As the world’s leading social media platform, Facebook has a huge user base and powerful advertising capabilities, providing companies with a broad space for promotion. For companies that hope to use Facebook to expand their business, increase brand awareness and achieve sales growth, it is crucial to master Facebook advertising skills. This article will deeply analyze the entire process of building a Facebook advertising system from 0 to 1, covering channel awareness, advertising platform understanding, familiarity with the delivery process, and practical points, to help companies achieve ideal results in the field of Facebook advertising.
- Facebook Channel Awareness 1.1 Overview of Facebook Platform
Facebook is not only a social network, but also a bridge for enterprises to establish deep connections with users. It has more than 2 billion monthly active users, allowing people to stay in close contact with friends, family and favorite brands across geographical boundaries. Enterprises can display brand image, publish product information, share brand stories and interact with users through Facebook corporate homepages. At the same time, Facebook Messenger, as an important tool for enterprises to communicate with customers, provides features such as greetings, automatic replies and away messages, which help improve customer service quality and enhance the connection between customers and brands.
Instagram has become a popular platform for brand promotion with its powerful visual presentation capabilities and active young user groups. Among the nearly 1 billion monthly active users, 71% are under the age of 35, and 72% of American teenagers are its users. Instagram business accounts allow brands to use unique immersive formats such as dynamic posts, Instagram stories, Instagram live broadcasts, videos and Reels to stimulate users’ desire to explore and attract the attention of the younger generation of consumers.
WhatsApp has a wide user base around the world and is an important channel for businesses to communicate with global audiences. Through WhatsApp, businesses can send text messages containing photos, videos and animated images to users around the world for free, share single items or entire product catalogs, simplify the communication process with customers, establish connections anytime and anywhere, build brand image and respond to customer messages in a timely manner. 1.2 Facebook channel advantages
Facebook’s huge number of users provides companies with a vast amount of potential customer resources, covering almost all target customer groups of product categories. No matter what products or services a company sells, it can find matching audiences on Facebook and carry out precise advertising marketing. Moreover, Facebook Messenger directly connects customers and brands, facilitates customer consultation and feedback, and enhances customer stickiness.
Instagram users are mainly young people, especially young women, which makes it an excellent platform for promoting high-value products. Young people are happy to discover new brands on Instagram. Brands can quickly attract the attention of target users and stimulate their desire to buy through high-quality visual content display. The Instagram Direct function also facilitates direct communication between brands and users.
WhatsApp’s high global usage rate enables companies to easily connect with customers around the world. Free communication services reduce the communication costs of enterprises. At the same time, the convenience of sharing product information allows customers to intuitively understand products and improve purchase conversion rates. 2. Understanding the Facebook advertising platform 2.1 Facebook account system
Facebook personal accounts are accounts registered by individuals for managing homepages, business management platform (BM) assets, and advertising. It is recommended to register with real identity information to ensure the security and stability of the account.
Facebook public pages are similar to WeChat official accounts and are an important position for enterprises to display and promote their brands. Enterprises must have public pages to advertise, and personal homepages cannot publish ads. Public pages are managed by personal accounts. Enterprises can publish brand-related content on them to attract fans and increase brand awareness.
Business Manager (BM) is the core tool for managing Facebook advertising assets, similar to WeChat official account management platform or company ERP system. In BM, enterprises can centrally manage all public pages, advertising accounts, pixels, domains, directories, custom audiences, material folders and other assets to facilitate advertising and asset configuration.
Advertising accounts are accounts used to publish advertisements, which are divided into personal accounts and corporate accounts. Each Facebook personal account can open a personal advertising account, while corporate advertising accounts need to submit a business license to open through an agent. For companies committed to brand building and long-term advertising, it is recommended to choose corporate advertising accounts, which are usually more stable and have better limits than personal advertising accounts.
