You can’t just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks when it comes to Facebook Ads.
It’s the quickest way to waste ad spend on campaigns that aren’t performing to their full potential.
Without a plan—a real strategy—you’ll never:
- know the reasons for your failures or success (AKA you can’t put an end to the bad stuff and do more of the good stuff)
- be able to optimize your ads (AKA get more bang for your buck)
- or scale your campaigns (AKA maintain those insane results as you increase your budget)
You don’t want that—and we don’t want that for you.
We’re giving away the cream of the crop, the best of the best: 21 Facebook Ad strategies our PPC experts use to get click-through rates (CTR) in the likes of 400% and above.
By the end of this article, you’ll know
- How to set Facebook ads up properly
- What strategies you want to use
- All about the conversion funnel
- What ads work best for different parts of that funnel
- What your best buyers look like
- How to segment your buyers
- How to make brilliant offers for each segment
- What retargeting is
- The Facebook Pixel (and the Apple-drama hurting its effectiveness)
- How to combine Facebook ads with other marketing tactics
- How to test your ads
- How to bid
Get brand new Facebook ad strategies straight to your inbox every week. 23,739 people already are!
We’ll start with four essential things you should do before setting up your first Facebook ad because, like all things, proper prep is key to brilliant execution.
- Set up a conversion funnel
- Create buyer personas
- Segment your market
- Install your tracking pixel
What happens if you ask a stranger for an ice cream cone?
Odds are, they feel sorry for you, grimace politely, and walk away from you (because you’re a crazy person).
But what happens if you ask a stranger for the time?
Odds are, they’ll tell you what time it is.
You might exchange a quick “beautiful day, huh?” and that might turn into a short conversation where you find out you have common friends and share similar interests. At that point, they might buy you ice cream.
The moral of the story is this:
To create a successful Facebook ad campaign, think of your target audience as groups of people in different stages of “ask comfort” (conversion stages).
A conversion funnel identifies the different relationships you have with your overall crowd (target audience) and chunks those relationships into stacked tiers. Some people are ready to buy from you right this moment (bottom of the funnel) while others still need proof that your product’s any good (top of the funnel).
As our article about conversion funnels states, a typical funnel has four stages: attract, convert, close, and delight.
No surprise, different Facebook campaign strategies and ad types work better for each stage of your sales funnel.
For example, a person who downloaded your eBooks and participated in a couple of webinars is more likely to buy your product than someone who sees your ad for the first time.
First-timers tell you what time it is but they don’t treat you to ice cream.
A well-defined conversion funnel guides how you manage your campaign:
- Identify your Facebook audiences.
- Develop offers and campaigns suited to each funnel (target) stage.
- Develop cross-channel marketing incentives to move people through your conversion funnel
- Set different campaign goals depending on the audience’s relationship with your brand
Who is your best customer?
You need to know that before you figure out the UVP (Unique Value Proposition—the value you propose to give) for your Facebook campaigns.
Dig into demographics:
- What do they look like?
- How old are they?
- Are they married?
- Do they own a home or rent a condo (or run a farm)?
- Do they commute via public transit or drive a car (or a tractor)?
- Is that car a Kia or a Tesla (or is it a Ford F250 truck)?
- What’s their income bracket?
- Do they like dogs or chickens?
Answer those questions.
If you need help answering those questions, study Facebook ad targeting to understand who your buyer is as a person. Get cozy with your buyer persona(s)—the story of a real person, not some abstract digital wallet.
Match your ad to their expectations. Speak their language.
When it comes to Facebook ads, knowing your target audience means knowing their pain points, interests, location, and purchase behaviors.
And here’s a pro tip that’s one step above the regular buyer persona exercise: understand how your buyer personas identify themselves.
Autopilot, for instance, talks the language of their ideal customer, a SaaS business owner. Their Facebook ad headline says “How To Nail Your SaaS Trial.”
Getting trial users to sign up for a paid subscription is a struggle for software vendors.
You won’t know who to target with your Facebook ad campaigns if you haven’t got a clue what your ideal customer needs.
I promise that the hours you spend on customer development is time well spent. You’ll know whom to target, when to target them, and what offer has the best chance of winning that click.
Pat yourself on the back. You know who your ideal customer is and you understand that the conversion funnel has different stages for them depending on how cozy they are with your offer.
Now, it’s time to put those two things together and make some magic.
