When it comes time to scale your business or to find your first set of customers, one of the avenues you'll be deciding to use is Facebook.
And let me tell you that Facebook is awesome!
With over one billion active users, super detailed interest targeting, and the ability to upload customer lists, it's become the go-to place for businesses and affiliate marketers to find customers.
Facebook is also a difficult plce to run successful ads without prior experience, with many first-time marketers making basic errors that will ensure their campaigns fail.
In this article I will list four do's and don'ts when you start using Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website.
1. Don't use the Audience Network
When running Facebook ads, you have the option to select where you would like your adverts to be shown. You can choose Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger.
As a default, Facebook will serve your adverts everywhere and will recommend that this is the best option to reach your desired objective. The audience network is a collection of third-party websites with the bulk of clicks coming from bots and not humans.
Always deselect the Audience Network when choosing your placements; otherwise, you'll be paying for clicks by bots.
The only time you should use the Audience Network is when you're targeting your website visitors or email list, which I'm going to talk about next.
2. Start with targeting website visitors
In a previous article, I showed you how to create an audience of people who have visited your website, and how you could serve them adverts on Facebook.
This is known as retargeting. When you first start running Facebook ads, always target your website visitors and users in your email list first.
You will have greater success with this audience than if you target new users who haven't visited your website. When starting out with Facebook ads, the learning curve is much easier and more profitable if you target these users compared to new users as they are easier to convert (eight times easier, in fact).
In most cases, marketers who target new audiences have little experience with how Facebook actually works and they end up spending too much money by targeting the wrong audiences.
3. Don't target huge audiences
More is not better with Facebook ads. If you target a million people to buy a niche product, your advert is bound to fail.
When starting out, I always advise newbies to keep their audience under 100,000.
When selecting who you want to serve adverts to, Facebook gives you an indication of your audience definition.
A good way to niche your audience is to target by city instead of country and to use narrow clauses. Narrow clauses ensures users must match two or more interests to be shown an advert.
In the example above, I have selected the city of Bangkok and users must be expats and also own an iPhone 6 or better to be shown an advert. Only people who match both clauses will be shown my advert.
This is a great way to niche down your audience size and target only the users most likely to take your action.
Smaller audiences are easier to troubleshoot when something goes wrong, and it's easier to add further interests to increase the audience size.
4. Don't spend too much per day
As a newbie, don't allocate more than $10 per day to any ad campaign. Facebook has a very clever algorithm and within a few days, you'll know whether your advert is performing well or not.
You can find this out for $30 or you can find this out for $300.
If an advert is performing poorly, Facebook then charges you more to serve it as users are receiving a negative experience. If you cap your daily budget to $10, you'll only spend a maximum of $10 to find out.
You can find out what your audience thinks of your ad by checking its relevance score (1-10) within the Adverts Manager.
Any adverts that are scoring below a 5 should be stopped and your advert copy and audience targeting reviewed.
If the advert is running above a 6 and you're seeing good results on your website, then you can start to increase the budget of your campaign.
Your turn
When it's time to take your business to the next level, Facebook should be part of your overall growth strategy.
It takes time getting used to the platform and expect your first few campaigns to fail. But if you follow my tips above, you'll be able to minimize your losses and hopefully maximize your gains.
How successful have you been with Facebook ads?
