Tips for Designing a Winning Ad on Facebook

Written by Zac Johnson
social social social

An article was just featured in Business Week magazine called “Design a Winning Ad on Facebook”, by Kasey Galang, Principal, Performance Marketing at Facebook. It may have been a good article for anyone who has never done any advertising on Facebook, but very little information for anyone who already has. I thought I would build upon this article and provide a few more tips and illustrations on how to setup winning Facebook Ad campaigns.

In the BW article, Kasey mentions the key points of 1.) Target the Right People, 2.) Ask People to Participate and 3.) Keep it Fresh. Below are three visual examples (fictional ads/offers) to help you better understand how to create a better ad campaign.

1.) Target the Right People
In my previous facebook ads article I showed you how easy it is to setup a new campaign and targeting. The fictional ad campaign below was created to show an example of effective targeting. The ad shows a middle aged couple, targets to single men, interested in woman and are over the age of 40. Depending on how you setup your ads, you can show a picture of a middle aged single female/male, then target to the opposite sex.

2.) Ask People to Participate
Since advertising on Facebook started, zip/email submits and surveys have always done well. Facebook moved away from allowing survey to be advertised, but they still approve zip/email submits. Here’s an example of setting up a zip/email ad campaign.

When you start asking people questions that are relevant to them, they actually get more interested and active. Here I setup a fictional ad campaign for a free $50 gift card to Olive Garden. The ad copy is clear enough and gets the viewers attention. I didn’t have to change much from the default targetting settings, but I did bump age up to 25 as the minimum, as the offers usually convert crappy for the advertiser, the lower the age you target. The best part of this ad campaign, is actually being able to target the people who eat at Olive Garden through the keywords section.

3.) Keep it Fresh
Depending on how many people you are targetting in your ad campaign, this concept might not matter too much. If you are targetting all of Facebook, it’s most likely not many of them will see your ad twice, however if you are using keywords and targetting a small group, they will see your ad more often. With that being said, I always setup multiple ad copies for my Facebook ads. Not only will it keep your ad fresh, but it will give you a better idea of whats working and bringing in better numbers. Here are just a few different ways to promote the same fictional campaign. Also, I’ve seen some great click through rates when using a variation of colors in ads, try it out..

I hope you found this article helpful and maybe a bit of inspiration for your next Facebook ads campaign. Remember to try a different variation of text and images on all ads. Remove the ones that have low CTRs. Don’t be lazy, and make sure you take the time to crop your images properly (110×80), so they don’t look like crap. Now go make some money on Facebook!

(Visited 131 times, 1 visits today)

Wait... before you leave, consider these top resources:

45 Replies to “Tips for Designing a Winning Ad on Facebook”

  1. Great suggestions! A lot of marketers are having trouble figuring out the Facebook ads system, whether they've written 1 ad or 1,000,000. It's helpful to go over the basics, but the details are what will set you apart in the end.

  2. Hey Zac, thank you for another very informative post on Facebook advertising. I’ve also sent you a short email regarding my situation with Facebook. Please take a look at it and reply if you have a moment. Thank you very much.

  3. I find it a bit tricky with facebook advertising. May be I have a practice more to get approved by facebook advertising.

  4. This is an outstanding guide to Facebook advertising. Thank you for the excellent tips.

  6. Nice guide, are the clicks on facebook cheaper than adwords or is it about the same price?

  8. <a class="replyTo" href="#comment-110045" rel="nofollow">@Free PS3:

    Just like adwords, it all depends on how you set up the campaigns. If you buy on a CPM basis, or can get very high CTR on FB, you may be paying only a few pennies per click.

  9. These are great tips on improving facebook marketing. Using the “interests” section is a great way to make sure the people who see your ad are actually interested in what you have to offer. Although, if you are too specific, it won’t be shown to very many people at all.

  10. The article was pretty helpful as I just started my first FB campaign last night, but the last comment about buying CPM is great. My CPC is too high right now, so that just might be the thing to try.

  13. FB ads seem to be either very effective or a complete failure. I think it really depends on who or what your ads are centered around. I have some friends who are doing great with them while others are doing nothing with them… I think its really important to know your audience in this situation.

  14. Thanks for another effective and informative post on Facebook advertising. It helped us to understand, how to create ad campaign in a much better way.

