Facebook & Instagram Ads

Facebook Ads, simply put, is advertising on Facebook. The term covers a wide range of tools that allow you to effectively reach potential customers in many ways. When used skillfully, these tools can help you create various types of advertising campaigns – targeting both customers at the top of the sales funnel and those almost ready to make a purchase.

Facebook Ads are placed where your potential customers are. Keep in mind that over 3 billion users have accounts on this social platform. This means that no matter what industry you’re in, you’ll find your target audience here. You need to tap into this potential!

Advertising on Facebook makes it much easier to reach your target audience. You have access to a wide range of ad formats – from videos to simple images or 360 posts.

Facebook Ads can engage, shock, or evoke other emotions through content or format – emotions that positively affect the relationship between the brand and the customer. You can also target any group of people – listeners of a specific radio station, fans of impressionist painting, or individuals who prefer palm oil-free sweets. This ensures you use your advertising budget to reach people with high conversion potential.

Other significant benefits include budget flexibility and the quick response times from customers to social media messages. You also gain considerable freedom in creating ads. You can start or stop your Facebook campaign at any time. Additionally, you can schedule ads to appear at specific hours. This allows you to quickly respond to changes related to your business – weather, calendar dates, or random events that may be relevant from a marketing perspective. All of this increases your chances of acquiring new customers, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of Facebook advertising!

The first reason why Facebook advertising is so effective is its precise targeting of individuals who may be potentially interested in our products or services. There are hundreds of variables to choose from within three main options. So, how do you select the right audience group?

Standard Audiences
This group is built based on demographic data, behaviors, and interests. This targeting method in the Ads Manager provides the most possibilities for audience segmentation. You can reach people who are currently engaged, individuals in a certain age group, or people interested in specific radio stations or magazines. The customization options provide access to all Facebook data, meaning that no matter the preferences or interests, you can reach the people that matter most to you. This leads to high advertising effectiveness.

Custom Audiences
These are individuals who have already interacted with your brand. Custom audiences are a group worth considering when looking for potential customers. Thanks to this option, you can reach people who have already shown interest in your brand. These individuals have previously taken actions related to your brand, such as visiting your website, liking a post on your Facebook page, or downloading your app. Advertising to this group can offer a high return on investment for your business!

Lookalike Audiences
This target group is created based on previously built custom audience groups. Facebook uses data from individuals within the custom group to find similar people across the country or region – typically 1% to 10% of people from these locations. Here’s an example to better understand how this works.

Suppose you have a custom audience group – individuals who visited your website in the last 60 days. This group contains 5,600 people. Each one provides tens of data points – age, gender, interests, location, actions taken, etc. Now, based on this information, you want to create a lookalike audience using Facebook’s Ads Manager.

When creating this group for Facebook advertising, you select the source from which the system should pull data (i.e., you define the parameters on which the new group should be based). You select the group of people who visited your website in the last 60 days.

Using the data from these 5,600 people, Facebook creates a lookalike audience. This group consists of 1% to 10% (depending on your choice) of people from the region, in this case, Poland. If you set the audience size to 1%, you will reach approximately 170,000 people. (Similarly, 10% would represent about 1,700,000 people in Poland). 100% of Facebook users in Poland is around 17,000,000 people.

This way, you can expand your potential customer reach significantly. However, note that this also impacts the cost of Facebook ads. The larger the target audience, the higher the cost of the ad.

Attention! Try not to make your audience group too large. Generally, it is not advisable to create groups exceeding 300,000 people. Such large targets may become “diluted,” meaning too broad, which results in an ad cost disproportionate to the returns generated. Test the audience group size that works best for your ads. In general, when advertising on Facebook, it’s essential to test everything – time, budget, audience, and content.

Facebook also offers a great tool for audience analysis. Audience Insights, as it’s called, shows you what a particular group is interested in. This will also allow you to optimize your ads.

