Tools to Advertise on Facebook

Before we go into building actual ad campaigns later, let's first explore what
tools you will use to build those ads. Facebook has two major tools you can use to
create your ad campaigns. The first tool allows you to create ads from your
business page using the promote button. The second tool is known as Ads Manager,
which can be used on your smartphone through the Ads Manager app, or through the
web on your desktop computer. For reference, the web version of Ads manager has the
most capabilities of all the ad creation tools. We'll briefly walk you through
each. Advertising from a business page is the simplest way to create a Facebook
ads, and it's also a great way to learn the basics of Facebook advertising.
Creating an ad from your page is a three-step process. First, you click that
promote button at the bottom left corner of your Facebook business page, then you
will choose a goal that aligns best with a goal for your ad, and the available
goals include; promoting your page, getting more website visitors, getting more
leads, promoting a call to action button, or boosting a post. Once you've selected
the goal that is right for you, you'll be asked to provide your creative, copy, a
call to action button, and the URL of your landing page. Then you specify your
target audience and set the budget and duration for your promotion. Finally, you
hit 'Promote Now', and you've created an ad from your Facebook business page. The
second Facebook advertising tool is Ads Manager. We won't focus on the Ads Manager
mobile app as much as the desktop version in this course, but we'll outline some of
its key features for you. The Facebook ads manager mobile app lets you create ad
campaigns on your phone, manage campaigns you've created from your business page or
using the web version of ads manager, see your campaign results and demographic
data from your phone, and manage campaigns from multiple business pages on a single
screen. The Facebook ads manager mobile app is particularly good for when you need
to add a Campaigns and ads on the go, and it's available on both Android and iOS.
Now, let's look at the web version of ads manager that you can access through your
desktop computer. Creating an ad campaign with Facebook, Ads Manager is similar to
creating one from a business page, but Ads Manager has much more powerful targeting
tools and features, so it's a longer process instead. Facebook Ads manager benefits
include being able to create and manage all of your campaigns in one place, being
able to choose from all goals, also known as add or campaign objectives, as well as
different creative options and placement availability. Being able to save ads as
drafts to edit and publish later, and being able to use all Facebook's advanced
tools, including creating and using the Facebook Pixel, building Advanced audience
targeting and others. We'll teach you more about these in the coming lessons. To
access the desktop version of ads manager, go to facebook.com/ads/manage, so now
let's have a first look at the process of setting up a campaign on Facebook Ads
manager. We'll dive into the specifics of each step in later videos. This is what
you campaign overview screen on Facebook Ads manager will look like. To create an
ad campaign, click the Create button, and then select one of the campaign
objectives that are displayed here. These are more detailed versions of the goals
that we saw earlier when creating a promotion from your business page. Depending on
the objective you choose, you may be asked to choose where you want to drive your
traffic to; your website, app, messenger, or WhatsApp. After that, Facebook will
prompt you to select your audience. You can define your audience by age, gender,
location, interests and more. We'll also set your ad budget and set up the schedule
for your ad. Then Facebook will ask you how and where you want your ads to appear
to people, also known as the ad placements. You can place your ads across any of
the available placements, including on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and The
Audience Network. We'll talk more about it in a future lesson. Then similar to the
advertising tool on your business page, you choose how you want the app to look.
You can use one of multiple creative formats; Carousel, single image, single video,
slideshow, or collection, which combines images and videos. You can also choose to
add an instant experience, which is a fast loading and mobile optimized experience
that viewers can interact with. Finally, you place your order and pay. Facebook
then checks the ad against its advertising policies, and if it meets those
criteria, it runs. Congrats, you've created an ad with Facebook Ads Manager. In
this video, we've covered creating Facebook ads with pages and how to use ads
Manager on both desktop and through the mobile app.