Ideal customers in the prospects stage (new customers) of the conversion funnel are your warm audience. They’re interested in your product.
There are so many targeting options out there. Retargeting is one of the best. We’ve seen many brands succeed when they retarget different audience segments. And we’re not the only ones:
Aurum Brothers achieved a 13x higher ROI on their Facebook ads when they retargeted past website visitors. A PR Newswire study brought attention to the link between retargeting and raising brand awareness. Retargeting represented the highest lift in trademark search behavior at a plucky 1,046%.
Here are a couple more customer segments we’ve seen work wonders on Facebook and other ad platforms:
People who visited your website once but didn’t engage with any content or offers.
People who’ve visited your blog page because they saw your link in search engine results (SERP) or social media, but left after reading a couple of articles.
People who keep returning to your blog for more insight. They are more likely to make a purchase in the future or share your content on Facebook.
Prospects who have landed on specific landing pages are likely interested in particular products or features.
People who almost bought from you, but need to a nudge to complete their purchase (with a cart abandonment trigger email).
These are fans who keep coming back for more. They are your potential brand advocates. Brand advocates tell others about your cool stuff. You want them to do that because according to a study by Nielsen, people are four times more likely to buy an item when referred by a friend.
These audience types are your buyer personas in different conversion stages.
And each of them gets a different advertising approach.
Each advertising approach has a different offer—and Facebook helps you with those offers.
This Facebook ad example by Try The World targets cold or lukewarm leads who haven’t subscribed yet. They offer a discount to convince people to try their product.
In contrast, this MailChimp ad targets people more familiar with their email marketing platform.
Fashion retailer Bonprix increased incremental sales by 4.3% using a mix of Facebook targeting tools and testing different ad types.
Once you understand your customer segments, your offers become more relevant. Your ad campaigns address a specific need or solve a common problem.
Conversion tracking is the boring cousin of shiny ad designs and flashy headlines. But, in case you haven’t noticed, being a nerd is pretty damn cool.
And the nerd in you knows that the shiny stuff must be measured.
For Facebook ads, the tool we use to gauge how we’re doing (metrics) is the Facebook Pixel.
It’s a tracking dot.
But it’s actually a bunch of dots strung together in a few lines of code that you copy from Facebook and add to your website. This code tracks what visitors do when they get to your site. Knowing what actions they take makes your Facebook ads WAY more relevant.
Way.
Tracking the right conversions keeps your Facebook campaign on course.
Or…. does it?
This is the big question of 2023.
The answer is yes, tracking conversions keeps your campaign on course. The problem is that tracking conversions hit a snag at the start of 2021.
How much that affects Facebook ad campaigns, we don’t yet. What we do know is that you’re flying 100% blind without it, so install it.
Further Reading: Facebook Pixel: Supercharge Your Facebook Ad Campaigns
- Go to Events Manager.
- Click Connect Data Sources and select Web.
- Select Facebook Pixel and click Connect (Every Facebook ad account gets a single pixel code (that’s all you need).
- Add your Pixel Name.
- Enter your website URL to check for easy setup options.
- Click Continue
- Copy the pixel code
8. Then paste the code in the header of your CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix etc.). You can paste it manually on each page or use a plugin like Insert Headers and Footers.
Done!
You just set up the basic code. But you can also add a conversion tracking code inside the basic code to turn things up.
Why would you do that?
Because you want to track specific conversions like purchases and lead conversions.
It’s fun to see those stats because you can track eight different custom events with one Facebook Pixel (code). Pick from this list:
Want a more step-by-step walk-thru on installing Facebook Pixel to your website? Go here: Facebook’s Pixel implementation guidelines.
And that’s it.
You’ve completed the pre-stuff.
Next comes the fun part.
We’re going to explore 17 ways to boost your Facebook campaign results with advanced KlientBoost-approved strategies.
If you don’t appreciate what you’ve done up to this point, you’ve set a rock-solid foundation for your Facebook strategy.
The launch pad is done.
Let’s see about bringing in the helos.
The good thing about digital marketing is that you don’t have to choose a single channel. You don’t have to place large bets on one thing and then sit back and pray things will roll the right way.
It’s the opposite.
With digital marketing channels, the fun is how you combine multiple campaigns and lead sources to support each other throughout your conversion funnel.
