Too many times I have encountered shaky social media campaigns that ended up doing more harm than good. This is why I thought it would be a good idea for Ludis to develop a handy checklist that will enable you to effectively monitor your Facebook campaign.
So without further ado, here is the list!
Prepare your banners
The number of different banners you will need will depend on how many campaigns and tests you plan on conducting. There are two things you need to keep in mind when producing your banners.
First, you are limited to a maximum of 20% text in the image. Keep that in mind, because if your strategist or designer gets carried away with text, you will have an issue!
Secondly, we encourage you to choose an image size of 1200 px x 627 px. This best suits pretty much all advertising scenarios on Facebook. It will be big enough for advertising in news feeds as well as for side ads.
Create a headline, descriptive text, and call to action
While this one is pretty obvious, many advertisers neglect this, and when they are about to launch a campaign, they realize that the information has not been validated by the client. This ends up delaying the go-live aspect of the campaign.
Keep in mind you are allowed only 25 characters for the headline and 90 for the description and CTA. Use them wisely. 😉
Choose the type of Facebook ads
Facebook offers you various types of ads to select from:
- Clicks to website
- Website conversions
- Page post engagement
- Page likes
- App Installs
- App Engagement
- Event Responses
- Offer Claims
Make sure you choose wisely. I’ve had much success with the Page Post Engagement. As stated before, put a lot of thought into your choice. I have found that when selecting “Clicks to website” for example, I had very few impressions from the news feed and the majority were from side ads…
Choose your ads placement
Depending on your campaign strategy, you might want your ads to be accessible through desktop, mobile and from the side bar. For example, if your website is not in responsive design, you might want to restrict the mobile user from having access to your ads.
Selecting your persona
Who are your ads catered to? You are selling a product or service that serves a particular type of person… Make sure you target those individuals first! Many marketers advertise too broadly and end up reaching people who are simply not interested in your product or service. This generates unqualified clicks on your ads and takes money right out of your marketing budget.
Facebook enables you to select your audience by location, age, gender, language, interest, behaviour, and other traits. Make use of your selection criteria. If your approach is too narrow, you might not receive enough impressions. On the other hand, if you have too many impressions you run the risk of not reaching the right people.
Setting up your campaign parameters
The first thing you should do is name your campaign. This step might seem simple, but if you don’t name your campaign according to a specific structure you will quickly end up in a nightmare of confusion. Facebook’s Ads Manager is not very intuitive so you want all the odds to be in your favour. Come up with a working structure for your various ads, this will make your reporting MUCH easier.
Then all you need to do is enter your budget and schedule information and you’re all set for your campaign parameters.
Defining the type of bidding strategy
This next step is very important. At this stage, if you don’t invest enough money you risk missing impressions but, on the other hand, you don’t want to pay too much.
Facebook enables you to optimize for clicks or for impressions. The option you choose will depend on your campaign vision and the type of ads you selected.
Facebook offers automatic or manual selection for both types of bidding. I highly recommend manual bidding. I like to have control over my spending and the idea of Facebook making decisions and charging my client’s credit card is not appealing to me!
Share access to the account to your managers
This step will save you a considerable amount of time. By giving your managers access, they can go take a quick look whenever they want. This reduces the number of e-mail communications needed.
Keep in mind that there is a maximum of 25 people per account. Choose wisely. Make sure that you ask for the client’s permission as you share that limit.
Monitoring your campaign
You did it! Your client’s campaign is online. Now you have to make sure that everything is running smoothly. You can set up various notifications and ensure that no one else is making changes to your campaign.
Evaluate your campaign performances
When your campaign is over, take the time to evaluate its performance. Which elements performed well and which ones did not? Make sure to keep records on the performance of previous campaigns – they will quickly become a great asset for your company.
I hope you find this list of elements to look for when managing Facebook ads useful and that it will help you generate qualified leads!
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us.
Thank you!
Gab
Latest posts by Gabriel Touchette
- 5 myths about inbound marketing - 9 September 2014
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