Facebook boasts one of the biggest advertising networks available and is a great way to get more exposure for your business. If you’ve come this far, you’re probably already sold on the idea of Facebook Ad’ so let us jump right into it.

Please note, the information here may no longer be valid at a later date if Facebook changes how things work and this page is not updated (last updated 21/02/2020).

Campaigns

A campaign forms the base for Facebook advertising in a broad sense. The main focus of a campaign is choosing an objective. What are you trying to achieve? Facebook gives you 3 types of objectives to choose from, awareness, consideration, and conversion. Each of these has sub-goals of which you must select one. Facebook will focus on optimizing your ad’s based on your goal. That’s why selecting the correct goal is crucial.

Awareness

Awareness is about building your brand and getting people to recognize it. It’s not so much about selling as it is about becoming known. The two awareness goals are:

• Brand awareness – focused on reaching as many people as possible who might be interested in your product
• Reach – showing your ad to as many people as possible

Consideration

This is about building leads, generating more direct interest, educating your customer and getting people to prospect your product. There are several sub goals available:

• Traffic – increasing traffic to your website or Facebook page
• Engagement – get more engagement with your social media content such as likes, shares etc.
• App installs – getting people to download your app
• Video views – getting people to see your videos
• Lead generation – generate sales leads such as emails from potential prospects
• Messages – getting people to contact you on Facebook

Conversion

The direct sell, getting people to buy your product. There are 3 types of goals available here

• Conversions – getting people to sign up, make a purchase on your site, or take some form of action
• Product catalog sales – directly sell your products in the form of a Facebook ad
• Store visits – drive traffic to your physical store location

Ad Set

A campaign is made up of ad-sets. Each ad-set holds a number of individual ad’s that will be shown on the ad network. The reason it is structured this way is so that you can easily track how each ad is performing relative to your ad-set which in turn allows you to optimize your advertising.

The settings for each ad-set will be slightly different depending on what type of campaign goal you selected. For example, if you selected conversion for your goal, you can setup how Facebook will track a conversion. There are some common settings across all ad-sets, there are as follows:

Budget

Your budget allows you to control how much you want to spend on advertising. The beauty of Facebook ads is that you can spend very little and start seeing some results. Spending even $2-$5 a day is enough to get some results and gather some data. The budget settings also allow you to set a schedule for when ad’s will be run or you can run them indefinitely.

Audience

This is perhaps the most important thing you can control. Your audience determines the people that Facebook will be showing your ad to. Setting an incorrect audience can make or break your marketing campaign. You can only do this correctly if you have accurately identified who your customers are. You have the following options available to you when creating an audience.

• Locations
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Detailed targeting based on demographics, interests, behaviors, likes, purchases etc.
• Connections, i.e. people who have visited your website, liked your Facebook page, etc.

With the above options, you can get super creative and test many different marketing strategies. For example, you can create an ad-set specifically around promoting your latest offers to people who have liked your Facebook page.

Placement

These settings control where Facebook will be showing your ad. Facebook’s advertising network extends far beyond just the Facebook platform. It also includes Instagram, Messenger and an extended audience network that is part of apps and websites. It’s important to consider whether or not some placements are relevant to your product. Thankfully food is something almost everyone loves and works well across most mediums so you can’t go wrong with most of the placement types.

Potential Reach & Audience Definition

Based on how you configured the above settings, Facebook will calculate your potential advertising reach, i.e. the number of people that will be shown your ad. It will also tell you whether your audience is broad or narrow.

Naturally the more targeting restrictions you place on your ad-set, the smaller your audience size will be. This is known as a narrow audience. The advantage of this is, everyone in your audience is likely to be more relevant to your business and therefore should yield better conversions.

Whereas a broader audience might have a larger potential reach but you also risk showing your ad to people who are less likely to be interested in your product.

If your business only has one location, you can expect your potential reach to be quite small. This is because there’s no point in targeting people who cannot access your product.

Ads

As stated before, every ad-set is made up of ads. Ads refer to the actual media that you want to show to the end user. Every ad consists of the following parts.

Identity

This is the author of the advert and it will be shown alongside the ad. The identity can be any Facebook page that you are an admin off. Your page’s profile picture will be shown alongside the ad along with the name of your Facebook page. You also have the opportunity to link an Instagram account to use that profile pic for adverts on Instagram.

Format

This is the actual type of ad that you want to show to your customer. There are several types to choose from.

• Carousel – 2 or more images in a slider
• Single image – create up to 6 individual ads with a unique photo
• Single video
• Slideshow – up to 10 images looping
• Collection – a series of items that opens into a customer full-screen page

Each format is unique and has its own benefits. Generally speaking, customers want to see delicious food and a great atmosphere. A format like a carousel, slideshow, and collection work well for this.

Videos are also great but making a good video will cost time and money. I would advise beginners to stay away from this unless you have someone with experience to guide you through this or a great budget.

You also have the option to configure what Facebook calls the “Full-Screen Experience” which is almost like a compact custom website to showcase some important information. This will be shown when a user selects your advert. They provide pre-defined templates to easily get started and it’s worth considering.

After selecting your format, you will need to upload the relevant images or media. Each format has its own unique requirement in terms of artwork resolution. You will also need to fill out some specific details such as what your ad will say, it’s title etc.