We use Facebook ads to create brand awareness and see who’s interested in our client’s product/offer.
We use this website remarketing audience to create RLSAs (Remarketing List Search Ads) in Google Ads (formerly Adwords).
When a past website visitor searches for one of your keywords, you’ll place a higher bid to appear higher on their search results page.
Then you take this Facebook + Google strategy higher.
That’s why you’re here, right?
Use this trick: RLSA competitor bidding lets you bid more aggressively for your competitors’ keyword searches. Snatch potential customers right from under your competition’s nose!
Further Reading: Facebook Retargeting: 157-Point Guide & 12 Ideas For Sweet Results
Most companies create Facebook ads with the goal of turning warm leads into paying customers.
This is good.
Sadly, those ads also target cold leads.
That’s bad—you can’t Cling Wrap warm and cold together. Doing that drastically reduces your campaign’s ROI.
Why target warm and cold together in the first place?
Because there aren’t enough warm leads to target yet. So marketers target cold leads with straightforward sales offers.
The problem is the huge unfilled gap between cold leads and warm leads.
That’s the problem you need to fix. And here’s how you do it:
You can turn cold leads into warm leads with content marketing.
Yep. Content marketing.
Don’t panic.
Content works with your Facebook ads.
Yes, “content” is the SEO side of things and, no, you don’t have to be the world’s best writer to make strong content. Content simply needs to be valuable and solve your target audience’s pain points. Keep things clear, concise, and compelling.
Then share that compelling content with your Facebook target audiences. Do that instead of hitting them in the face with a salesy offer first thing.
For example, Moz plays the long game (content) and publishes 10x content about the latest SEO tactics. Slowly but surely, cold leads start to perceive Moz as a leading expert in the field of SEO.
Those new leads eventually warm into customers.
Later, after a person has read a couple of your blog articles or downloaded a free eBook, you can move them forward in the funnel, and target them with more sales-oriented Facebook ads.
According to a Content Marketing Institute article on Facebook blog promotions, this is the best publishing plan for promoting blog content on Facebook:
- Share your post on Facebook. Easy.
- Ask your team members to like and share the post. Easy. Only, don’t overdo it or Facebook will penalize you.
- Boost your Facebook post to reach a wider audience. Easy.
Notice something?
Three easies. Content is your friend.
Tip: You can use a single Facebook page post across multiple ad campaigns, so that all the social proof (likes and shares) show under a single ad.
Here are additional content marketing tips about paid content promotion.
Mobile ads make up 94% of Facebook's advertising revenues. That’s somewhere in the ballpark of $16.34 billion in quarterly mobile ad revenues.
That’s a ballpark you want to play ball in.
If you add in Facebook’s Audience Network, you can reach an even larger audience.
Think about your landing page. Is it mobile-optimized?
It absolutely must be.
Don’t make the Facebook ad mistake of driving mobile traffic to a web page that’s hard to read without a large screen.
We’ve seen mobile Facebook ads deliver great results across different industries, from consumer products to B2B—it’s up to you to test whether it works for your brand.
Here’s an example by Udemy using both Facebook and Instagram mobile newsfeed ads to get people to sign up for courses.
Create different ads for desktop and mobile newsfeeds.
Desktop newsfeed ads benefit from longer link descriptions. Their headline is the most eye-capturing part of the ad.
Mobile ads, on the contrary, display the headline with a smaller font, making the main ad text the most important part of your ad copy.
If you want Facebook ad clicks, offer something of high value.
Facebook giveaways and contests are highly engaging.
Here’s an example: SurveyMonkey’s chance to win cool prizes in exchange for participating in surveys.
Del Mar Fans & Lighting’s Facebook giveaway asks entrants to vote on their preferred lighting product. Once they vote, they enter the competition (and become a lead).
So there’s a light spin on ads.
Your Facebook contests don’t have to focus 100% of the time on sales. Instead, look for long-term benefits such as increased brand awareness and new leads to enter in your conversion funnel.
Tip: When targeting a large cold Facebook audience, select Reach as your campaign objective, so that Facebook will deliver your ads to the maximum number of people.
Lead ads make life super easy.
When a lead ad appears on your newsfeed, you can fill in your contact information without ever leaving Facebook.
This removes the possible friction points between your prospect and the conversion, making it easier for them to exchange their email address for an eBook or another type of Facebook ad offer.
