How To Setup Your Facebook and Instagram Ads and Measure your results the right way in 2020

Hey Guys...

In this post I will take you through the entire process of setting up your first Facebook Ad campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager and how to understand and measure your results to give you value for the money you invest into these ads.    

Table of Contents: 

• Setting Up Your Ads Using Facebook Ads Manager.
• Measuring Your Facebook Ad Results using relevant indicators

Ready to create your first campaign? Let’s start from the very top.... 


What is Facebook Ads Manager? 

The Facebook ads manager is where you go, to set your first Facebook ad campaign. It is where you create and manage all your ad campaigns. 

QUICK ONE before I proceed: Mostly people run ads on instagram directly from the instagram app by pressing the promote button beneath their posts. Yes, your ad will run, but the instagram platform limits the potential of your ad; you only get to do a few changes. Please stop doing that! If you want to run ads to your instagram page and you want value for the money you spend, please go to your Facebook ad manager account and run the ads through there to instagram. 

The first time you open your Ads Manager to run an ad can be quiet intimidating, why do I say this? 

If you don’t know your way around, it can get confusing and very tiring. Let’s open your ads manager now! 

If you can’t find your ads manager, you can use this quick LINK to get to yours. 

If your ads manager is opened, you should see something like the image below. NB: You won’t have any ad results like what you see below because you have never set any ads. 

But you should see the Green Create button below the Account Overview TAB.  

2. Next Click the +CREATE Button 

Check image below. You should see the exact same thing when you click on the button

3. SELECT YOUR MARKETING OBJECTIVE 

At this juncture you should know what your marketing objective is for the ad you want to run. Facebook Ad manager will give you several ad objectives for you to choose from but if you don’t choose the exact one in relation to your marketing objective, you will end up wasting money. 

Let me explain briefly what every objective provides. 

Awareness: 

Brand Awareness (as the name implies, this objective falls under the Awareness objective and you only select this objective if you want to reach people who are more likely to show interest in your business). 

Reach (With this objective, you get to show your ad or your business gets to reach maximum number of people you select as your target market). 

Consideration:

Traffic (you use this objective when you want to send more people to a specific location such as your website or your app) This objective is really good if you want more link clicks.  

Engagement (Ever wondered how to get more page likes, photo comments, more shares on your post? This is the objective that triggers that result. With this objective your ad gets to people who are likely to engage with your content.)

App installs (Have a new app out? And looking for a way to get more app installs? Say no more, this objective has been designed exactly for that cause.)

Video views (You have a new video out and you want more eye balls on the video? This particular objective will do that work for you. One thing you need to understand is that this objective works best for content on your social media page. If you want to send someone off Facebook to let’s say a video on YouTube, I will suggest you use the Traffic objective.)

Lead Generation (Maybe you might have heard of the word Lead before. If you have a business on social media in 2020 and you don’t have leads such as email addresses from people you can contact directly, you are losing out big time. This particular objective helps you to collect sales leads from people that are interested in your business.)

Messages (With this objective, you can link your WhatsApp number directly to the ad you run in order to get direct messages from people who are interested in your business. I feel it’s a very great objective to build a strong relationship with your clients and prospective clients.) 

Conversion: 

Conversions (Use this objective to drive valuable actions on your website as well as to get people to make purchases on your website or app). 


Catalog Sales (with this ad, you are able to easily show products in your catalog to the market you are targeting.)

Store Visits (do you have a physical store? If yes, are you looking for a way to drive customers to your physical store? This objective is what you need. With this objective, your ads are shown to people who are nearby.)

Great! so these are the objectives available at the moment and what benefits you get from them. Choose what best fits your marketing goal and follow the steps. 

But for the sake of this post, I will be selecting the Traffic objective. It is one objective I use a lot to send people off Facebook to a clients website. 

After selecting your objective, give your campaign a name. This might look like an easy step (naming your campaign). Yes, it’s easy to assign a name to a campaign but keep in mind that you need to do it professionally as this will help you with future reports. Also it helps you to easily identify which ad sets are working perfectly if you want to duplicate the ads or run more of them. 

After naming your campaign, you can see the Create A/B test, this feature helps you run experimental ads and collect relevant data that shows you the best performing creative, placement, audience and delivery optimization strategies. 

