One of the most common questions that all I get inside my Facebook group is
how do I start a Facebook ad campaign from scratch and get good results?
That's what I'm going to cover in today's video in 10 minutes or less.
So let's get into it.
Hey, I'm Rod.
I'm the founder of Rod Bland Agency.
We help people create, manage, optimize, and do better with Facebook and Instagram
advertising, and in today's video, I'm going to show the exact formula that
we use for our e-commerce clients, whether they're small clients that are
only spending a hundred dollars a day or larger ones that are spending $700 a
day, we use this same formula regardless.
So I'm going to take you through everything that you need to do from
the way the campaign's structured, the ad sets, the targeting, the
ads, the creative, the whole shebang in less than 10 minutes.
Now, before you get carried away thinking that I'm about to impart
to you a formula which is guaranteed to give you successful ads no matter
what, there's a couple of caveats.
The first one is that you are actually making sales through your website.
If you plan to make your first sale using an ad, I really recommend against that.
If you can make sales through organic means first, then at least it will
prove that your product is viable.
Secondly, if your website conversion rate is something less than 1.5%,
then it's going to be very hard for you to run ads profitably.
I'm not saying it's going to be impossible, but in my experience the lower
that your conversion rate is for your website, the more that you've got to spend
on ads to be able to generate a sale.
The third thing is you already need to have a Facebook business manager set up.
You need to have an ad account set up.
If you haven't got any of those things ready, then there'll be some
links to videos in the description where you can learn how to do that.
So let's jump on the computer and get started.
So the page I'm on here is ad manager for one of our clients, and this uses
the exact same structure and set up that I'm going to explain to you now,
and you can see over the maximum time period from April 28th of last year,
we've had a return on ad spend of 5.22, about a $25 cost per purchase.
If you look at the last 30 days, that's 4.78 or $28.
If you look at the last 14 days, return on ad spend 7.48, $18 cost per purchase.
It's been a consistently performing campaign, we have rotated in
different creative as time has gone along, but essentially the
structure that we initially set up is still working eight months later.
There's a couple of other infrastructure items that you want to make sure
that you've taken care of, which is installing the Facebook pixel on your
website, configuring the conversions API.
Make sure that the domain is verified, and make sure that you
have your web events configured.
I have videos that explain how to do all of those things, and there'll be a
link to those in the video description.
So let's move on to audiences.
The best audiences still today in my experience are those that are a lookalike
that is based on your previous customers.
And the larger that that source audience is, the better that the lookalike
audience is that Facebook can create.
Where people sometimes run into trouble is that their source audience doesn't
have very many people in it, like less than a hundred, and that can mean
that the lookalike audience isn't as effective as an interest based audience.
There's a couple of things I always like to do when it comes to
creating a custom audience that's based on previous purchasers.
You can create an audience that's based on the pixel.
So if you go and create custom audience, and then you say website.
Then you can use a pixel and you could say last 180 days and you can choose purchase.
So if you've already had the pixel installed for awhile, you
should already have this event logged in your Facebook pixel.
So you can create an audience that's based on that.
So we can say purchases from pixel 180 days.
So that's one way for us to create a custom audience consisting of previous
purchasers, which is fine, but it will only ever go back 180 days.
What I find is better is download them from say Shopify, or if your email
management system is Klaviyo, then you can simply create a segment of people who have
placed an order and then synchronize that audience to your Facebook custom audience.
From that, we then want to create a lookalike audience.
I'm not gonna explain how to do that here, because I've got other videos that
explain how to do that, but I usually then make a 3% and a 5% look alike audience.
So as you can see here I have made a lookalike audience of just people
from Australia, 3% of the population.
That ends up being about half a million.
5% ends up being a million.
So that prepares a lookalike audience and also a custom audience consisting
of all your previous purchasers.
There's a couple of other audiences that I also set up for retargeting.
That is website visitors, 180 days, Instagram engagers from the last
365 days, and Facebook page and Ad engagers from the last 365 days.
That is all the custom audiences that you need to get started.
If you don't have any data on your pixel or you haven't made any sales, you really
need to make sure that you can make sales without ads first, before you started
doing this, then you could use audience interests and how to create a custom
audience based on interests is something that I'll cover in another video.
So once you've set up your custom audiences, the next
thing is to prepare your ads.
Now, if you don't know where to start with creating an ad, the best
thing to do is to model someone else's that's been successful.
And the best tool that I've found to find ads that have worked previously,
apart from the ad library itself, is this tool here, which is called Advertsuite.
I'll put a link to this in the description.
It's not very expensive and it's a lifetime license.
I use this tool all the time.
Totally worth the money.
The link that I put in the description might actually be an affiliate link, but
I do use it all the time and appreciate if you do actually purchase it that way.
Let's say I'm looking for ads about wedding cakes.
The search mode up here is going to be keywords.
Keyword type is ad text.
I'll put in wedding cake, and then I'm going to sort by likes.
Then you just click on search ads.
What that gives you is the most popular ads at the top.