Create a Facebook Custom Audience of blog readers and website visitors in the past 30 days who haven’t converted on any offer yet.
Set up a lead ads campaign to collect their emails and move them into your marketing funnel.
That’s exactly what AdEspresso did with their eBook campaign on Facebook. Here’s what their ad looked like:
Their results?
The average cost for a prospect’s email address was around $2.
AdEspresso also ran an experiment to see which ads worked best: Facebook lead ads or regular ads with a landing page.
They concluded that:
“When re-targeting website visitors, Lead Ads are more likely to win on mobile, while Landing Pages are more likely to win on Desktop.”
The better your content offer, the more downloads people make, the better the new leads results.
Facebook multi-product ads show off multiple products in a single ad.
That works for a bunch of reasons:
- Multi-Product Ads give your customers choice.
- You pay for a single ad but you promote multiple products—bonus.
- You can show multiple benefits of a single product.
Adobe’s multi-advertiser case study showed that using multi-product ads can bring:
- Significant improvements in CTR, with an increase between 50%-300%.
- Reductions in the CPC, with costs decreasing by as much as 35% as a result of higher click engagement.
- Cost per acquisition improved by more than 250% in some cases.
But that’s just scratching the surface of the carousel-type Facebook ads. This ad type can also be used by B2B and SaaS companies or subscription services.
A report by Kinetic Social revealed that carousel ads are 10 times better at getting people to click through Facebook ads compared to static sponsored posts on Facebook.
The best carousel ads tell a consistent story throughout the slides (you can use up to 10 slides, by the way).
Keep in mind that the first image of your carousel ads makes or breaks your campaign—it needs to be so good people can’t ignore it.
If you’re in the software business or sell a product that has several steps to setup, you can use the carousel ads to walk your target audience through the process of using your product.
For example, a subscription service could have a Facebook ad explaining the entire subscription funnel, from the initial signup to the joy of opening a delivered subscription box.
If images speak a thousand words, how many words are spoken with moving images?
A lot.
People like videos because videos spoon-feed information.
There’s a crapton of evidence that using videos in your Facebook advertising strategy leads to skyrocketly improved results.
On top of better results, Kinetic Social reports that video ads have the lowest eCPC (effective cost per click) compared to other ad types, with an average eCPC of $0.18.
eCPC shows what the cost per click would have been if clicks had been purchased instead of impressions (the number of times a video is watched) or conversions.
According to Adobe, shoppers that watch videos are 1.81 times more likely to purchase than non-video viewers. That would equal an almost 85% increase in your advertising ROI.
Goes without saying that the videos you use should be high quality and relevant to your target audience.
We’ve seen a lot of Facebook video posts succeed. But a lot go south. Mainly, it’s the quality and relevance that decide whether a video will become popular or not.
For example, this video by Adidas accumulated over 11k likes:
If you’ve got a cool product you’d like to show in action, video ads are a good way to do that.
- Got a subscription service? – Cool, create a video of someone unwrapping the box to show the excitement of receiving your product.
- Selling SaaS? – Create a brief video that shows what your product looks like.
- Offering consultations? – Create a short Facebook video ad to invite people to participate in your upcoming webinar.
Once you’ve managed to get people to visit your website and spend some time on specific landing pages, it would be a waste to let them go and not send them an invitation to return.
This is where you’ll create new Facebook Custom Audiences for retargeting ads.
SaaS company Scoro ran a Facebook remarketing campaign using Facebook Custom Audiences that resulted in six times more conversions at an unchanged ad budget.
If you’re not using Facebook Custom Audiences yet, now’s a good time to start.
I recommend that you start by retargeting your landing page visitors. Here’s why:
- Landing page visitors are familiar with your brand
- They’re interested in a particular product or use case
- You can create landing page-specific offers relevant to a small audience
For example, if someone visited our conversion rate optimization-related landing page, we could set up a Facebook remarketing campaign to turn them from a lead to a client.
According to eMarketer, nearly three out of five U.S. online buyers say they notice ads about products they’ve looked up before on other sites.
If you could convince 60% of past website visitors to go back to your website and 25% of them signed up for an offer, you’d be swimming in success.
The rule of segmenting your Facebook audiences into granular groups also applies to remarketing campaigns.
- Go as specific as you can and make landing page-specific offers.