There is a close connection between personal accounts, business management platforms, and advertising accounts. Personal accounts can create and manage business management platforms, and business management platforms can manage multiple public pages, advertising accounts, and other assets. Advertising accounts can be personal advertising accounts, corporate advertising accounts, or BM advertising accounts. Different types of advertising accounts have different stability and limits. The stability and limits are corporate advertising accounts > BM advertising accounts > personal advertising accounts. 2.2 Facebook advertising logic
Facebook advertising is based on a complex bidding mechanism. When a company publishes an advertisement, the advertisement will participate in the auction to compete for the opportunity to be displayed to a specific audience. During the auction process, Facebook mainly considers factors such as advertising bidding, the relevance of the advertisement to the audience, and the estimated operation rate of the audience. Ad bidding is the amount that advertisers are willing to pay for ad display; ad relevance reflects the quality of the ad and its match with the target audience; and the estimated action rate reflects the probability of the advertiser getting the expected action (such as click, purchase, etc.) when displaying the ad to a specific group of people. Facebook comprehensively evaluates these factors to determine the winning ad and displays it to the target audience, aiming to create the best experience for users while creating the greatest value for advertisers. 3. Familiar with the Facebook advertising delivery process 3.1 Overview of the advertising level
The Facebook advertising delivery system is divided into three levels: campaigns, ad groups, and ads. An ad campaign corresponds to a delivery goal, such as increasing brand awareness, increasing website traffic, or promoting product sales. In an ad campaign, you can set up multiple ad groups, and each ad group can set different variables for different audiences, delivery positions, budget allocations, etc. to test different advertising strategies. Each ad group can contain multiple ads to test different advertising ideas, such as different combinations of pictures, videos, copywriting, etc., so as to find the advertising form that best attracts the target audience. 3.2 Analysis and selection of advertising objectives
The awareness objective aims to display ads to users who are most likely to remember the ads and increase the awareness of the business, brand or service. It is suitable for advertisers who are in the early stages of their business and want to gain more exposure on the Facebook platform and attract the attention of potential customers, but do not have urgent requirements for click-through rates and sales of ad links. For example, when a new brand is launched, more users can be informed of the existence and characteristics of the brand by running awareness ads.
The traffic objective is to guide Facebook users to visit the target location selected by the advertiser, such as website landing pages, blog posts, apps or phone calls. It is usually used to increase the number of landing page views and is suitable for advertisers who want to increase the number of website visitors but do not regard sales as their primary goal for the time being. For example, e-commerce companies want to drive traffic to newly launched event pages, so they can choose the traffic objective.
The interaction objective focuses on reaching users who are most likely to interact with posts, and the forms of interaction include likes, comments, shares, and receiving discounts on public pages. This objective helps to increase the popularity of advertising homepages and posts and accumulate fan groups. For advertisers who want to increase user engagement and create a brand community atmosphere, the interaction objective is an ideal choice. For example, when a brand holds an online event, it encourages users to participate in discussions and sharing through interactive ads to expand the influence of the event.
The lead generation goal aims to attract potential customers for the business, and collects information about users who are interested in the product by creating ads, such as email newsletter subscription information or encouraging users to call for consultation. It is suitable for companies that want to obtain potential customer data to support subsequent marketing activities. For example, educational institutions can use lead generation ads to collect contact information of users with training needs for precision marketing.
The app promotion goal is mainly used to attract new users to install the app and continue to use it. For advertisers who promote apps, if they want to increase app downloads and increase their market share, the app promotion goal is a key choice. For example, when game developers launch new games, they use app promotion ads to attract users to download and experience the game.
The sales goal is to guide users to take specific actions on the company’s website, such as adding products to the shopping cart, downloading apps, registering websites, calling business phones or making purchases, etc. It is the most commonly used advertising goal to achieve sales goals. It is suitable for advertisers who want to directly promote product sales through Facebook. For example, during promotional activities, e-commerce companies use sales ads to reach users who are most likely to buy and increase sales.
When choosing advertising targets, companies should make reasonable plans based on their own marketing stages and business goals. In the early stage of brand promotion, you can focus on awareness and traffic targets to increase brand exposure and user traffic; in the mid-term, focus on interaction and potential customer development, accumulate user resources and improve user engagement; in the later stage, focus on sales and application promotion to achieve business conversion and growth. 3.3 Audience positioning
Core audience positioning is based on demographic data (such as age, gender, family income, occupation, education level and region), common interests (interest in certain products, topics or activities) and similar behaviors (reading the same publications or having similar habits). Companies can accurately screen out qualified audience groups based on the target user characteristics of the product. For example, when promoting beauty products to fashionable and avant-garde young women in the workplace, the age can be positioned at 23-35 years old, the gender is female, the occupation is a professional, and the interests are set as fashion, trendy hairstyles and nail art design, etc.
Custom audiences allow companies to reach users who have shown interest in their business or products. Data sources include their own data sources (such as websites, customer lists, app events, offline events, catalogs) and Meta Sources (videos, Instagram accounts, activities, lead forms, instant experiences, Facebook public pages, shopping, Facebook product information). Through custom audiences, companies can conduct precision marketing for users at different stages, such as repurchase marketing for users who have already purchased, recall marketing for users who browsed but did not purchase, etc.