  15. If you want to use Facebook advertising coupon for some credits, please use only US$ otherwise you will not get any credit. So if you are from Canada and select CA$, you wont get the credit for coupon.

  16. These are great tips, thanks for sharing them. I never had much success with Facebook advertising. I just end up losing a lot of money.

  17. Facebook is quite safe. You can alter your privacy settings so only your friends can see your profile, and if you don't want some of your friends seeing everything, you can give them limited access to your profile.

  18. I've never had a MySpace, but I've heard quite a few stories that they are not very good at keeping people's names and info on private display, even after the person has requested it to be.

  19. Facebook isn't exactly any safer if you don't go through the precautions to only allow certain people to see your profile, but I prefer Facebook anyway because it's cleaner, although with all these new add-ons they seem to be making it's starting to get more obnoxious.

  20. Facebook is more safe than myspace because you have to be a member and you have to let people be your friend or you can not see their profile.

  21. However, facebook and myspace are both safe if you are careful about them. Don't put up personal information and don't try to meet strangers over them and you should be fine.

  23. The phenomenal growth in facebook users has created a huge marketplace, where you can target your chosen demographic down to the T. This really gives us as advertisers some fresh options apart from adwords. Facebook being the gated community that it is has actually created this unique marketplace free from Adwords. Google must be dying to get in there!

  24. How facebook targets the location? Is it the location of the user in database or based on IP? Does anybody knows?

    If it is based on the location of the user in the database, then I wonder how good the geotargeting would be?

  26. Inviting your targeted audience to participate works for me. FB is all about participation, and if you strike the right cord you could end up with a huge volume of traffic.

  27. Zac..this is new for me to know how to design facebook. I rarely deal with it honestly. Thanks for your nice tips. It is getting more interesting now to take bigger benefits from such social web. Make Quick Cash John

  28. @Free PS3:

    Yes, they are cheaper than Google Google ad word and yahoo marketing. For my product, i was paying $8/click to Google and $1 for Facebook. But , i am sorry to say, Facebook conversion rate is not good.

  30. I am so much into optimizing my site for the search engines that I haven't bothered looking into this area..

  31. I'm actually looking into facebook advertising myself, this little guide you've written up with the visual makes it look a lot less intimidating than what i've encountered elsewhere.

  32. Facebook advertising– is it really worth the trouble? I agree– it will reach a lot of people, but the details and time that it consumes… not sure yet. However, if I was sold on the idea, I would use this easy guide to create my ad.

  33. The girl whose profile you looked at will have no way of knowing that you looked at her page, but, your IP address can be ascertained by the website. This is used for following the pages that you look at, and then targeting ads to you personally using the results.

  34. Well, those kind of websites usually have advertisements like those. And I suggest that you shouldn't click them. Some ads even have viruses. Well, if you had your Facebook picture in that ad, then I guess only you can see it because you're the only one who clicked the link.

  35. This is great information. Didn´t mentioned to advertise on facebook. I will try it out.

    Best regards,

    Volksphone!

  36. I wrote a new LiveJournal blog post about 20 minutes ago, and have Facebook set up to import my blog posts. It's already imported all my old ones; how long does it take for Facebook to check for new blog posts.

  37. Facebook Ads are one of the best way of doing advertising online because of large number of users. Nice tips to create Facebook Ads. Will it works for every pattern of Ads?

  39. Using the “interests” section is a great way to make sure the people who see your ad are actually interested in what you have to offer. Although, if you are too specific, it won’t be shown to very many people at all

  41. Nice article, but offering free stuff might get you clicks but will it generate solid business? We are steering clear of cheap / free targeting. But it depends on your product / service. We are targeting more highscale so we do not want free stuff clicks. Best of luck to all with your campaigns.

  42. Great content. I have been using FB for some time and it brings amazing results for me so far.
    I especially like point 2 about getting them to participate. I actually did not try this before so going to include that in my next campaign, if I remember, will come back here to let you know my results with this approach.

    I have found FB more effective for me recently than regular PPC, so its def a good medium. Cool post, will bookmark this one for my list to take a look at. Thanks.

    Dave
    Freelance Writer and Web Master, Pretoria, South Africa
    My recent post Click one of the post titles above to include it at the end of your comment

Comments are closed.