- Include an easy-to-see benefit
- Be clear about the next step you’d like a user to take, for instance, by using the “Sign Up” or “Download” call-to-action button in your ad.
Dynamic product ads are one of the highest ROI strategies e-commerce sites can use.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines retargeted their website visitors with dynamic ads. Doing that resulted in an 87% higher conversion rate than their other remarketing campaigns.
Dynamic Ads are your chance to bring back hesitant customers by showing them highly-tailored ads based on what they’re doing on your site—and this is why the Facebook Pixel is good for customers (customization).
By combining the multi-product ads with Facebook Custom Audiences, you can produce a carousel of different items a person browsed on your website—dynamic product ads.
For example, if a person looked at red dresses and accessories on Amazon, they could be retargeted with a dynamic product ad showing those exact products.
E-commerce company Nomorerack used this Facebook ad strategy and saw its CTRs (click-through rates) increase a whopping 42% while its CPA (cost per acquisition) decreased more than 40%.
To set up multi-product Facebook ads, upload your product catalogue to Facebook Business Manager.
Showing dynamic ads to people who visited your website or mobile app depends on the Facebook Pixel on your website and/or the Facebook SDK in your mobile app.
It also depends on users letting the Facebook Pixel do that, something they may not do now that Apple gives iPhoners the power to say oh hells naw, Facebook.
According to research by Adobe, 41% of overall revenue in the U.S. comes from repeat customers.
The average revenue per visit for repeat purchasers in the U.S. is 497% higher compared to regular shoppers. That’s 5x better.
A single look at this data hints that upsell campaigns are a potential goldmine.
When was the last time you ran an upsell campaign?
There’s huge untapped potential in launching a remarketing campaign on your existing customers.
One upsell strategy is targeting people based on their recent purchases and offering related items.
For example, when someone orders business cards from MOO, MOO could follow up with an offer on their notebooks as well.
Another upsell strategy revives past customer relationships by calling a product a customer bought a few months ago.
In this case, a discount offer is a great selling point—if the person liked your product, they might be interested in buying something else at a bargain.
The above ad by Teabox illustrates that upselling as a Facebook ad strategy works nicely for B2C products.
But if you’re a B2B business, you may find more success with referrals and email marketing. In fact, 84% of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral.
Up to now, the focus has been Facebook ad strategies that turn cold and warm leads into customers.
But marketers often give up after two or three tries at converting a prospect into a paying client.
What they don’t realize is that there are many small factors that get in the way of a customer making a purchase or signing up in the front end. But, maybe in six months’ time, your lead is ready to give your product a try.
That’s why you should continue to nurture your leads even if you fail to convert them right away.
Run a lead nurturing content marketing campaign every few months.
You could even create multiple highly-targeted articles or guides around specific landing page topics to make sure your campaign is relevant to various lead segments.
Keap’s Facebook ad targets small business owners as a customer segment.
Another option is to celebrate the important milestones with your customers, fans, and leads like Pipedrive did.
When setting up remarketing and lead nurturing campaigns, use Facebook Custom Audiences to reach people in your email lists, past website visitors, and other lead segments.
There are only upsides to keeping the customers who joined your team happy:
- Great customer experience differentiates you from the competition.
- Referrals and word-of-mouth are powerful marketing channels.
- It’s a leading indicator of consumer re-purchase intentions.
- There’s always room for an upsell.
- It’s cheaper to keep your current customers than acquire new ones.
So think about what would be most helpful for your customers. What would the most valuable thing you could give your customers look like? Focus on customer happiness when you’re developing your Facebook ad strategy.
This could be a guide, a premium discount offer, a new product to beta-test, or a customer survey with a nice thank-you prize.
A simple survey could notify your customers that their opinion matters to you while also giving you insight into potential problem areas.
For example, Stack Overflow’s made it a habit to conduct annual surveys about the state of the developer industry.
Create Custom Audiences of past converters and purchasers or use your email lists to set up a Facebook target audience.
Usually, companies start Facebook advertising by targeting their campaigns at a big pool of cold leads (a large cold audience).
Mostly, this is a loss for everyone. Deflating balloons.
Facebookers see lots of irrelevant ads—and this irrelevancy will be worse with the Facebook pixel flying one engine short. Irrelevant ads demolish advertising budgets and contribute to a negative campaign ROI.
Luckily, you can avoid going down that path.
