in this post, we’ll share with you everything you would like to understand about Facebook Ads to urge your ad campaigns up and running, also as all we’ve learned from My experiences.

You will learn:
• the way to find out your first Facebook Ads campaign
• recommendations on setting audiences, targeting, placements, and more
• Exact specs for creative – image sizes right down to the pixel
• The ROI you'll expect to realize with Facebook Ads

Understanding the way to leverage Facebook Ads is becoming a staple part of almost every social media strategy. And if you would like to urge your posts seen on Facebook, it’s becoming more and more likely that you’ll need to buy reach through Facebook and Instagram Ads.

Paid advertising on Facebook seems to be one of the foremost immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Though it’s not without its questions. How well does it work? What quiet engagement does one get? And what are you able to expect for your hard-earned money?

How to found out a Facebook Ads Campaign

Step 1: Set some goals for your Facebook Ads
Before you jump in and make any adverts, it’s important to first believe in why you’re advertising and what you’re getting to achieve. By setting yourself a couple of goals before going accept ads, you furthermore may have something to live your success against.

For example, if you’re looking to extend downloads of your mobile app through Facebook Ads, you'll set a goal of 100 downloads within the first month. this may also assist you when it involves choosing the right objective for your Facebook Ads campaign in Step 3 below. Some more example goals could be:

• Increase traffic to your website from Facebook
• Increase attendance at an occasion
• Generate new leads
• Increase the reach of your content on Facebook
• Boost engagement for your Facebook Page
• Increase your online sales

Step 2. Head over to Facebook Ads Manager
All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads Manager tool, which you'll access via Facebook, or by clicking “Ads Center” within the left sidebar menu on your Facebook page, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook Page.

Once you’re in your Ads Manager, you'll navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. to urge started together with your first ad, click the green button within the top-right corner of the page.

Step 3. Choose your objective
When you click to make a Facebook Ad, you’ll attend a page where you select the target for your campaign. There are 15 options here for what you would possibly want to realize With Facebook, you've got many various ways of approaching a billboard campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:

Awareness

Objectives that generate interest in your product or service:

• Boost your posts
• Promote your page
• Reach people near your business
• Increase Brand Awareness
• Increase your reach
Top tip: for little budgets, you’re likely to urge the foremost bang for your buck with the notice ad types. Moz found that $1 per day can grow your audience by 4,000 people (this didn’t quite match our experience, though it’s well worth trying).

Consideration Objectives that get people to start out brooding about your business and appearance for more information about it:

• Send people to a destination on or off Facebook
• Get installs of your app
• Raise attendance at your event
• Get video views
• Collect leads for your business
• Conversion

Objectives that encourage people curious about your business to get or use your product or service:

• Increase conversions on your website
• Increase engagement in your app
• Get people to say your offer
• Promote a product or catalog
• Get people to go to your shops
• Once you’ve selected your marketing objective, you’ll then be asked to call your campaign:

Step 4: Define your audience and budget
Customizing your audience
This step is extremely crucial for the success of your Facebook Ads campaigns. The audience for your ad is often customized to support all the subsequent demographics:

Location, starting with a rustic, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
Age
Gender
Languages
• Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics
• Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, also as device usage
• Connections – prefer to show the ad to all or any people, just those connected to Buffer, or those not connected to Buffer
In addition, with the Connections setting, you'll choose advanced targeting, which allows you to include or exclude people that are connected to certain pages, apps, or events. you'll also further customize your targeting using custom audiences to retarget people that have already interacted together with your business.

Example: Choosing an audience for a Buffer ad

Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way so as to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the subsequent audience demographics:

Location: us
Interests: Social media
Excluded: people that already like Buffer
Age: 18-65+
Language: English (US)
This gave us an estimated reach of up to three,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are what percentage we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.

Setting your budget
Once you’ve selected your audience, you next got to choose what proportion you’d wish to spend on your ad. once you set a budget, it’s important to recollect that this figure represents the utmost amount of cash you would like to spend. you'll also set your budget to Daily or Lifetime:

Daily: A daily budget is a mean that you’ll spend a day .
Lifetime: A lifetime budget may be a maximum that you’ll spend during the lifetime of your advert set.

Step 5: Create your advert
This is where it gets really fun! It’s now time to settle on the pictures (or video), headline, body text, and where your ad are going to be displayed on Facebook. For the text, you get 90 characters to share a fast message which will appear above your image(s) or video.

