How to Run Facebook Campaigns -

Want to run Facebook Campaigns but overwhelmed? Ever looked at the options available for you within your Facebook Ads Manager?

It’s bewildering, to say the least.

Seasoned pros (me included) often struggle with the ever-changing Frankenstein that the Facebook ads platform could be.

If experienced pros could find the Facebook ads platform perplexing, ever imagined how a non-tech-savvy business owner or rookie marketers could feel?

But then, you can’t avoid Facebook at all.

The behemoth that it is, Facebook gives you the potential to reach about 2.1 billion people in the world. On top of that, you also get access to a cool million on Instagram.

Before you get anywhere near Facebook ads, you need to understand the various campaign types and objectives available to you

Read this, grab a cup of coffee, and plan your campaigns better.

Here’s what you should know before you even try to find out how to start Facebook campaigns:

Install The Facebook Pixel

Without installing the Facebook Pixel, there’s no point in trying to learn how to start Facebook campaigns.

Absolutely everything you do with Facebook beings and ends with the Facebook Pixel. Don’t even proceed without getting this part right.

So, let’s start with the basics:

Facebook provides you with a two-part javascript code that you’d need to install on your website.

The Facebook Pixel is a Javascript code that comes in two parts:

A generic part of the pixel should go on every page of your website.
The event code that should show up right below the base pixel on pages that only show up when certain actions are taken — such as when a lead signs up, or when a product sale happens. More often than not, these are “.thankyou.html” pages. The exact URLs of your destination pages really depends on the platforms you use.

Watch this video to find out how to add your Facebook Pixel properly:

Think Strategic: Ask Yourself The Right Questions

If starting Facebook campaigns was easy enough, everyone would profit from it. But the truth is that not everyone gets it right. The reason? You are not being strategic enough about your Facebook Campaigns. You are thinking “How to Start Facebook Campaigns” instead of thinking “Why Should My Potential Customer Care?”

Before you go anywhere near your Facebook ad campaigns, you’d have to sit down and think about a few things:

Given your market (and your competition), where does your business stand in terms of reach and branding?
At the moment, what’s your digital marketing setup like? What do you do now to get traffic to your website?
Why should your customers consider your business or buy from you? What’s your USP?
What are you selling, at what price, and what’s your profit margin on each sale?
Will your customers place orders on your website or do they make transactions offline, or a mix of both?
Without even considering Facebook Ads (or Google Ads), what’s the marketing flow like? How does it all work?
If you do put up Facebook ads, what’s the offer you are willing to make? Will you make some free offers? Give something away? Deliver a coupon for your e-commerce store?
What are the exact campaign types you’ll start with?
What is your marketing setup like? What are the various tools you’ll use to make it all work for you? In short, what does your marketing stack look like?

Landing Pages: How To Use Them (& When Do You Not Need Them)

Don’t waste time chasing designers and developers to get your landing pages built. Just use Unbounce or Leadpages. That’s it. The discussion ends here.

For certain Facebook Ad campaign types, there might not be a need to use landing pages at all. Facebook Lead Ad Campaigns, for instance, will make use of Instant forms triggered by regular-looking image or video ads.

You don’t really need landing pages when you use Facebook Lead ads since the Instant forms will work like landing pages and they’ll imitate the functionality of a landing page.

You also don’t need landing pages when you create Facebook Instant Experiences (but it won’t hurt to still use landing pages, just in case). When you use Facebook Collections (mostly for your e-commerce stores), you’ll make use of the “e-commerce landing page” like native Facebook experience to send traffic straight to your e-commerce store.

With the exception of Facebook Lead Ads, you’ll need landing pages for every other type of Facebook ad campaign.

Read More:

Do You Need e-commerce Landing Pages?

Importance of Landing Pages: Why Even Bother?

Start With A Proper Sales Funnel

Starting with the pixel (above) and your landing pages (unless you are using Facebook Lead Ads), you’ll need a proper sales funnel or a lead generation funnel (depending on your objectives).

For Facebook advertising objectives such as traffic, reach, and branding, you’ll need to optimize your landing pages and/or websites to do proper justice for those campaign objectives.

If you are using Facebook lead ad campaigns, be sure to have a strong offer, a compelling call-to-action, and a well-designed Instant form.

The rest of the campaigns (especially the conversion objective) you’ll need a proper funnel consisting of one of many landing pages, an ability to sync your leads to your CRM, an email marketing automation system, and a robust way to nurture your leads (done with email marketing).

7 Stunning Examples of Sales Funnels That Work

Embrace Email Marketing Automation

When you run Facebook ad campaigns, your primary motive isn’t to “sell stuff”. You are basically running Facebook ad campaigns because you want to generate leads (lead gen ads), bring more people to your website (reach & traffic), drive more people to your store (or offline location), or have people sign up for your offers off Facebook (on a landing page usually, using conversions objective).

Regardless of which campaign type you use for Facebook and how you generate leads, it’s email marketing as a channel that actually contributes to your sales. It’s the emails that’ll finally push your regular subscribers into customers.

Since you can’t be manually sending emails out each time someone signs up, you’ll need email marketing automation. You can easily accomplish this by using popular email marketing providers such as Drip.

Email List? Screw That. Build an Email Marketing Strategy That You Are Proud Of

Understand How Facebook Campaigns Work

Let’s say you choose a special audience to target, targeting the United States. Assume that you were running a Facebook Lead ad campaign. “Leads” will be the final result on Facebook.

It goes without saying that you are paying for impressions or that you’ve chosen a particular target amount per lead acquired.

The moment you launch your campaign, Facebook gets into “learning” mode for your campaign. It tries to determine exactly what you are trying to achieve and tries to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to figure out who should be the right people to see (or act) on your ad.

As such, Facebook needs at least 50 conversion events (could be landing page views, leads, sales, viewcontent, pageviews, button clicks, etc. — whatever it was that you choose as a conversion event).

Facebook will need your conversion event to fire at least 50 times before it knows what to do with your campaigns.

Guess what? Most people end their campaigns even before they get a single conversion of any kind. They don’t let Facebook learn about their own objectives. Facebook doesn’t even get a chance in most cases (assuming you did everything right).

So, once you launch your campaigns, stick on (and avoid doing any major edits) until you reach about 50 conversion events.