Similar audiences are based on the seed audiences provided by the company (usually 1,000 to 50,000 people) to find new users with similar characteristics. These new users have high potential value and may be interested in the company’s products or services. Companies can create similar audience groups through high-quality seed audiences to expand audience coverage and improve advertising effectiveness.
In order to accurately locate the right audience, companies must first conduct product positioning and clarify the characteristics, advantages and target market of the product. Then, determine the target demand population through market research and analyze their needs, pain points and consumption habits. Next, build a profile of the audience population, including demographic characteristics, interests, hobbies, behavioral habits and other aspects. When determining the audience size, it is recommended to be no less than 10 million to ensure that there are enough potential customers to reach. In addition, companies can also use audience analysis tools, similarweb, adcostly and other tools to obtain more accurate audience data and market information.
In the process of audience targeting, you can also adopt strategies such as broad interest audience targeting, homepage targeting, cascading keyword targeting, group targeting and excluding users. Broad interest audience targeting uses the “include” and “narrow audience range” options to cascade and segment broad words and interest-related words to accurately target the audience; homepage targeting can target specific homepages for advertising to improve the accuracy and interaction rate of the audience; group targeting extracts relevant keywords and tags from the group page and sets up ad groups for targeting; the exclusion user option can exclude certain irrelevant interest word targeting audiences and optimize the audience group.
For B2B marketing, common audience types include IT decision makers, business decision makers, new active business administrators and employers. Companies can choose suitable B2B audiences for advertising based on their own business characteristics and target customer groups. 3.4 Ad Bidding Strategies
The Highest Quantity & Highest Value strategy is automatically bid by Facebook, aiming to get as many impressions as possible and efficiently acquire potential customers who may convert. This strategy is suitable for advertisers who want to spend all their money to obtain a large amount of data, especially for multiple scenarios and new sellers who are new to Facebook advertising. However, due to automatic optimization, the results may be unstable and the effect is difficult to control.
The cost per result target allows advertisers to control the cost per conversion, but if the target is set too low, they may not get enough impressions and miss cost-effective conversions. It is suitable for advertisers who have strict control requirements on the cost per conversion.
The return on advertising cost target helps advertisers control the return on spending and ensure a stable return on investment. However, similar to the cost per result target, if the target is set too high, it will not get enough impressions and miss potential high-quality conversions. It is suitable for companies that focus on the input-output ratio and want to stabilize the return on advertising spending.
The bid cap strategy requires advertisers to set bids manually, and the cost is controllable. However, manual bidding is difficult and requires advertisers to frequently adjust bids according to market conditions. They may also miss opportunities to display to high-quality audiences due to unreasonable bids. It is suitable for merchants who have a deep understanding of the market and conversion rates, can accurately calculate appropriate bids, and want to control display costs.
3.5 Advertisement Display Placements
Facebook has a wide variety of ad placements, covering multiple platforms and different forms. Dynamic placements include Facebook News Feed, Instagram News, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Video News, Facebook Right Sidebar, Instagram Discover, Instagram Shops, Messenger Inbox, Facebook Group News, etc.; Stories placements include Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, Messenger Stories, and Instagram Reels; Video Inserts are distributed in Facebook Video Inserts and Instagram Video Inserts; Search placements are Facebook search results; Message placements are Messenger sponsored messages; In-text placements are Facebook Instant Articles; App and website placements display native, banner and interstitial placements, rewarded video placements, video inserts, etc. through Audience Network. Enterprises can choose appropriate placements based on advertising goals, audience characteristics, and product features, or choose automatic placements to let Facebook’s advertising system automatically allocate budgets based on advertising performance to obtain more display opportunities. 3.6 Ad format analysis
Image ads attract users to visit the target website or app through wonderful pictures, and show the product or brand image in a concise and intuitive way. They are suitable for scenes that highlight the appearance, features or brand logo of the product.
Video ads use dynamic pictures and sound effects to vividly show the characteristics of the product, which can more effectively capture the user’s attention and convey rich information. Video ads are suitable for showing the usage scenarios, function demonstrations or brand stories of the product, and enhance the user’s emotional resonance.
Slideshow ads combine dynamic pictures, sound effects and text to tell the brand story, and can be played smoothly at any network speed. It is suitable for areas with unstable network environment or advertising campaigns that need to attract users with story content.
