Ad Sets
Campaigns can hold multiple assets. This way, you can keep all of your different audiences within the same campaign. You may be asking yourself why you would have multiple ad sets in one campaign. If you were doing a campaign, you might have one ad set aimed at people that are in your key demographics and locations. You may also have an ad set of people who had previously clicked on your ad. So set one is for people to qualify their interest and set two is for people who have already interacted with your brand, are in your demographics, and in your location.
This puts in perspective how you can qualify your audience as you go. As more people interact with your first ad set, you have more people to advertise to in your second ad set. This is how you can qualify traffic using Facebook’s tools.
A/B Testing
An added bonus is that ad sets contain multiple ads, so you can test different messages at different stages to see which perform best for cost and click-through-rates.
Without structure, this can get very confusing, very quickly. As a starting point, we would suggest A/B testing your images, your ad copy (text), and your ad content. In reality, you can A/B test just about anything with enough time and organization.
As an example, you have three articles on three retirement topics that you are using to qualify interest. For each article, you should create three images (nine total) and three sets of copy for the ads you intend to send. In total, your ad set will have three articles but will have nine ads.
You might be asking yourself, why make all these duplicates? What purpose is this serving?
What this does is, it shows you each variable independent of the others. This way, you can look at the data and decide what works best based on cost, clicks, and click-through-rate. After a few weeks of running the ads, you’ll quickly see your winners and losers with more detail than just running one ad for each article and evaluating what’s wrong in broad strokes.
If you see that you have three ads with the same article but different photos, you can deduce that you shouldn’t use a type of photo and shift your spend to the ad version that is getting better results. This way, you will see better results in the proceeding weeks using the data Facebook was able to gather.
Audiences
Facebook is very good at gathering data; one could argue they’re too good at gathering data and that’s what gets them in trouble. The true power of Facebook ads is in their custom audiences. Targeting users based on their location and age is great but there are much more powerful tools at your disposal.
Custom Audience is an ad targeting option that lets you find your existing audiences among people who are on Facebook. You can use customer lists, website traffic, or engagement on Facebook to create audiences of people who already know your business.
For example, you could have a list of your current clients. If you wanted to upload to Facebook and advertise to them, you can. If you’d like to upload this list and create a “lookalike audience” of people with similar ages, interests, and locations, you could do this. Keep in mind that the number of people that Facebook can pull in is dependent on how extensive your list is.
Another example of a custom audience is a website visitors’ audience. If someone has visited your website in the past either through their own searching or through a Facebook ad, you can advertise to these people. Keep in mind that having the Facebook Pixel installed on your website to signal who has and hasn’t been to your site will be required.
Lastly, audiences come with projections of how big or small they are. Depending on all the segments you add to your audience, you’ll need to have enough people in that pool so that you are not serving the same people the same ads. Whatever audience you choose, be sure not to narrow that audience to a point where you cannot gather data. The audience features can do a great job in qualifying interest, but your content should help you determine interest from users.