Facebook Advertising for Beginners

Facebook Advertising for Beginners

• Digital marketing
• June 12, 2023

But first, a few technical terms

The following terms will help you understand the basics of Facebook Advertising better. Some terms are specific to Facebook Advertising, while some are also used in other platforms as well.

Please note that these terms have been explained as simply as possible as it is intended for beginners.

Reach, Impressions & Frequency

Reach and impressions are the no. of times someone sees your ad. Reach is unique, while impressions is not.

For e.g., 10 people seeing your ad once each person is 10 impressions and 10 reach; 10 people seeing your ad twice each is 20 impressions and 10 reach.

Frequency is a metric of how many times your ad is seen – it is calculated by dividing total impressions by total reach.

For e.g., 10 people seeing your ad once each person is 10 impressions, 10 reach, and 1 frequency; 10 people seeing your ad twice each is 20 impressions, 10 reach, and 2 frequency. Similarly 1.5 frequency means half the total no. of people have seen your ad twice, and the other half have only seen it once.

Organic vs. Paid

Organic refers to anything you haven’t paid Facebook (or any other platform) for, while Paid is anything you do pay Facebook for

For e.g., an organic post is when your Facebook business page posts a photo of your office lunch, and organic engagement is when you get likes, and comments on that post. A paid ad is when you pay Facebook to show your post / ad to people (for e.g. you run a Facebook ad for $100) and the resulting engagement, reach, impressions, etc. is termed as paid engagement, paid reach, paid impressions, etc.

ROI vs. ROAS

ROI, or Return on Investment, may be familiar to most people as it is a common business term, and refers to the returns (or sales) acquired from an initial investment, or sales per amount spent.

On the other hand, ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend, is mostly used for Digital Advertising and refers to the returns (or sales) by running ads for a certain amount, or sales per ad spend.

ROI is easiest for manufacturing companies to calculate, but it can be harder to calculate when you include human factors such as time (wages). Instead marketers tend to use ROAS as a determining factor as to whether advertising campaigns are doing better or worse.

Bid

All actions associated with Facebook ads such as engagement, reach, video views, clicks, etc. are paid – but how much do you pay? This is where Bids come into play.

The bid for xyz action determines whether your ad is shown or your competitor’s ad is shown, and then you or he/she are charged based on the user’s actions, and your campaign setup. A lower bid nets fewer actions, while higher bids result in more ad spend, but higher rate of actions as well (this is only if the ads and targeting is exactly the same as ad quality also comes into play here).

If you do not set a bid then Facebook will automatically determine the lowest possible bid for you – while this does usually ensure results, you may end up spending more than you want. Manual bids help avoid this issue, at the cost of fewer actions if not optimized correctly.

For e.g., you may think it’s okay to pay Rs. 5 per click on your Facebook ad; in an auto bid (set by Facebook) you may be bidding higher at around $ 1 per click.

It’s always advised to use manual clicks for most types of ads in order to have full control over them. You can usually search for industry averages (also check the country), or manually test out different bids, and see what amount gets you the required no. of results at the best cost.

CPC & CPM

CPC, or Cost per Click, is the rate at which you are paying for clicks.

CPM, or Cost per Mille, is the rate at which you pay for a 1000 impressions of your ad (a mille is a 1000 impressions).

These two are some of the types of options you can choose to pay according to with your Facebook ads (depending on the campaign type).

Now onto the basics of Facebook Advertising!
When learning about Facebook Advertising, we must first look at the different Facebook campaign types available.

Types of Facebook Advertising Campaigns

As shown in the image below, there are 13 types of Facebook Campaigns available as of today (the Engagement campaign includes 3 campaign subtypes: Page Likes, Event Responses, and Post Engagement).

Each campaign is optimized based on a specific objective.

You may have also noticed that the headings for each group of campaigns is similar to that of a Sales Funnel:

• Awareness – Make customers aware of you
• Consideration – Make customers think of you
• Conversion – Convince them to buy from you

Awareness

• The Brand Awareness campaign helps you get an estimate of how many people would remember your ad after seeing it within two days.
• The Reach campaign lets you control frequency (and thereby the no. of reach and impressions) for your campaign.

Consideration

• Traffic campaigns are optimized to help get people to click on your ads to send them to your website, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, and more (basically off Facebook).
• Engagement campaigns as explained earlier let you get Post Engagement, Page Likes, or Event Responses.
• App Install campaigns are needed if you want to get more users for your app.
• Video View campaigns let you optimize for views of your video campaign.
• Lead Generation campaigns help you collect leads using built-in Facebook Lead Generation forms.
• Message campaigns let users message you by clicking on your ads.

Conversion

• Conversion campaigns help you optimize your ad campaign for any action considered as a conversion, e.g. purchase, sign ups, registrations, etc.
• Catalog Sales campaigns optimize your campaigns to maximize sales from your Facebook product catalog.
• Store Traffic campaigns are great to drive physical traffic to your physical stores.