Let’s move on...

A NEW AND IMPORTANT FEATURE FACEBOOK ADDED 

DYNAMIC:

CREATIVE FEATURE: 

So with this feature Facebook allows you to upload multiple versions of headlines, descriptions, images, and this allows Facebook to plug all in and find the the best combinations from the uploads you made to help your ads convert much better. 

This helps you save some time to test a whole lot of variations very easily and quickly. The reports will show you which combination is really useful to help you increase performance to get more value for money. 

The only issue here is if you dont have a huge budget you might want to test a fewer combinations and variations. Because each combination needs about 500 impressions for Facebook to be able to test it properly. So if your budget is low you should test one variation at a time. Say different headline variations but the same image or vice versa. 

4. Setting Up your Audience Targeting

There are two ways in setting up your audience targeting:

1. You can create new audience

2. You can use saved audience 

The custom audience feature is another great feature where you can target already existing customers who have engaged with your page or your website or your app and you can also create a look alike audience that are similar to your custom audience and will have a high potential of clicking your a.

Location: This is where you enter the location where your target audience stay. Make sure you switch the tab to people living in this location. Enter the location of your target market. 

After location, check the age range of your target audience, check the gender whether you want to reach both male and females or just one gender; now at detailed targeting, you get to add in details some items relating to your target market. 

As you build your target audience you will be getting data on whether your audience is too big, whether it’s too small and the possible reach estimate for your targeted audience. 

Targeting is very important, do this well and you should have achieved about 40% of your ad goal already.

5. Setting Up Your Ad Placements

Facebook will set your placements to automatic for you, this can include a whole lot of ad spots, and most of them won’t be relevant to your audience. 

Automatic AD SPOTS ON FACEBOOK INCLUDE the following:

• Facebook News Feed
• Facebook Market Place
• Facebook Video Feeds
• Facebook Right Column 
• Facebook Stories 
• Facebook In-stream Videos
• Facebook Search Results 
• Facebook Instant Articles 

Automatic AD SPOTS ON INSTAGRAM INCLUDE the following:

• Instagram Explore 
• Instagram Feed
• Instagram Stories

 

 

Now if you've done your research very well, you should know all the best places to put your ad because that is where your audience will be looking. You can then change the ad spots by clicking on the manual placements and selecting your own ad placements. But if you have no idea where your audience will be looking, then select the automatic placements so Facebook automatically places your ads at the best performing places. 

Facebook has some recommended ad placements for every ad objective you select, find them below. 

·        

·         Brand awareness: Facebook and Instagram

·         Engagement: Facebook and Instagram

·         Video views: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network

·         App installs: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network

·         Traffic (for website clicks and app engagement): Facebook and Audience Network

·         Product catalog sales: Facebook and Audience Network

·         Conversions: Facebook and Audience Network 

6. Setting Up Your Budget and Schedule. 

Optimizing for ad delivery:

Now this feature is really important as it helps Facebook determine who to show your ad to. You remember in the beginning we selected the traffic objective, and the aim of that objective is to send people off Facebook or Instagram to an external website. 

At the Optimization point, you need to choose the event you want for your ad. Remember your selection will affect who sees your ad to help you achieve your campaign goal. 

Click the drop down arrow and select the best optimization according to the goal of your campaign. 

Schedule: You can either choose to run your ad continuously from the time your ad goes live or you can choose a start and end date for your ad. 

click the SHOW MORE OPTIONS to adjust this feature:

Add Ad spend limits: If you have spending requirements for your ad set, add them here. You can set the minimum amount you spend in a day and the maximum amount you spend on your ad in a day. 

7. Setting Up Your Facebook Ads.

This is the point where you setup the content that everybody will see. This is the final step of the process. 

Select the preferred identity of your ads. The Facebook or Instagram page you select will represent your business in your ads. Make sure you are selecting the right identity for your ads. 

 Next, select the ad format. Are you going to do a single image or video ad or are you going for a carousel? Choose one and add media, if you have a post already on your page you can use an existing photo. 

After choosing the format and uploading your content, go on and fill the primary text, if it’s not enough, you can add another option to include more texts. 