For example, if you want to check what interests teenagers in large Polish cities and which services they most frequently interact with, the fastest way to find this out is through Audience Insights. This tool will provide insights into things like which fashion blogger they follow the most, which cooking show is most popular among them, and what type of music they listen to. You can perform this analysis regardless of location, gender, or age.

It’s a powerful tool that proves invaluable in many situations – especially for Facebook advertising, as well as content marketing and influencer marketing. It allows you to plan ad campaigns that can reach target audiences across various areas.

Another factor contributing to the popularity of Facebook advertising is its easy-to-use interface. But beware! The easier the tools are to use, the more likely you are to waste your advertising budget.

This is often the case, not just with Facebook. However, even someone spending just $100 a month on Facebook Ads, while only having a basic knowledge of the tools, is likely to see business benefits from this form of advertising – especially if the ad is targeted locally.

However, the larger your advertising budget, the more important it becomes to learn the ad editing tools. The better you use them, the more effectively you can optimize ad costs and their impact on profits. This is why many clients choose to hire a professional Facebook Ads agency – both for running Facebook ads and managing their profiles. Such a decision often makes the cost of advertising less important than the significantly higher ROI.

Thanks to the Facebook Ads Manager, you will receive an estimated reach for your campaign before publishing it.

At certain stages of creating ads, you can specify how many times, on average, the audience should see your message. This could be once, three times, or more. You can create ads specifically for reach, but also for other specific goals, such as link clicks, website visits, or building brand awareness.

If you want to create an ad (post) from scratch, depending on your goal, you can create the following:

Video

Present your brand using a video. The video can be up to 240 minutes long, 10 GB in size, and can be either vertical or horizontal (16:9 or 9:16). You can also use 360-degree videos. This is one of the most powerful tools used in modern online marketing.

Image

This is the most commonly used format when setting up a campaign. A single image can be very impactful and result in an optimal cost per conversion. Like videos, images can be vertical or horizontal (16:9 or 9:16). If the image contains text, when creating the ad, you can request a manual review of the content by the platform’s administration – it should take no more than a few hours. It’s worth doing this to avoid having the material rejected by the social media platform.

Slideshow

A slideshow is a video made up of 3-10 images. While it might sound a bit old-fashioned, this format can still be used creatively. One advantage of a slideshow is that it’s easier to create.

Instant Experience

This is an additional ad format that only appears on mobile devices and can be added to any ad format (though it’s a given for the Collection format).

An Instant Experience will open upon clicking the ad, such as a picture or slideshow. Just like with the Collection format, a panel called the “environment” opens, where you can create a mini website-like panel with videos, animations, images, and text. Facebook allows you to create an Instant Experience from scratch or use a ready-made template available in the Ads Manager.

Collection

Collections are “ad sets” that allow you to present multiple images and videos, mostly used for product showcases (a great tool for e-commerce). When the ad is clicked, a scrollable panel (the “environment”) opens, similar to a website (though the user stays within the app). It contains videos, images, and descriptions. A Collection can dynamically display products, similar to a carousel. This is a great format that combines brand presentation with product sales. It’s also used in the real estate industry.

Carousel

Most commonly used for catalog sales, though its potential can also be leveraged for other goals. A carousel consists of several (up to 10) cards with individual square images or videos (recommended ratio is 1×1), which you configure using the Ads Manager. Each card can have a different description, headline, and image/video.

Once you have selected the type of advertising message you want to use to attract the audience, you will proceed to set up the message content, such as texts, links, headlines, etc.

Do you want your Facebook ad to generate the highest possible returns, while preferring not to handle the campaign setup on your own? This is a good approach. Focus on your business, and leave digital marketing to the experts at Verseo. We understand how Facebook’s algorithms work and know how to purchase ads on this platform to achieve maximum ROI. See how the campaign development process works from the ground up!

Defining Campaign Objectives

The first step is always to define the purpose of your ads. Do they aim to increase brand awareness? Facilitate the acquisition of contact data and support lead generation? Or help drive quick product sales for your company? This question must be clarified from the outset.

