The complete guide to launching successful Facebook advertising campaigns

In this guide, you'll find everything you need to know to launch or optimize your Facebook advertising campaigns: targeting options, formats and locations, performance measurement... 
The best practices for successful advertising campaigns are yours!

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What goals should you choose for your Facebook advertising campaigns?

With your Facebook ads, it's possible to pursue marketing goals tailored to each stage of your customer journey. 
Advertisers can create a campaign that pursues... 

• Awareness goals, to massively reach your consumers, or create interest in your brand and products
• Traffic goals, to attract your visitors on your website
• Consideration goals, to attract the attention of your core target from the social network
• Conversion goals, to turn your already captive audience into a customer audience
• Customer loyalty goals, to encourage the purchase of your products, or even cross-selling or up-selling

Before diving into Facebook advertising, it is crucial to determine these advertising goals. These will determine your entire targeting strategy, the type of campaign to set up, as well as the choice of formats and placements you need to deploy. 

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What targeting methods are possible on Facebook?

The Facebook advertising network offers different targeting methods in order to reach your audience in a fine-tuned way. 
Once you have your persona in mind, you can decide to target... 

• Your current customers, whether you want them to buy your products again or work on their loyalty, thanks to the onboarding of your first-party data
• Visitors of your website (thanks to retargeting / remarketing), based on the onboarding of your current first party data
• Lookalike audiences, a targeting method which consists in creating audience segments that resemble your current fans or customers
• Targets that meet socio-demographic and behavioral criteria, such as geolocation, type of device used (mobile, tablet, desktop), or their interests
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Thanks to those methods, you can create ads for the various audiences you want to address, and segment your campaigns in an ultra-relevant way to boost conversions. 

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What are the possible advertising locations on Facebook?

On Facebook, you can choose between different types of advertising campaigns, which offer you to broadcast your messages in various locations on the platform.
Choose if you want to launch an advertising campaign... 

• In the newsfeed: your advertisements appear in the Facebook newsfeed of your targets
• In stories: your ads appear between two Facebook stories of your targets
• In search: your ads appear in the search results made by your targets on Facebook
• In messages: you send your targets private advertising messages
• In the Marketplace: you promote your brand or sponsored products in the catalog on the platform
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The best practice to reach your targets? Design different types of ads, for all locations where your core target is on the social network. This way, you'll be sure to maximize your ads’ reach, and thus increase their potential.

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Which advertising formats should you choose?

Investing in Facebook advertising also means creating campaigns based on personalized ad formats that will attract the attention of your targets and generate their engagement.
On Facebook, each location has a variety of ad formats that you can deploy. 
Depending on the goal of the campaign, you can consider using... 

• Video: we advise you to position it in stories, in the newsfeed and in-stream (i.e. an ad placed in the video content itself). This format is ideal if you pursue a brand awareness goal.
• Instant Experience: it is particularly well adapted to the consideration phase of your customer journey.
• Static format: it adapts to all possible locations, and is best reserved for the lower phases of the conversion funnel. 
• Collection format: it is very effective for placement in the newsfeed of your audiences.
• Carousel format: it is ideal for the conversion phase, in stories, newsfeed, Marketplace and search. 
• Native ads, banners and interstitial ads on Audience Network: with these formats, you can set up banners outside of Facebook, on third-party partner applications. 

And to respect the technical specs of all these formats, download our dedicated guide!

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How to build your advertising messaging on the platform?

When launching an ad campaign on Facebook, the key idea to remember is to combine a buying strategy with creativity. By balancing the right bidding strategy with creative formats, you can ensure that your messages are relevant and effective. 
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To do this, you must first ensure that you adapt these messages to your customer journey.
At the top of the funnel, you will want to enhance your brand image in your creations. It will therefore be optimal to highlight the logo and the elements of your brand's visual identity, to be identified at first glance. Do not hesitate to communicate your values. 
On the other hand, at the bottom of the funnel, you can rather highlight the advantages of your products. Make sure you show these products, highlighting their prices and associated services. Another good practice is to focus on urgency and rarity, for example by proposing a limited-time offer. 
And for maximum effectiveness of your Facebook advertising campaign, be sure to deploy advertising creatives based on best practices: 

• Show your brand early in the customer journey, but also often
• Find a balance between message and ad length when it comes to video ads
• Capture attention in a dynamic way, choosing ad formats that catch the eye of targets 
• Design your video ads for when the sound is off, but delight your audience with the sound on

And finally, don't hesitate to experiment, to get out of your comfort zone! This is the key to a campaign that achieves its advertising goal, by differentiating your brand from the competition.

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How to track the performance of your Facebook advertising campaigns?

"Creating a Facebook ad that achieves your brand goals is all about combining the right targeting criteria, the right formats, and a dose of creativity to set you apart from the competition. However, to achieve optimal results, it's crucial to monitor the performance of your campaigns on a daily basis, so you can continuously optimize them. This is the role of our Gamned! experts: to monitor the performance of your ads for you, but also the current trends that allow you to aim for even better results." Simone Tang, Head of Media Trading at Gamned!

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Tracking the performance of your campaigns is crucial: it allows you to control your ad spend, but also to continuously improve your Facebook advertising device. So how do you do it?
First of all, here is a prerequisite: if you launch campaigns that aim to bring traffic to your website, don't forget to install the Facebook pixel, which allows you to track the actions of your audience after they have been exposed or clicked on your ads.
Then, you need to associate the right key performance metrics (KPI) to each campaign goal you had defined beforehand:

• For awareness goals: target coverage (reach), number of video views, advertising memorization... 
• For consideration goals: Landing Page views, time spent on your site or application, messages received... 
• For conversion goals: number of leads generated, number of downloads of your app, number of sales, conversion rate... 

Also be sure to always measure the ROI of your campaigns, taking into account the total cost of your campaigns.
Do not hesitate to use Facebook's brand lift feature to make sure your ads are relevant. The idea is simple: your ads are served to an audience that you define, and this audience is then asked about things like ad recall, brand awareness and message association. 
It’s a great way of knowing if your ads attracted your audience’s attention! 

Whether you're just getting started with advertising on Facebook or you already have campaigns set up, Gamned! can help. Our digital advertising experts will audit your existing strategies or create your first campaign with one goal in mind: optimal performance. 
‍Contact a Gamned! expert now, and get started!