Carousel ads can display up to 10 pictures or videos in a single ad, and each element can be set with different links, so that users can browse more content by sliding. This ad format is suitable for displaying product series, different styles or multiple selling points, guiding users to explore more.
Collection bar ads use images as carriers to create an immersive experience, allowing consumers to discover, browse and purchase products and services more easily on mobile devices. It provides users with a convenient shopping path and can effectively increase the purchase conversion rate, especially for e-commerce promotion.
Instant experience is a full-screen experience that opens after users click on an ad, which can visually highlight the brand, product or service. By creating instant experience, brands can provide users with richer and more interactive content, increase user engagement and willingness to buy.
Dynamic ads can automatically display relevant product or service information based on user interests and behaviors. For example, showing ads for a specific product to users who have browsed the product before can improve the relevance and targeting of ads, which is suitable for e-commerce companies with a large inventory of products.
When creating advertising creatives, make sure they are targeted and start from the needs and preferences of the audience. For different advertising goals, creative strategies are also different. When building brand awareness, it is necessary to display brand information as soon as possible and convey the value of the service; to attract users to participate in interaction, it is necessary to establish brand trust, guide user interaction through activities and copywriting, and create topics; to encourage users to take action, it is necessary to use event discounts, a sense of urgency, and action buttons with strong appeal to prompt user conversion.
For video ads, pay attention to the rhythm control, preferably 1.5 times the speed, to ensure that key information is delivered in a short time; add text explanations to facilitate users to understand the content of the ad in a muted state; avoid excessive commercialization in the first 3 seconds, and use consumer experience and other methods to attract users; the video content should match the actual situation of the product.
B2B advertising creativity should focus on visualizing products, highlighting the most unique, real and attractive product benefits, and show core advantages in the shortest time. Display the company logo from the beginning, use brand language, color palette and visual effects, and seize the first 2 seconds to convey the main information. 3.7 Facebook Advertising Policy
Facebook advertising review mainly relies on automatic review tools and is usually completed within 24 hours. The review content includes the pictures, videos, texts, target audience information and related landing page information of the ad. Ads can only be delivered normally after passing the review, and will be subject to multiple reviews during the delivery process. If the ad receives a lot of negative feedback after running for a period of time, such as being hidden by the audience or marked as spam, it may also cause the ad to be blocked.
Facebook has strict regulations on the categories of advertising. Tobacco products, unsafe products or tools (such as drugs and medicines), firearms and ammunition, weapons, and adult products are clearly prohibited; alcoholic products, online gambling, health care products, animals and animal products are restricted products that need to follow the policies of different countries and regions. Some of them need to obtain Facebook’s permission and cannot be put on the store. At the same time, some easily confused products such as smoking cessation products and plastic weapon toys are allowed to be placed.
Advertising copy must not contain misleading and deceptive content, such as false or exaggerated descriptions of functional effects, multi-level pyramid schemes, one-cent auctions, etc.; avoid using words that refer to personal characteristics, and avoid behaviors that circumvent policies, such as abusing symbols and using capital letters incorrectly. Excellent advertising copy should be correct and appropriate, clear in business, concise and intuitive, create a sense of urgency, maintain a unified style, and strengthen relevance to the audience and materials.
In terms of advertising materials, it is prohibited to have buttons without actual functions (such as play buttons, action buttons, etc.), personal characteristics (such as personal health, partial close-ups, etc. that may generate negative perceptions), occluding materials, mosaics, and infringing content (such as counterfeit brands, unauthorized use of trademarks, copyrights, privacy rights, and publicity rights, etc.). Best practices include using appropriate aspect ratios (such as 1:1, 4:5, or 9:16), choosing half-body or full-body model images, using original materials as much as possible, clearly and completely displaying products, and clearly introducing the promoted products or services.
In terms of advertising audience targeting, it is necessary to comply with local policies and laws and regulations, not to conduct inappropriate audience targeting or exclusion, avoid using targeting options for improper purposes such as discrimination and harassment, and ensure fairness when promoting discounts or benefits. Companies should select audiences based on business goals, adjust age targeting parameters, improve audience relevance, reduce audience overlap, and reasonably use custom audiences and similar audiences.
Advertising landing pages cannot contain false or exaggerated information, false discounts, and promotion countdowns. The content must be consistent with the advertisement, and the delivery time must be clear. The landing page should function properly, avoiding 404 pages, pages under construction, pages built with images, browser compatibility issues, geographic IP restrictions, and pop-ups. Best practices require that the landing page is closely related to the ad, has a consistent brand image, is easy to navigate, accurately reflects the promoted product or service, the URL can work properly on all browsers, and provides clear product information, delivery methods, and policies.
