Most people do not know how to develop their Facebook ads strategy.
They have heard about a few tactics and they try some of those tactics and often don’t have good luck.
You need a system of testing your Facebook ads strategy as well as a way to measure what is working.
But before all of that, you need to set your “key performance indicator” or KPI for your Facebook ad campaign.
The KPI is going to be different for different types of businesses and for different stages of the sales cycle.
In this article, you’ll learn how to choose your KPI and the five steps that ANY business can use to create a Facebook ads strategy.
Set Your Measurable Facebook Ad Campaign Goal
Not everyone wants sales from their Facebook ads (but I know a lot of people do).
Your business may run differently, maybe you want brand awareness or specific awareness around one piece of content.
Or maybe your business is all about getting traffic to your website where you have ads.
Here are just a few of the goals people have with running Facebook ads:
- Brand awareness
- Engagement
- New fans
- Leads
- Sales
- New donors for their non-profit
- Affiliates/Partners
- Event attendance
- Traffic to website
- In-store traffic
- Video views
- Reviews
- New members into their community
There are a lot of options and your business model may be complicated.
You may want to map out the customer journey as to how someone comes to do business with you and give you money.
For example, a blogger may be looking for bigger awareness with potential advertisers or sponsors so they decide to run a video ad to get a lot of visible engagement with their blog.
The actual sale due to the Facebook ad can be hard to pinpoint or measure but we can measure engagement.
The point is, you know better than anyone what types of activities drive the progression to money for your business.
Facebook doesn’t always work well for straight sales.
You target people based on their interests and behaviors and you can’t target people based on the fact that they are searching for your product right now like you can with Google ads.
So sometimes it’s better to lead people who are on Facebook to a step that happens before they buy.
Warm them up a little with your information and content before asking for the sale.
People need a little romancing.
You may have different goals for different parts of your sales cycle.
One thing that I know in my business is that when I get more email subscribers, I get more sales later.
They don’t always buy something right away but I can connect with them through good content and they buy six months or a year later.
Set-up Your Tracking Methods
The biggest part of the success of your Facebook ads strategy is being able to measure it so that you know what’s working.
If you want leads or sales, you can measure sales directly from Facebook ads if the lead or sale happens on your website (with the help of the Facebook pixel).
If you want sales and the sale happens offline (either at your location or with someone calling you for example), then you will have to determine how you will track that.
- You could ask people if they saw your ad but that doesn’t always work.
- You can set up “Offline Event” tracking on Facebook with your point of sale system in your store but that is a little more complex.
- Or you could have a coupon code that you only use for your Facebook ad.
- If the sale for your product happens on another website, Amazon for example, then that is not easy to track because you typically can’t install the Facebook tracking pixel on other websites.
If you don’t have a way to measure your success, then you need to choose a KPI you can measure.
Match Your Goal to a KPI and Ad Objective
If you want leads or sales, you could set up a conversion ad using the Facebook pixel on your website to measure.
For Leads, you can set up a Lead Generation ad so you don’t need to send people off of Facebook.
Make sure you understand the difference between a lead generation ad and a conversion ad.
Most businesses will probably focus on traffic, conversions, or lead generation as an ad objective.
Split Test Your Facebook Ads
The next step in your Facebook ad strategy is to develop a campaign plan where you will test different keywords, different images, and different text in the ads.
I suggest testing your keywords first and then testing images.
Group your keywords into similar segments rather than stuffing every conceivable keyword into your ad set.
In a perfect world, you might test each keyword individually but that requires bigger budgets.
Measure and Tweak Your Facebook Ads Strategy
Your next step is to watch your KPI and turn off the ads that aren’t performing as well.
So for example, if you are driving traffic and optimizing around link clicks, you watch the ads that give you the best link click cost.
Or if you are optimizing around conversions, you will be able to easily see which image is performing better in your ad reports and then turn off the one that isn’t converting as well.
Building From Here
Having a Facebook ads strategy is key to your success.
There is no one size all approach to which types of ads work because different industries and business models can have different results.
So it’s important to test what works for YOU!
Want to go further with your Facebook ads?
I am launching a brand new Facebook Ads Funnel Accelerator, which will help you do all of this and more.
Apply for the 10-12 week small group accelerator here.
(A version of this article was originally published on AndreaVahl.com)