Ad placements

As we discussed in the last video, defining your ad placement is choosing where

your ads will appear to your audience and how they will look. Your ad placement
determines whether your ads appear on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and
or the Audience Network, as well as how they look on each platform. For example,
you could choose to have your ads appear in Facebook and Instagram's newsfeed and
stories, but not on Messenger or WhatsApp and there are a lot of options to choose
from. We're going to break down how it works in this video. If you choose the ad
managers automatic placement option, Facebook will allocate your budget across
multiple placements based on where they're likely to perform best. We recommend
using automatic placement most of the time, so Facebook can make the most of your
ad budget and you can get the best results possible. When using automatic
placements, Facebook also provides brand safety features if there's certain apps or
services you don't want your ads on, as well as creative customization options, if
you want to show different creatives on different platforms. If you do decide you
need full control over your placements, the option is also available to you by
selecting Manual placements. We'll go over the current placements now. Facebook's
major ad placement types are feeds, stories, in-stream, search, messages, in-
article and apps. Let's break them down one by one, and let's start with feeds.
When your ads are placed in feed, that means that they appear to people scrolling
through their inbox, desktop or mobile feeds on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
There are seven different feed placements. The first feed placement is Facebook
news feed placement, which is probably the type you're most familiar with. This is
when an ad appears in between posts from your friends and pages you follow. The
second feed placement is Instagram ad, which is when you are ad appears in between
the posts of people and businesses that you follow on Instagram. The third feed
placement is on Facebook marketplace. This is when your ads are placed in the
marketplace homepage or when someone browses marketplace in the Facebook app, your
ads will appear with other relevant products and services on marketplace. Feed
placement number four is via Facebook video. Here you video ads appear between
videos in Facebook watch and Facebook news feed. Feed placement number 5 is on
Facebook's right column. Your ads will appear on the right columns on Facebook and
right column ads only appear to people browsing Facebook on their computers. Feed
placement number 6 is on Instagram explore. Here your ads will appear to them when
they click on the content they found in the browsing experience that is called
Explore. Feed placement number 7 is in the Messenger inbox. Here your ads appear in
the home tab of Messenger between conversations. Those are all the feed ad
placements. Next, we'll talk about this story ad placement. Facebook ads Manager
lets you post story ads on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. They're typically
full-screen vertical images or videos of 5-15 seconds long. Story ads will show you
an ad between stories of people who you are friends with or you follow. Story ads
are great to grab the audience's attention for a few seconds, they're particularly
good at letting your audience know that a product exists. Next up, we have in-
stream ads. Your ads will appear on video on demand and in a select group of
approved partner livestreams on Facebook. Your ads can appear before, during, or
after video content. In-stream ads are currently only available on Facebook. Next
we have the search placement. This means that you ads can appear on Facebook and
Facebook marketplace. If someone searches something related to your product, for
example, someone looking for flowerpots in Amsterdam on Facebook marketplace could
be shown a Calla and Ivy ad. After that, we have sponsored messages. If you choose
this placement, your ads will appear as messages to people who've had an existing
conversation with you in Messenger. Second to last, we have the Facebook instant
article placement. Now, this means that your ads will appear in some articles on
the Facebook mobile app. Finally, our last ad placement is apps, which displays
your ads in external apps through the Facebook audience network. And our audience
network extends Facebook's people based advertising beyond the Facebook platform.
When you choose to use the apps placement, Facebook will show you ads on a
multitude of external apps that they partner with. These apps are basically chosen
to display Facebook advertising as part of their in-app experience. Now, four types
of app placements. Native, banner, interstitial, and rewarded video, and we'll go
over each very briefly. For audience networks, native banner and interstitial ads,
Facebook takes your ad creative and then transforms it to better blend in with the
partner app environments. The native ads are custom ad units designed to fit into
the app experience. You can see in this example how the Call and Ivy ad blends into
the atmosphere of the app. Banner ads are small bar ads that show at the top of
your screen in the app you're in. The interstitial ad is a full-screen ad designed
to appear at natural transition points within an app. Lastly, there are rewarded
video ads. This placement is most often placed in mobile games. Players can choose
to watch a video in exchange for a reward, such as virtual currency or in-app
items, hence the name rewarded videos. That's all of Facebook's major ad
placements, and that was a lot of ground to cover, so thanks for bearing with us.
Just to recap, we recommend choosing the automatic placement setting in Ads Manager
to allow Facebook's delivery system to do the placement selection for you. But now
you know all the available placements if you need to do it manually. You can also
adjust your ads to make sure they best fit their placements.