The feedback score of the Facebook homepage will affect the advertising. If the homepage is created more than 1 year ago, the score is between 1-2 points, the number of people covered will decrease, and if it is less than 1 point, the ad cannot be posted; if it is created less than 1 year ago, it is less than 2 points. At the same time, avoid creating multiple similar homepages that post the same content. Companies should optimize Facebook homepages, ensure that the name, avatar, and background image are closely related to the company and high quality, update posts regularly and actively interact with users, avoid false behavior, ensure that posts are compliant, improve company information, and regularly check user identities and permissions. 3.8 Indicator data analysis and optimization
The bounce rate reflects the proportion of users who exit the webpage without taking any action after clicking on the ad. The lower the bounce rate, the more interested the user is in the landing page and the product, and the higher the quality of the landing page. A high bounce rate may mean that the landing page loads slowly, the content is irrelevant or unattractive, and the landing page needs to be optimized, such as improving the page design, improving the content quality, optimizing the loading speed, etc.
The conversion rate is the percentage of sessions that lead to e-commerce transactions, which represents the user’s interest in the value provided by the advertisement after clicking on the advertisement. The conversion rate is affected by many factors such as product attractiveness, website quality, and traffic quality. To improve the conversion rate, it is necessary to start from optimizing product display, improving website user experience, and accurately targeting the audience.
The number of purchases directly reflects the actual sales results brought by the advertisement and is one of the important indicators for measuring the effectiveness of advertising. By analyzing the changes in the number of purchases, companies can evaluate the effectiveness of advertising strategies, such as adjusting advertising creativity, optimizing audience positioning, and launching promotional activities to increase the number of purchases.
The number of add-ons reflects the number of times users add products to the shopping cart after browsing the landing page, which can reflect the user’s willingness to buy, the rationality of the product price, the attractiveness of the product, and the quality of the landing page. If the add-to-cart rate is low, companies can consider optimizing product prices, improving product descriptions and display methods, and improving the guidance of landing pages.
The number of searches reflects the number of times users search after entering the website, which can effectively show user needs. Companies can understand users’ concerns and needs based on the number of searches and search keywords, adjust the delivery strategy in a timely manner, supplement products that meet user needs, and optimize the website’s search function and product classification.
The average session duration indicates the average time users stay on the website after entering the landing page. The richer and more attractive the website content is, the longer the average session duration will be. Companies can increase users’ stay time on the website and improve user engagement by enriching website content, providing valuable information, and optimizing page layout.
Frequency refers to the average number of times an ad is viewed by an individual. For brand promotion ads, appropriately increasing the frequency of ads can help deepen brand impressions; but for lead generation or e-commerce advertising activities, too high an ad frequency may cause user disgust and needs to be kept at a lower frequency. Companies should reasonably control the frequency of ads based on advertising goals.
CPM (cost per thousand impressions) shows the cost paid for every 1,000 views, which is closely related to the country and audience competition. High-quality ads and high interaction rates can effectively reduce CPM costs. Companies can improve the competitiveness of ads and reduce CPM costs by optimizing ad creatives, improving ad quality, and accurately targeting audiences.
CTR (click-through rate) indicates the percentage of users who click on ads among all users who browse ads. The higher the value, the more interested the audience is in the ad. CTR is affected by multiple factors such as ad creatives, ad words, ad materials, and audience targeting. By optimizing these factors, improving the attractiveness and relevance of ads, CTR can be effectively increased.
CPC (cost per click) shows the main cost paid by ads when users click on them. The higher the relevance of ads, the lower the CPC cost. Optimizing CPC requires improving ad quality, optimizing audience targeting, and improving the matching degree between ads and audiences to reduce the cost per click.
CPA (conversion cost or action cost) shows the cost to be paid for each lead or conversion, which is closely related to ad spending and conversion numbers. Companies can reduce CPA by optimizing ad delivery strategies, improving conversion rates, and reducing ad spending.
ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend) shows the return on advertising investment and is one of the important indicators for measuring the quality of advertising. The higher the ROAS, the greater the profit margin; if it is below a certain level, you may need to shut down the advertising. ROAS is related to indicators such as customer unit price, CVR, CTR, and CPM. The higher the customer unit price, CVR, and CTR, and the lower the CPM, the higher the ROAS. Enterprises should calculate reasonable ROAS targets based on various costs and improve ROAS by increasing product value, optimizing advertising creativity, and audience targeting.