See this ad 59,000 likes 405 comments, 2500 shares.
So that was a pretty popular ad and they obviously spent a lot of money on it.
Chances are that might be one you can model.
Let's see if we can still look up the original ad.
So in my view, they do a lot of things wrong especially with the copy.
That's just a wall of text there.
However, I think what it illustrates is that a good piece of creative is
probably the most important part of the ad when it comes to wedding cakes.
Now I want to move on to how to set up and structure the campaign
within the Facebook ads manager.
Once you're in ads manager.
If you're not already there, just click on the little hamburger icon, click on
ads manager, click on create, and we're going to create a conversions campaign.
In the name of the campaign, I always put my initials, conversions,
CBO, because it's campaign budget optimization, and the date.
In the adset I use this naming convention.
So P is for prospecting.
C is for custom audience.
Lookalike, AU 3% Klaviyo placed order.
So I can identify the targeting that's been used to create
this particular ad set.
Then I have the date once again.
Then for ad name, I use this naming convention.
OP is for original post.
Image number one, and put the headline in there.
Since we're going to be using the example of cakes, the headline is going to be
'Almost too good to eat' and then the date, and then we click on continue.
Moving on down the page pretty rapidly.
The campaign objective is conversions.
You don't need to add anything else to the options there.
We're not doing an AB test.
We're going to turn on campaign budget optimization and in your daily budget,
my suggestion is that you work on the rule of thumb of $35 per ad per day.
So if you've got a budget of anything up to $35 then I
wouldn't run any more than one ad.
If you've got a budget of say a hundred dollars, then you might
want to test three different ads.
So let's just put in 35 and then in the options here, the campaign
bid strategy, lowest cost is fine.
Click on next.
This is in my agency demonstration account so I don't have some of
the conversion events set up here.
But I'm going to use the inactive events anyway.
So the conversion event that we want to optimize for is going to be purchase.
The conversion event location is going to be the website.
If you have this message, which says, verify pixel, you need to go and fix
that if you've got an eCommerce store.
Because this is the demo account, that's why it's not actually configured.
In the custom audiences section, I just type in look for
lookalike, there it is there.
Location is defaulted to Australia for me.
I'm not going to put in any additional detailed targeting, I'm
going to leave automatic placements.
Optimization and delivery, I'm going to be optimizing for conversions.
In the attribution setting, we've got 7 days after clicking 1 day after viewing,
and when we get charged, impressions.
All of those we're going to leave as the defaults.
Then we click on next.
Now we're onto the ad section.
So we've got an ad name.
This is where you want to connect your Facebook page and your
Instagram account, if you have one.
In the ad set up, we're going to go with create ad.
Now I'm going to show you how to create the image ad.
I would suggest if you have additional budget that you create an image
ad, a carousel ad, and a video ad.
For more information about how you create those formats.
I actually have a PDF, which I'm going to put in the video description
below, which you can download.
It has all the details about how you set those ads up, but for now, I'm
just going to create the image ad only so you can see how it's done.
I'm going to turn off dynamic formats and creative, choosing
a single image or video.
It will automatically select a catalog so I'm just going to get rid
of that so I can add my media in.
I've got a cake image that I've already added here previously.
So I'm going to select that then we go next.
Now, as far as the format of the images go square is the safest
option, ideally 1080x1080 pixels.
We're going to leave these all at the original format.
Click on done.
Then we've got our primary text.
So we'll put in a primary text of celebrate that special occasion
with a delicious chocolate mud cake.
Order yours online today.
I also always like to include some emojis in the primary text.
The best place for emojis is this one, emojipedia.
So let's just see if there's a cake emoji.
Got one that's pretty close.
There's a birthday cake.
We'll put that in at the start of the primary text.
We're going to use a headline of almost too good to eat, and in the description,
we'll put in order online today.
The call to action, we've got Shop now, and the website you want to
make sure that your URL is there.
In the display link, because the website URL has to have the HTTPS in front of
it, you could just put just the URL only without that as the display link.
In the tracking you want to make sure that your pixel is selected there.
So you can see, I haven't used any different ad creative
for the different placements.
If you use a square piece of creative, it is going to work in any
placement when it comes to image ads.
In Instagram stories and other placements, they will add in some additional
color because it is a tall format.
You are then ready to hit the publish button.
So this video doesn't end up being too long, I'm going to finish things up there.
So this will give you an ad campaign that has a cold audience in it.
You can also create another ad set, which has got your warm audiences in it.
And that's it.
Hopefully I've been able to edit this down under 10 minutes.
I hope it answers the question of how you can get started from
scratch with a Facebook ad.
That particular format I've used with many e-commerce clients.
And as long as the conversion rate is good, it always produces consistently
good results, and it doesn't require a whole lot of fiddling.
So once you get your ad set up, don't change anything for seven days, let data
accumulate, and then act after that.
That's all for this video.
If you've found this content useful, please click like and subscribe.
I really appreciate that, and I'll see you in the next one.