Facebook Ad Auction

Buying ads on Facebook isn't like buying ads on TV. You don't just pay to buy
commercial space. The Facebook ad system is built of what's called an auction
system. So in order to understand how Facebook charges for ads, it's important to
understand how their auction system works first. The Facebook ad auction is how
Facebook decides how much to charge for an ad. And the Facebook ad auction is
designed to achieve two goals. Creating value for advertisers by helping them reach
and get results from people in their target audience. While also providing positive
and relevant experiences for people who use the Facebook products. And to achieve
this balance, they hold an auction to match the right ad to the right person at the
right time. So each time there's an opportunity to show an ad to someone, an
auction takes place to determine which ad to show to that person. And billions of
auctions take place every day across the Facebook family of apps. So who competes
in these auctions? When an advertiser like you creates an ad, you define your
target audience on Facebook. But, what happens when another advertiser wants to
target the same audience as you? Well then, both you and the other advertiser
compete in the auction to show that person the ad. For example, say one advertiser
targets all women who like flowers. Another advertiser targets all flower lovers
who live in California. In that case, the same woman in California who likes
flowers could fall in both of these advertisers' audiences. And let's call this
woman Clara. So how does Facebook decide whose ad Clara sees? Well, Facebook
decides which ad Clara sees by running an equation that calculates a total value
for each of these ads, which is effectively a numerical score. And the ad with a
higher total value wins the auction and gets shown to Clara. So what does this
equation look like? An ads total value is based on three things, the advertiser
bid, the estimated action rate, and the ad quality. And we'll explain each of them
briefly. The advertiser bid is how much an advertiser is willing to pay to achieve
their desired outcome, like a website visit or a newsletter sign up. And you can
manually set that bid, or you can let Facebook automatically determine what your
bid should be. The more money you bid, the higher your advertiser bid will be. It's
good to remember though, that the winner of an auction is not simply the advertiser
that pays the most, it's a combination of all the factors in the equation. And
we'll talk more about setting bids in another lesson. So the next part of the total
value equation is the estimated action rate. The estimated action rate measures the
likelihood that a certain ad shown to a certain person will lead to a desired
outcome. So it's basically an estimation of how likely the user is to fulfill your
ad campaign objectives, whether that's pressing a shop now button, or going to your
website. The final part of the total value equation is ad quality. Ad quality is
determined by many sources, including feedback from people that view or hide your
ad, as well as finding of low quality attributes, such as sensationalized language,
engagement bait, and more. So the advertiser bid, the estimated action rate, and
the ad quality, combined make up an ad's total value. So what does this mean for
Clara who is being targeted by two flower companies? Well, let's assume both
companies ran an ad with the goal of getting people to purchase flowers from their
website. They input the same advertiser bid and Facebook determined Clara is
equally likely to fulfill their desired goal, in other words, buy products from
both of them. And this means, the estimated action rate is the same for both ads
too. Advertiser A however is sending people to a website that has a lot of ads on
their homepage, as well as misleading information about flower pricing. And that's
not a great user experience. So hypothetically this could lower advertiser's A ad
quality score, driving their total value down. And this means advertiser B will
have a higher total value score leading to them winning the auction, and Clara
seeing their ad. So now that you understand the auction, how does that relate to
how much you're charged for an ad? Billions of auctions take place every day across
the Facebook family of apps, and often with far more than two companies. So every
time you see an ad, it's the result of an auction. And Facebook only charges you
for those ads when you win the auction. Facebook typically charges you by the
number of times your ad is displayed to people, also known as an impression. And
Facebook charges on a 1000 impression basis, also known as CPM or cost per
thousand. CPM measures the total amount spent on an ad campaign divided by
impressions and multiplied by 1000. So an example is, if you spend $50 on your ad
and got the 10000 impressions, your CPM would be $5. And you might be wondering why
CPM is important. CPM is a common metric used by the online advertising industry to
determine the cost effectiveness of an ad campaign. And it's often used to compare
performance among different ad publishers and campaigns. So when you get charged
$50, you can calculate what you were charged for by the CPM price. And for some
marketing goals you can also choose to be charged per link click or per action.
This means Facebook will only charge you if a customer clicks on your ad or takes
another specific action, such as watching a video. And I'll show you later where
you can make that choice to be charged per link click or action, rather than
impression. Now that you know how the auction works, and how Facebook charges for
ads, you're ready to set your budget in Ads Manager. And your Facebook ad budget is
the total amount you want to spend daily, or over the course of the campaign.
Facebook will then try to spend your budget evenly throughout the time your ad is
running, and you won't be charged more than the budget you set. So if you set a
maximum budget of say, $100 to run an ad over a month, but Facebook only spend $70
that month, based on the ads performance, your bill will be $70. Remember, when
you're setting a budget for Facebook ads, it's the maximum amount you're willing to
spend, not the actual amount spent. Finally, let's briefly cover how you will
actually pay for your ads. In general, there are two ways you may be charged for
ads. Many advertisers have what's called automatic payments. With automatic
payments, Facebook will automatically charge you whenever you spend a certain
amount, which is known as a billing threshold. You will be charged each time you
hit your billing threshold, and again on your monthly bill date for any leftover
charges. You can also pay via manual payments. With manual payments, you preload
money to your account before your ads run. After that, Facebook will typically
deduct from that amount up to once a day, as your ads run. For smaller amounts,
Facebook may wait until the charges amount to a certain amount, or until seven days
pass before they invoice your account.