Selecting the Right Target Audience

The cost per conversion and the price of Facebook ads are influenced by how well the campaign is targeted. It is crucial that the messages are displayed to those who are truly interested. Simply put, this is an important part of our work. Before an ad “lands” on Facebook, we invest considerable effort in understanding your business and the audience for the solutions you offer.

Choosing the Right Ad Format

Video, image, carousel, or collection? This largely depends on the advertising goals you set and your target audience. We select promotional formats and configurations that work best and allow for optimal use of your advertising budget.

Creating Compelling Ad Copy

To effectively target Facebook ads, you must “speak the language of your customers.” It must be persuasive, communicate the greatest benefits, and be clear to those in your target audience. This affects its efficiency and translates into sales.

Designing Attractive Visuals

To achieve advertising goals, you also need to “speak through visuals.” The effectiveness of a Facebook ad depends on whether it stands out among the many other messages. Therefore, it must be eye-catching and “pleasing to the eye.” We know how to achieve this.

Setting the Budget

How much Facebook advertising costs is significant for you. You must plan the budget properly to pay for it. Also, keep in mind that the total budget must include the cost of campaign management. You will know the specific costs at the beginning of our cooperation.

Effective advertising is not just about publishing, but, most importantly, monitoring. Therefore, it is crucial to track how the quality of an ad translates into results.

Campaign Monitoring

After the ads are placed, you need to check their performance using the manager. This includes the number of impressions (and who saw them), as well as how the audience responds to the message. Does it align with the advertising objective? How many conversions does the banner, video, or post generate? If the results are unsatisfactory, changes must be made.

Ad Performance Analysis

The results achieved by the Facebook ad should also be evaluated after the campaign ends. This is when you can finally determine how the cost of the ad relates to the achievement of marketing goals. For example, did brand awareness increase? Is the company’s website receiving more visits? The answers to these questions must be included in the report.

A/B Testing of Ads

A/B testing involves checking the effectiveness of different ad variations and their impact on the “audience network.” These are tested on a smaller audience, and based on the results, the variant that delivers the best outcomes is chosen. This affects the final cost-to-conversion ratio of the ads.

Adjusting the Budget

Sometimes it turns out that a certain promotional format on Facebook performs better than others. In such cases, experts respond in real-time, for example, by increasing the ad budget to generate even higher profits.

Optimizing Ad Targeting

The audience that your messages reach influences the conversion rate. Therefore, specialists continuously analyze whether the people seeing your ads are indeed those who may purchase your product. This ensures that you do not waste impressions on people who will not convert into new customers.

Creating target audiences based on interests, location, job position, age, and many other factors is an excellent tool. This allows you to reach people who have not yet heard of your brand but may potentially be interested in it.

If you are involved in marketing, you know that an audience that is already familiar with your brand or uses it (e.g., by choosing your services/products) is of higher value. This is why remarketing, which targets people who have already interacted with your brand (e.g., by visiting your website), is such an important aspect of this field.

However, to know if a person has visited your site, the website must be properly connected to Facebook’s advertising system. This connection is enabled by the Facebook Pixel.

What is the Facebook Pixel?

The Pixel is a small script, consisting of a few lines of code, that is placed in the header section of your website’s code. The Pixel is a tracking code that checks whether the person who visited the site has a Facebook account that can be linked to them. If they do, they are added to a database, allowing you to later target them with your ads.

Important! The Pixel collects data from the moment it is installed. If you want to create an audience group of people who visited your site in the last 14 days, the Pixel needs to have been active on the site for at least 14 days (the Pixel collects data for up to 180 days).

You don’t need to be a programmer to use and understand the Pixel. You just need to install it on your website once and test whether everything is working properly.

The Pixel is not everything – What are Events?

Before checking if the Pixel works correctly on your website, let’s first explore what Events are.

Once the basic Pixel code is installed on your website, you can build remarketing audiences and target people who visited your site. But what if you want to narrow down this group to people who took specific actions on your site, such as adding a product to the cart or submitting an inquiry on the contact page? This is where Events come in.