Instead, you can target Facebook Lookalike Audiences that also consist of cold leads. Those leads’ profiles will look like your current customers, making them more likely to be interested in your offers.
The best Lookalike Audience strategy on Facebook is targeting people who resemble past converters and customers.
Here’s how it works:
- Create a Facebook Custom Audience of past converters.
- Set up a Lookalike Audience based on the Custom Audience you just created.
If you’ve never tried Mille Feuille, polish your advertising forks, ladies and gentlemen.
Mille Feuille is a dessert with a fancy name and a heavenly taste. In English, Mille Feuille means “a thousand layers.”
When applied to Facebook ads, the Mille Feuille method layers your audience targeting so that you’ll reach the core audience group most interested in your offer.
Let’s say you want to target your blog readers—but not all of them.
Just an intersection of them.
You only want to target the blog readers you think would be interested in your latest article about the best coffee shops in Costa Mesa, California.
At the same time, you want to exclude the people who read a similar post a couple of weeks ago.
Here’s how you do that:
- Create a Custom Audience of blog readers.
- Exclude the people who read your past article.
- Create a Saved Audience that includes the Custom Audience of your blog readers.
- Narrow down the Saved Audience by targeting only the people living near Costa Mesa, California.
- Add a layer of interests around coffee to be even more specific.
Apply the Mille Feuille targeting strategy to reach granular target audiences with highly-relevant offers. That’s especially important when working with limited budgets.
People put a lot of weight behind testimonials. That’s why social proof ads that have reviews from actual clients do well. Starred ratings next to positive remarks minimizes fear of something new.
Picking your ad format depends on your advertising objective and your advertising objective determines your ad placement. One such placement is Facebook Messenger.
Why bother to advertise here?
Because Messenger is a powerful way to reach audiences directly and interact with them. In an age where instant answers wins the prize, a direct link from your customers to you is a sure shot way to answer their questions right away and open up a channel for targeted ads.
A Messenger Ad appears as a direct message in the Messenger app. These ads show offers you think users would like along with a question. Their response tailors your next message to their interests.
The main difference between this Facebook ad and other ad types is the call-to-action. What you want your customers to do isn’t to buy something or jump to a landing page. Instead, the CTA is to start a conversation.
"What product do you like?" followed with three choices triggers a specific product offer in their thread.
You can give them what they want when you know what they want.
Building a strategy is one thing. Making your ads look good so they grab attention is another.
In this section, we'll explore the fundamentals of great facebook ads and how to publish, manage, and test them.
Go to Ads Manager
Click the Campaigns tab
Select A/B Test
Choose the variable you want to test (Audience, creative, placements, etc.).
Perform your test.
Select how long to run your test.
Further Reading: Facebook Ad Testing: The 121-Point Master Guide
Facebook supports different ad types across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, etc.
- Image
- Video
- Carousel
- Collection
When designing your creatives, test each of these formats to see which one your audience responds to most.
Do more of that ad type.
For creatives, you work on two things:
- What it looks like (format)
- Where it goes (display placement)
Play with each of these to see what your existing customers like, and reach out to new customers. Get creative with your creatives. Need help? Facebook Ads Guide.
This one isn’t complicated.
Write two versions of your ad copy.
Test which one gets more clicks.
Blammo.
CTA is short for Call to Action. That’s your button. Don’t overthink it. Come up with two different buttons and see which action called to your customer most.
Your options are limited in Facebook. This is mostly a good thing. It cuts down on creativity, but it gets you where you need to be fast.
Do you sell bar stools? Go with SHOP NOW, or GET OFFER.
Run a non-profit?. Go with DONATE NOW, CONTACT US, or LEARN MORE.
Smart tactics and catchy creatives are the basics. But picking the right bidding strategy, audience, and offer prevents overspend and negative ROI.
How your bid decides who sees your ad, how often they see it, and how much that will cost you—too much if you muck up your bid strategy.
A Facebook ads campaign must do well at the auction.
The auction barn has millions of other advertisers bidding on placements that billions of Facebook viewers will see. Fine tuning your bid strategy is just as important as nailing your ad strategy so the right people see it, love it, and click your buttons like plucky chickens peck feed on a warm summer morning.
If you don’t choose a bid strategy, this is the default. Facebook will try to get you the most results for the lowest possible CPC (cost per click). It’s a good place to start if you don’t know what to bid.
