The SEM Marketer's Guide to Facebook Ads

I initially just wanted to take some notes for myself as I go through a refresher for Facebook’s ad platform.

But then I thought, why not create some learning exhaust around it and share it with the world?

This assumes familiarity with how Google Ads work so I won’t go into too much details on the things that are similar on both ad platforms.

Let’s dive in!

Campaign Structure for Facebook

The structure for Facebook ads follows the Campaign > Ad Set > Ad hierarchy

At the campaign level, you can control the following:

• Objective (covered in detail later but this is basically what you want to achieve with your campaign)
• Campaign Budget Optimization: When turned on, it lets Facebook decide which ad set gets the budget depending on whether it will drive the most results for your objective. Here’s an illustrated explanation of how it works.

An adset is basically, like the name suggests, a bunch of ads grouped together as a set. You can have multiple adsets within a campaign. At the adset level, you can control:

• Audience (we’ll go into more details below)

• Placements (where your ads show up)

  • Types of placements
  • Devices
  • OS and version

• Budget

  • Delivery option (Standard or Accelerated)

At the ad level, you can control:

• Text
• Headline
• URL
• Conversion Tracking

Things to consider when you set up a campaign:

• Are your adset targeting options overlapping with each other?
• Objectives: If you’re after conversions, it might be useful to choose a Traffic objective first to let the Facebook pixel gather enough data and then use the Conversions objective after. There are some differing opinions.
• Potentially separating out adsets by placements depending on your objectives. Some placements don’t work very well with certain objectives. This article goes indepth about this.

Types of Facebook Ads Objective

Facebook has 11 different types of campaign objectives depending on what your advertising goals are and these objectives will determine what kind of campaigns you create. They are broadly grouped into 3 different categories:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Conversion

Audience

Targeting options are where Facebook ads set itself apart from other advertising platforms.

There are a ton of options available because people usually fill up these information since Facebook is a social network. Because of this, they have so much more data points at their disposal to create these targeting options.

Let’s go through them:

• Custom Audiences

  • Like Google’s Customer Match feature, you can upload a list of your existing customer database and create a set of audience that you are able to target or exclude.
  • You can also create audience list from users who have engaged with your page, lead forms, videos and your website (needs FB pxiel implementation)
  • Here’s an overall view of the kind of audiences you can create

• Lookalike Audiences

  • Similar to Google Ads’ Similar Audiences, you can create an audience list of new users that are similar to your existing customers
  • What’s different here is you can adjust the lookalike audience size (from 1-10% of the source audience size) However, the bigger the audience size, the less similar it will be to your source audience so there is some degree of testing that could be done here to find the optimal size
  • You can also create LTV (Lifetime Value) lookalike audiences if you upload your own customer list with LTV information. But since this presumably depends on other advertisers’ LTV information, I would be wary of using this feature due to accuracy concerns.

• Location

  • Like Google Ads, you are able to include and exclude locations either by name or by radius around a coordinate. What’s slightly different here is that you are able to further segment by people who are travelling, living or whose home are in a location.
• Gender
• Age
• Languages

• Demographic

  • Since Facebook has lots of data on a particular user, we are able to target really specifically here. There are simply too many to list but examples include Life events (anniversary, birthdays ane even users whose close friends’ birthdays are coming up), whether they are parents and even how old their child is!

• Interest

  • There are lots of interest types here. Not hard to guess this is a proxy to the type of pages a user might have liked. Not that different from Google Ads’ topic based targeting.

• Behaviour

  • These can be described as activities/traits associated with a user. So you get options like operating system. primary email domain, ethnicity and even Facebook’s own marketing API users! I guess it’s all really a matter of whether they want to dip into their database to create a group of users that advertisers can target.

• Connections

  • This allows you to include/exclude people and friends of people who are connected to your page, app or event in some way.

Bidding Options

Overview

Depending on what type of campaigns you create, there are slightly different bidding options. 

For example Brand Awareness campaigns don’t even have bidding options. Facebook doesn’t let you control bids but will seek to maximize the campaign objective within the budget.

Other campaigns allow you to set a Bid cap per auction or a Cost cap per action (Link Click, Landing Page View, Post Engagement etc.)

Bid and Cost caps

Cost cap: Ensures that on average you don’t spend above a capped amount per action

Bid cap: Ensures you don’t bid above a certain amount per bid in auction

In general, I think it’s best to set a cost cap instead of a bid cap since there is a range of cost per actions available. Letting the algorithm do its work will let you get the maximum number of actions within the target cost cap.

The Facebook Auction System

Like Google Ads, Facebook ads have their own version of the Ad Rank score. According to Blueprint, the formula goes like this: [Advertiser Bid] x [Estimated Action Rates] + [User Value]

User Value is determined by the following factors:

• Ad quality panel: Users surveyed on whether they like the ad
• Post click experience: Page load speed, quality of content on the page etc
• Predicted engagement: Expected action rate on the ad
• Repeitition: The more a user is exposed to the same ad, the lower the value

Whereas in their help centre article, they are saying something slightly different, That is, to win the ad auction, you need to depend on Bid, Estimated action rates and Ad quality **and that together “estimated action rates” and “ad quality” measure **ad relevance.

To help advertisers improve ad relevance, they have kindly included a feature called Ad Relevance Diagnostics that tells you what you need to improve on to bring up that score.

One interesting tidbit:

Since advertisers can have multiple ways of bidding (CPM, CPC, Cost per Conversion etc), it’s all converted to an eCPM when calculating the score above.

Optimization Levers

Bidding

What should you optimize your ad delivery on and what kind of cost control should you use?

Creatives

This is kind of obvious but seeing as Facebook users are innudated by so many images and text, this is probably the biggest lever that will impact campaign performance

Placements

A user on Instagram compared to someone on the Audience Network would probably be in a very different state of mind. Definitely worth seeing which placements make sense for your campaign

Audience

Goes without saying, tailoring the right creatives to the appropirate audience would have a major impact on performance

Testing

Facebook ads allow you to do split tests similar to Drafts and Experiments in Google Ads. You will also get a report with the test results once the test is complete. Basically the tests are run at the ad set level, i.e. you have a control ad set and a test ad set.

You can find a step by step guide here.

But wait there’s more! Facebook has this  Test and Learn section in ads manager where there are a few more kinds of test you can run.

What’s of particular interest is the ability to run Conversion Lift tests, which lets you measure the incremental effectiveness of running Facebook ads, something you’re not currently able to run natively on Google Ads.

Useful links

Facebook for Business: https://www.facebook.com/business/

All encompassing resource from help articles to case studies on how other businesses are using the Facebook ads platform.

Facebook Blueprint: https://www.facebookblueprint.com/student/catalog

A learning platform for all things related to Facebook ads. I found some of the content here to be outdated so you might need to double-check what you find here. But still good for foundational knowledge and also essential if you want to take the Blueprint certification.

Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel is is more than just a conversion pixel. It allows you to create custom audiences and can capture multiple events that are triggered by users on your website. Really useful and should definitely be installed before you start running any traffic if you’re planning to run any kind of performance driven ads.