise by demographics instead of just keywords.

  30. Using Facebook is really a very good idea, especially the remark on non-US traffic. This can indeed be huge, and should not be underestimated! Are there CPA networks specific for non-US traffic?

  32. This will come in handy when i set up my first campaign. Did you see any results from this campaign?

  33. It all depends what you are trying to advertise using Facebook advertising. In many cases your ad will be disapproved for the not meeting the terms and conditions. It might be frustrating sometime when your ad is disapproved while similar products are being advertised on facebook. Any idea how it is possible?

  34. Instructive post Zac, considering the amount of popularity for facebook it should be great place to investigate on.

  35. I haven't really thought about doing a Facebook ad campaign, but this really will help me when I finally do. When I first started with marketing I followed your PPC guide to great success, Thanks Zac.

  36. I wonder do you think Facebook is the best place to start for a newbie since its pretty easy and quick to get started? What else can you use besides flogs for landing pages?

  37. Didn´t know that I can advertise on Facebook. Thanks for sharing this information. I will try it next week 🙂

    Cheers,

    Volksphone!

  39. Zac
    the whole articles relating to you FB campaign is great, but I have
    found 1 problem with it , you really got to watch your account every day, I still had $ 30.00 in free credit-yet Fb took out 3 different $$$
    amount out of my credit card account, now here is the biggest problem , after my contact to them, they did send a reply , they would check it out & get back to me , after waiting for 1 week & me trying 2 more times -Never got a answer , so i contact my credit card co. & got my $ back from them ( credit co)
    Alex.

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