This is when you put a cap on the cost of your bids. You have more control than the lowest cost bidding strategy and you can get better placements if you’ve done your math and you know what you can spend per result. You might spend more. You might win more though too.
Share your purchase information with Facebook (in the Events Manager with the Facebook Pixel) and tell Facebook the minimum return on ad spend that will make you happy. Facebook optimizes ad delivery to Facebook users who are most likely to purchase at higher values.
Define the cap you want to spend to get your results and costs will stay low, guaranteed. That means you have to know how much those results should cost you. So some experience here helps. Use it to smoke test or with low budget campaigns.
Facebook ads weren’t a thing until 2014.
Back then, ads (and websites) were built for desktop first and mobile devices second. The big thing used to be to make sure your website themes and ads were “mobile responsive.” Fast forward seven years and we are well into the age of mobile-first design.
Facebook has multiple ad sizes based on ad placement and device.
Ads look a little different between desktop and mobile. On desktop, the headline gets more focus so you put sweat into the headline. On mobile, the main text steals more of the show, so you polish the body text.
You should upload different formats for different devices.
Here’s what else you should know about desktop and mobile ads:
Desktop ads are rectangular or square. They appear in multiple places and were the first of the Facebook ad types
Desktop image-based feed ads are 1200px wide by 628px high and are considered prime real estate. This is the ad type you will see on Facebook Marketplace, a buy and sell platform. Video-based feed ads are 600px wide x 315 pixels high (landscape) or 600px x 600px (square) and are considered essential to grab attention today.
Right column ads are smaller than feed ads and can only be image based. They don’t cost as much and they succeed when there is a clear Call to Action with a brilliant graphic.
Carousels tell a story and cost less than other ads (30-50% lower cost per conversion compared to single image ads).
They are also really cool.
Carousel ads are a type of desktop ad that shows 2 to 10 images or videos in a slider (each with its own link). Users can swipe through the product slides.
Carousel ads are used in the desktop feed, right column, Facebook marketplace, and Instant Experience (fast interactive articles on Facebook mobile app and Messenger.)
Which brings us to mobile ads.
When we still designed ads for desktop, viewing those ads on our phone the way they were supposed to look meant turning the phone sideways (landscape mode). But Facebook knows that the majority of its ads views are mobile-driven.
Mobile ads are square or vertical (taking up the full screen of a mobile phone) at a size of 1080px x 1920px.
Mobile ads can be photos or videos. For mobile, Facebook recommends a square format (which also works for Instagram) and vertical formats that fill a phone screen.
There are four main types:
- Instant Experience
- Collection Ads
- Story Ads
- Poll Ads
Instant Experience is a fullscreen experience that opens (instantly) after someone taps your ad on their phone.
A collection of products opens as an Instant Experience when someone interacts with it. Users see a product catalog lookbook (or store front) of products available for purchase from their phone.
This type of ad moves customers to the purchase stage quickly.
Story ads are a mobile-only full-screen vertical image and video format that maximizes screen real estate (when held the way a phone is supposed to be held—vertical portrait mode).
Square ads fit mobile screens. But Stories ads use more of the vertical space.
Story ads work the same way as Facebook Stories. They use a mixture of still images (that appear for 5 seconds) and short videos (that last for 15 seconds). Story ads appear between Facebook Stories.
This ad type is mobile-only. It makes voting fun in an interactive way by providing links for two poll choices on an image or video ad. Users and advertisers see the tally of poll votes.
Best practices are only best practices. There’s no guarantee they’re going to work. There’s a better chance they will work though when you do the right things.
But maybe they won’t.
Before you make a high bet and start an expensive Facebook ad campaign, test your hypotheses on a smaller scale first. Run a few experiments and A/B tests to see who the winner is.
Use the Facebook ad strategies we went over here as a guideline to develop your own strategy.
Because Facebook ad success relies on having a defined marketing strategy.
Outside of the mechanics, there’s a lot to be said about injecting emotion, urgency, and creativity into that strategy. Creativity added to primacy is its own thrill—coming up with new ideas before anyone else.
You have 21 proven tools to design a winning Facebook ad strategy.
Try them out. Set them up, execute them, test them, and see if something new works its way into your strategy over time.
Test that and refine it.
When a pattern emerges on your graphs showing what works for your company, put more money there.
And tell us about it.
