4 Quick Tips to Help You When Setting Up a Facebook Advertising Campaign

Facebook Ads offer you a quick way to promote your business to the specific customers who you want to attract, with timely and relevant ads showing up in their Facebook feed. The targeting options have improved of late so your Ad budget can be spent as efficiently as possible by specifying exactly who you want your ads to be shown to. If you are new to Facebook Ads then try some of our tips to help guarantee success.

The 20% text rule

Facebook is very strict in enforcing the fact that images used for Ads should contain less than 20% text. Their logic in setting this rule is that when users scan webpages, they will naturally be drawn to bright and colourful imagery first before they read the surrounding text, so text-heavy images will likely be ignored. Best practise is to only add a headline or brief call to action to your image, and then to provide further information to the Ad text itself. In order to help you check whether your image meets Facebook’s guidelines, you can use their Image Text check tool which will analyse your uploaded image and provide one of the following ratings: Image Text: OK - Your ad will run normally. Image Text: Low - Your ad's reach may be slightly lower. Image Text: Medium - Your ad's reach may be much lower. Image Text: High - Your ad may not run. The tool also gives helpful advice on how you can reduce the ratio of text in an image to help you meet the guidelines and make your Ads more likely to run. Which location targeting do you need? For many businesses, the location targeting options are one of the most important reasons to use Facebook Ads. If you want to target people who are physically near to your business then you can use a radius filtering via the ‘local awareness’ setting within Ad Manager. This is ideal for businesses such as shops, bars and restaurants as it lets you target people who are visiting the area, not just those who live locally. Alternatively to target potential customers who live in a certain area, you can enter specific geographic regions or postcodes in the ‘Audiences’ section which provides many location targeting options.

Check that tracking is set up

In order to get the most out of your Facebook ads you need to track the results. You can add tracking to your campaign easily during Ad creation, by using the Facebook pixel tab in Ads Manager. You then need to add the corresponding code to your website- Facebook provides instructions and support on this. This allows you to track the actions of users who come to your website via Facebook Ads. The most important thing for you to do is to check the pixel is working before you make ads live, otherwise you will not be able to properly measure the success of your campaigns.

Patience is key

Many small business owners give Facebook Ads a try for a few days, perhaps by just ‘boosting’ an existing post and then giving up as soon as the budget runs out. If you want to give Facebook Ads a serious trial for your business, we would recommend putting aside enough budget for at least one month in order to get statistically viable results. Test your Ads with different images and text to see which designs earn you the highest click through rate, as Facebook will reward you with a lower cost per click if your audience is engaging with your ads. For support in setting up your Facebook Ad campaigns, get in touch with our team of experts today.