There are two ways to make adverts: Using an existing post or creating a replacement advert. Here’s a fast check out both options.

Using an existing post
For certain sorts of adverts, like boosting posts, you'll create your ad using an existing post that’s already been shared on your Facebook Page. to try to to this, select the ‘Use Existing Post’ option from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From here, you'll choose which Page you’d wish to select a post from and pick a private post from that page to use as your advert:

Creating a replacement advert
If you’d wish to create your advert from a blank canvas, the primary task is to pick the format you’d wish to use for your advert. Facebook Adverts look slightly different counting on the results you would like . Facebook currently offers 5 various formats for adverts:

• Carousel: Create a billboard with 2 or more scrollable images or videos
• Single image: Create up to six variations of your advert using 1 image
• Single video: Create a billboard with one video
• Slideshow: Create a looping video advert with up to 10 images
• Canvas: Tell a more immersive story by combining images and videos

Note: The formats available to you'll vary supported the target you set for your advert during Step 3 a touch earlier during this post.

Once the format is chosen , you would like to feature the content to your advert (the images or video and therefore the copy). If your ad goes to be a hit , you would like your image and replica to be enticing enough to form people want to click.

Image specs:

Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
Image ratio: 1.91:1
To maximize advert delivery, use a picture that contains little or no overlaid text.
Video specs:

Format: .MOV or .MP4 files
Resolution: a minimum of 720p
File size: 2.3 GB max.
Recommended aspect ratio: widescreen (16:9)
Facebook: hour max.
Instagram: 60 seconds max.

Step 6: Choose your ad placements
Advert placement defines where your advert is shown and with Facebook Ads, you’re ready to choose which locations your advert will appear in. Adverts may appear in Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed, and right column. you'll also create ads to seem on Instagram.

Facebook recommends using the default placements for the target you chose, which enables Facebook to optimize placements for you so as to urge the simplest possible results at the most cost effective overall monetary value .

However, if you would like to pick your own placements, Facebook recommends the subsequent choices, broken out by campaign objective:

• Increase brand awareness campaigns (including Reach & Frequency buying): Facebook and Instagram
• Boost your posts (including Reach & Frequency buying): Facebook and Instagram
• Get video views (including Reach & Frequency buying): Facebook and Instagram
• Get installs of your app: Facebook and Instagram
• Increase engagement in your app: Facebook
• Promote a product catalog: Facebook
• Increase conversions on your website: Facebook
• Send people to your website: Facebook

Step 7: Place your order
Now, your advert is prepared to travel . To submit your ad click the ‘Place Order button at rock bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live (you’ll receive a confirmation email from Facebook once the ad is live).

What $5 Per Day Will Buy You on Facebook
To give a touch context into what’s achievable with Facebook Ads, we ran an experiment to ascertain what a budget of $5 per day would get us. We tried three differing types of Facebook Ads, each designed with a special objective in mind.

Here are our results:

Page Likes – $0.57 per like
Clicks to the Buffer for the Business landing page – $4.01 per click
Boosted post – $6.35 per additional 1,000 people reached
When we view this in terms of what proportion $5 per day will buy you, these are the numbers:

Page Likes – 9 likes per day
Clicks to the Buffer homepage – 1 per day
Boosted post – 787 new people reached

How does this jive together with your experience with Facebook Ads?

I’ll be happy to share the specifics of what we tried and the way we tried it (and how you'll test this for yourself, too.)

One final thought before moving ahead, it'd be useful to ascertain how our experience compares to Facebook Ads benchmarks overall. WordStream analyzed the Facebook Ads performance of its 256 US-based clients and came up with many useful performance benchmarks, like the subsequent .

Since we discover ourselves within the technology space at Buffer, we will compare it to the industry benchmarks during this chart.

Average clickthrough rate: 1.04%

Ours: 0.95%

Average cost per click: $1.27

Ours: $4.01

A lot of our experience here didn’t quite match up to the benchmarks, likely for variety of things like this being my first dive into Facebook Ads (lots to learn!) and my not spending the time to really optimize the campaigns. Like all the experiments we run and share here, your mileage may vary. And we’d like to hear your experience and results!

Over to you

Thanks for reading! I hope you discover it to be a useful guide for getting found out with Facebook Ads and I hope our benchmarks also convince be a handy measure for what is often achieved on a limited budget. I’d like to continue the conversation with you in the comments below. What has been the simplest success you’ve found with Facebook Ads? What are your top tips for creating brilliant ads?