If you remember, the particular campaigns objective I’m using for this blog post is the traffic objective and it’s for a location off Facebook and Instagram.

With an objective like this, you will need to add a website URL to it. This will be the destination where people will be taken to when they click on your ad. 

And after that add a call to action that suits your ad campaign objective. 

8. Tracking: 

This is equally an important point of the whole process, Facebook will give you analytics for how people connect with your ads, 

but if you want details of what happens on the destination where you send people like your website purchases and form signups; you will need to install a Facebook pixel on your website, for apps you will need to setup your Apps events. 

You only add the tracking if people will be performing specific actions on your website that you need to analyze, if not, you skip this section and confirm your campaign. 

When you click confirm, you will be asked to add a payment method. You should enter your visa card details or papal account details to activate your ad. 

Your ad will be reviewed and in some hours or minutes. you should get a notification that your ad is live. 

7 IMPORTANT METRICS FOR MEASURING YOUR FACEBOOK AD

 

1. ROAS (RETURN ON AD SPENT)

2. PCV (PURCHASE CONVERSION VALUE)

3. CPP (COST PER PURCHASE)

4. EPL (EARNINGS PER LEAD)

5. EPC (EARNINGS PER CLICK)

6. CTR LINK (CLICK THROUGH RATE LINK)

 

7. CTR ALL (CLICK THROUGH RATE ALL)

 

Let’s take them one after the other and understand how they each work. 

 

NB: We will be doing a little mathematics over here but it’s nothing to be scared of. lolx 

 

 

1. ROAS (RETURN ON AD SPENT)

This metric shows you how much revenue you are making for every $ you invest in ads. 

 

The formula for ROAS is 

Total Revenue/ Total Ad spent + Other Expenses. 

So let’s say you made 10 sales of a product that cost $27 = $270 

and you spent $27 on ads to generate the sales for that Ad. Other expenses = $73 

Your ROAS = 270/27+73 = 2.7x 

This means for every dollar you gave Facebook, you earned $2.7 back. 

NB: Always your ROAS should stay above 1. If you get a ROAS below 1 then something is wrong and you should edit your  ad campaign. 

2. PCV (PURCHASE CONVERSION VALUE)

 

This metric shows you the total revenue your Facebook ads generated. You need to have your Facebook pixel installed on your website to get this easily track this action. 

The pixel will let Facebook quickly determine that this particular ad resulted in this revenue. 

To calculate this metric, take the number of items sold x cost of items. 

Your PVC should always stay positive. 

 

 

3. CPP (COST PER PURCHASE)

This metric checks to see whether your ad is selling products at a profit / at loss. So let’s say you spend $100 on ads and you sold 5 items. $100/5 =$20 per unit to sell one product. 

If the cost of your product is $30, take the cost of the product which is $30 and take it from the ad spend per unit -$20; it shows you for every product you sell you are making $10 of profit.   

Take into account your variable expenses too to know if the profit you are making is reasonable. 

This metric is also calculated automatically by the Facebook pixel when you install it on your website. 

4. EPL (EARNINGS PER LEAD)

If you run a business that generates leads (subscribers), this is the metric used to calculate the value per every lead your ad campaign brings in. 

PCV (Purchase Conversion Value /Number of Leads (subscribers) 

The result means for every lead your business gets that is how much the person is worth. 

5. EPC (EARNINGS PER CLICK)

If you run a business that thrives on link clicks, this is the metric used to calculate the value per every click your ad campaign brings in. 

PCV (Purchase Conversion Value /Number of link clicks 

The result means for every click your business gets that is how much the person is worth. 

"To calculate cost per lead or click i.e. how much you spend to get 1 lead or 1 click."

Ad spend / No of leads/clicks 

so if you spend $130 on ads to get 100 leads / clicks the cost per 1 lead or click is $1.30. 

6. CTR LINK (CLICK THROUGH RATE LINK)

 

Click through rate link shows the number of people that clicked on your ad link. If you have a link through rate less than 1.5 for feed ads please go back and edit your ad because it clearly shows your ad is not engaging enough. 

7. CTR ALL (CLICK THROUGH RATE ALL)

A Click through rate all shows how engaging your ad copy is in general i.e. from your total likes, shares, comments and all that if your CTRALL is less than 1 edit your ad because something is wrong somewhere. 

