We’re going to look at how we set up Facebook adverts the right way, both for customers and yourself.
Have you ever felt that building Facebook adverts is a little…foggy? Like you’re building your adverts in the dark and guessing most of the options?
Advertising copy, images, headlines, audience interests. Sure, we could argue that we’re “testing” when we create adverts. But testing against what?
Let’s say I create an advert and select 15 different interests in my audience. I know all the things they like, so I’ll put them all in.
- Why are my advertising costs so expensive and my costs per click so high?
- What should I edit if I want to test again? What copy or image should I change?
There’s a huge misconception that the majority of your time should be spent on the creative, copy and image side of Facebook advertising.
The idea is that we’re creating an advert, therefor we need to create compelling copy, choose a nice image and decide between video or galleries.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t focus on the right copy and image. But all of that won’t mean a damn thing unless you get your audience right.
The Super Bowl fallacy
The Super Bowl is watched by billions of people worldwide. Companies pay MILLIONS of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Why do they pay so much? Because the know billions of people will be watching. It sounds obvious, but companies are competing to get in front of that many people. So prices for advertising time go up, as there are only so many seconds of advertising time available.
As advertising time is a finite resource, it essentially becomes a bidding war. In 2016, a 30 second advert during the Super Bowl cost $5 million.
That’s $166 000 per second.
Here’s where most people go wrong during their Facebook adverts. They treat their audience selection like the Super Bowl.
Let’s say I want to put a surfing product in front an audience. Inside Facebook adverts, I’ll set the location and then start to input all the interests.
Logic and common sense would tell you to target multiple interests, use the suggested interests and enter lots of interests, just to be safe.
Most of which, is guesswork
What we’re building here is a Super Bowl audience. We’re focusing on massive audience numbers that everyone else is competing for.
When we select lots of interests that we “think” and guess (let’s be honest) our potential customers and audience are interested in, we’re building a Super Bowl audience.
That audience is so massive and so obvious that anyone and everyone will be competing to use it too. So therefor, your cost per click and advertising costs go up.
Another reason your advertising costs go up, is because it’s harder to test multiple interests in an audience.
Let’s say you put an advert out and split test a few different images and headlines. But they all use the same audience, with multiple interests.
If one advert works, WHY did it work? Did it resonate with one interest and not another?
The final reason it pushes advertising costs up, is that audiences that are too broad tend to have lower engagement. There’s too much to target and therefor Facebook doesn’t really know who and what to target.
Instead, you need to create audiences with just one interest at a time. Bearing in mind that your audience’s interests could and will change over time.
I’ve spoken before about how we set up our Facebook audiences using “interests” and focusing on just one interest at a time here.
When we run our adverts, we like to run 30 different audiences at a time. Each one with an individual interest and test the costs per click, conversion rates and cost per lead.
Action plan
- Use the audience insight tool and this blog post to list out 30 interests that you can target on Facebook
- Plan you maths and advertising spend around your cost per customer NOT your cost per click (click here to read more)
- Use our Facebook Adverts Checklist to write up your 30 interests, their audience size and create the best audiences to test
Let me know if this funnel tactic was useful, insightful or if you want to know more in the comments below. What funnel tactics do you use in your Facebook advertising? Let me know in the comments.