Campaign Structure

We're going to walk you through how to use ads managers soon. But first, let's talk
about how campaigns are structured. There are three parts to a Facebook ad
campaign; the campaign, Ad sets and the individual ads. Collectively this is called
the Campaign structure. Knowing how these parts work together can help you best
optimize your advertising experience and results. We'll briefly break down each
part using one of our example companies, Calla and Ivy. We'll start by explaining
the first part, the campaign. The first thing you do when you go to create an ad in
ads manager is choose a campaign objective, and think of the campaign as the
foundation of your ad. The objective you choose will define what options you will
have in the rest of the campaign setup. The objective you choose should reflect
what you want to accomplish with your ads, such as promoting your app or building
awareness of your business. We'll go over all the different objectives available in
detail and when to choose which in the next lesson. Let's say Calla and Ivy want to
drive traffic to their website. They will set increased web traffic as their
company objective, and move on to the next level of the structure, Ad sets. Ad sets
are the second level of a campaign. Think of the ad set as the level that tells
your ad how to run. At the ad set level, you will define who will see your ad, the
targeting, where your ad will show up, the placement, how much you want to spend,
the budget and how long it should run for the schedule. It's important to know that
a campaign can include multiple ad sets, each with different targeting, scheduling
and budgeting option selected. This allows you to easily segment your ads to try
different things to see what works. You could target one ad set to young people and
one ad set to older ones. You could set one ad set to run on Facebook and one to
run on Instagram, and you can effectively use them to target any one of Facebook's
audience categories. For example, Calla and Ivy might want to advertise wedding
flower packages to newly engaged couples in the Netherlands in March. They're
interested in finding out whether younger or older couples respond better to their
ads. They could create one ad set to target people who are newly engaged, who live
in the Netherlands and are between the ages of 20 to 35 and a second ad set to
target those between 36 and 49. The third and final level of the campaign structure
is the ad level. The ad level defines what your audience will actually see. You
first choose the ad format, and then you'll add videos or photos, write a copy and
define your destination. Keep in mind that you can have multiple ads within a
single ad set. Calla and Ivy could, for example, test a photo ad and a video ad in
each ad set to learn which performs better. To summarize, a campaign is built off a
single objective and consists of one or multiple ad sets that each contain one or
multiple ads. It's a simple structure that helps you organize and optimize your
campaign. This structure also enables you to test many different variables such as
your audience, ad creative, etc. This then allows you to shift more budget towards
a highly performing ad set or ads, or consider new strategies altogether.

his course is an essential part of our Facebook Social Media Marketing Professional
Certificate. You now know all the steps it takes to plan, create, run, manage, and
optimize a campaign using Facebook Ads Manager. You've learned how campaigns are
structured in Ads Manager and what role campaigns, ad sets and ads play. You know
how to align your business goals with the campaign objectives offered in Ads
Manager. You understand how to calculate your campaign budget and how to set it in
Ads Manager. You've learned what bidding strategies you can utilize in the ad
auction. Also built a solid understanding of the different audience targeting
options available in Ads Manager, and how to set up Core, Custom and lookalike
audiences. You learned how to choose the ad placements for your campaign and how to
set up the schedule it runs on. You know what ad formats available and Ads Manager
and how to create ads step-by-step. We also took the first steps at monitoring and
analyzing the most important campaign metrics. Finally, you've rolled up your
sleeves and applied all you've learned in this course in the project and build a
campaign beginning to end. That was a lot of ground we've covered. Awesome job. In
the next course, you'll have a much closer look at the results of your marketing
efforts. Anke will take you on a deep dive into measuring and optimizing the
performance of your social media marketing campaigns