NOW THAT WE UNDERSTAND HOW THESE METRICS WORK, LETS LOOK AT WHERE TO FIND THEM ON FACEBOOK AD MANAGER AND HOW TO ADD THEM FOR OUR EVERYDAY USE.

FOLLOW THE STEP BELOW TO ADD THEM.

1. OPEN YOUR FACEBOOK AD MANAGER

 

2. LOOK FOR THE COLUMN SECTION, PRESS THE DROP 

DOWN ARROW.

 

3. YOU ARE GOING TO SEE A LOT METRICS WHEN YOU PRESS THE COLUMNS BUT THAT IS NOT WHY WE ARE THERE, I WILL ADVISE YOU AT YOUR FREE TIME. TRY AND FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH THE METRICS IN THE COLUMNS. 

4. GO DOWN THE METRICS AND SELECT CUSTOMIZE COLUMNS, BECAUSE WE ARE COMING TO ADD THE 7 METRICS WE JUST DISCUSSED. 

5. WHEN YOU CLICK ON THE CUSTOMIZE COLUMNS A NEW PANE WILL OPEN FOR YOU. 

6. LET’S ENTER THE FIRST METRIC. YOU SHOULD SEE A SEARCH BUTTON AT THE TOP OF THE NEW PANE. 

7. ENTER THE FIRST METRIC WE TALKED ABOUT WHICH IS ROAS (AND SELECT TOTAL) FROM BENEATH IT. 

8. NOW LOOK ON THE RIGHT HAND SIDE, YOU SHOULD SEE ‘ROAS HAS BEEN ADDED TO THE COLUMNS’. (DESELECT WEBSITE PURCHASE ROAS (RETURN ON AD SPEND)

9. NEXT ADD THE PURCHASE CONVERSION VALUE (TYPE IN PURCHASE) YOU SHOULD SEE PURCHASE ROAS AND PURCHASES, SELECT TOTAL FOR PURCHASE ROAS AND VALUE AND COST FOR PURCHASES. JUST LIKE IN THE SCREEN CAPTURE. (WITH THIS TOO DESELECT ANY THING UNDER THE PURCHASE CONVERSION VALUE ON THE RIGHT HAND SIDE OF THE PANE.  

10. THE NEXT METRIC IS THE EARNINGS PER LEAD BUT WITH THIS FACEBOOK DOES NOT GIVE US A METRIC TO AUTOMATICALLY TRACK THAT BUT YOU CAN CALCULATE THAT MANUALLY. YOU JUST NEED TO DIVIDE THE TOTAL NUMBER OF LEADS YOU GET BY THE TOTAL REVENUE. 

(GOOD THING HERE IS FACEBOOK CAN HELP US GET THE NUMBER OF LEADS AUTOMATICALLY TO HELP WITH THIS CALCULATION.) 

11. SO LET’S ADD THE LEADS METRIC TO THE COLUMN. GO TO THE SEARCH AND TYPE LEADS (SELECT TOTAL AND COST), ONCE AGAIN DESELECT ANYTHING AT THE RIGHT HAND OF THE PANE UNDER LEADS. 

12. NEXT, LET’S ADD THE CLICK THROUGH RATE. ENTER CTR IN THE SEARCH, YOU SHOULD SEE CTR (ALL AND LINK-THROUGH-RATE) SELECT THESE TWO. 

13. EVERYTHING IS SELECTED NOW. LOOK AT THE BOTTOM LEFT CORNER AND SELECT (SAVE AS PRESET) RIGHT BESIDE THAT GIVE THE PRESET A NAME AND CLICK APPLY. 

14. YOU SHOULD SEE ALL THE METRICS WE TALKED ABOUT ADDED TO YOUR NEW PANEL. 

15. CHECK THE VIDEO FOR CONFIRMATION GUYS. 

SO THIS IS IT, GUYS LENGTHY POST RIGHT?  HOPE IT’S VALUABLE. UNDERSTAND THIS BASIC STEPS AND YOUR FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM AD STRATEGY WILL BE A BOOM FOR YOUR BUSINESS ALWAYS.