With the basic Pixel code, you can target people who visited your site, and with Events, you can target people who took specific actions.

Events are installed on specific pages (they trigger after the page loads) or elements, such as buttons (the event triggers when the button is clicked).

Example Events

ViewContent

 
This event is typically used on product pages, for example, when expanding the product description.

AddToCart

This event should be installed in the cart or on the “add to cart” buttons. Thanks to this event, you’ll know how many people visited/filled the cart.

Purchase

This event should be placed on the “thank you page” after a purchase is made. With it, you can track how many people completed a purchase.

Based on events, you can build audience groups. A good example of using this is targeting ads to people who abandoned their cart (all users from the AddToCart event, excluding those from the Purchase event).

A dynamic ad is one that, based on data about the user from the pixel, shows them relevant content.

Pixel events with appropriate parameters can serve as data sources for dynamic ads using catalogs (the pixel must be connected to the catalog).

Their dynamism lies in adjusting the ad not only to the audience group (as in regular remarketing) but to a specific user—automatically.

Therefore, with dynamic ads, you can reach your remarketing group, which might have 5,000 people, and show each person the product they previously viewed on the website.

However, for the events on the website to convey data on which product a specific person viewed, they must include specific parameters.

To run dynamic ads on Facebook, you need:

• The pixel installed on the website.
• Events installed on the relevant pages (e.g., ViewContent, AddToCart, Purchase).
• Advanced event parameters such as: value, currency, content_ids, content_type, and their corresponding values.
• A connection between the product catalog and the pixel (the pixel must serve as the data source for the catalog).

Let’s be honest, this topic requires a deeper analysis. However, the hard work will reward you with the ability to reach customers more effectively.

How much does advertising on Facebook cost? This is a question that is difficult to answer definitively. The advertising budget can vary. Much depends on your current capabilities and, above all, on the goals you want to achieve. The price of the ad is also important, specifically the cost of showing it to your target audience. Discuss this with our experts!

What benefits do Facebook Ads bring to entrepreneurs?
Facebook advertising is a quick way to reach customers within your industry. This form of promotion also allows you to control the cost of the ad and the goals it helps to achieve.

What are the most important tips for effective Facebook advertising?
Effective Facebook advertising is primarily well-targeted, meaning the content is tailored and then displayed to potential customers.

What are the biggest challenges associated with advertising on Facebook?
Correctly configuring the campaign in terms of target audience, budget, and ad message parameters, which is why it’s worth leaving this task to experts.

What are the most popular types of Facebook ads?
The most popular are graphic ads, meaning images. Video, carousels, and collections are also frequently used.

Which industries in Poland most commonly use Facebook Ads?
This is mainly a promotional method used by B2C companies, including e-commerce. However, entrepreneurs from every industry can find clients here.

What are the most common mistakes made in Facebook ad campaigns?
Attempting to configure the campaign on your own. Without the proper knowledge and experience, this usually results in “wasting the budget.”

What are the best ways to increase the reach of Facebook ads?
You can, for example, use the ability to create a lookalike audience.

What factors have the greatest impact on the effectiveness of Facebook ads?
Properly setting the publication goal and matching the target audience. The next factor influencing effectiveness is the cost of the ad.

What are the most common goals of Facebook ads?
These can include building brand awareness, collecting contact data, or driving direct sales.

What is the minimum advertising campaign budget on Facebook?
The advertising budget is flexible. You can set it to the level that fits your needs.

How can I optimize my Facebook ad targeting?
Do this by collaborating with experts. They can, for example, adjust the way audience groups are created.

What is a good click-through rate (CTR) for a Facebook ad?
This depends on the industry and the advertising goal.

How can I measure the effectiveness of my Facebook ad campaign?
For example, by using monitoring tools in the Ads Manager. However, the best indicator of effectiveness is an increased number of orders/quote requests.