42 Proven Tips About Facebook Advertising

We were hosting a Facebook advertising mastermind in San Diego recently and I had an opportunity to meet about 3 dozen active Facebook marketers.  Since I love to write, I wanted to ask them all about some unique proven tips that they may have and would like to share regarding their experiences with Facebook advertising.  The following is a long list of 42 tips that will benefit those using the paid marketing platform of the social media giant.

How To Advertise On Facebook For Free

Everyone loves FREE!  But you typically get what you pay for.

Posting from your Facebook Business Page is a great way to promote your business, products, and services, however, you probably won’t reach that many people.  Since February of 2015, Facebook has drastically reduced the reach rate (the amount of Fans who actually see your post) to about 2%.

This stat means that if you have 20,000 fans on your site and you post something, only 2%, or 400 people will see it.

So does this mean you shouldn’t post on you Fan Page?  No, you should still post with the goal of engaging your members.

Here are some tips on how to advertise on Facebook for free using Facebook Pages:

1)  Pick A Vanity URL – with Facebook, you can choose your own, easy to remember URL.  This vanity URL will make it easy for people to find you or your company.  For example, our Facebook URL is https://www.facebook.com/socialmediaadgenius, which is easy for people to find and remember.  The easier it is to find, the more likely people are to Like your page (in fact, feel free to go to our Page now and ‘LIKE’ it if you haven’t already).  To set your own, go to Admin Panel > Edit Page > Update Info.

2)  Completely Fill Out Your ‘About’ Page – Facebook Pages for businesses rank well in Google if optimized properly.  Here’s a helpful tip: use the info in your ‘about us’ section of your website to complete this Facebook section.  You may then link back to your website.  Within the same area that you’d update your About section (Admin Panel > Edit Page > Update Info), update the Description, Mission, Awards and Products, filling it with relevant keywords.

3)  Design A Strategy For Posting – most newbies to Facebook start posting with the goal of promoting their product or service.  This flawed strategy doesn’t work because you quickly become boring to people.  Rather than being promotional, your goal should be to post with the intent of getting people to engage with you, or ‘Like’, comment, & share your content.

4)  How To Advertise on Facebook Effectively Using The 10 x 3 x 1 Posting Strategy – This strategy assumes that you are making 2 posts a day for 7 days.

• 10 posts – purely engagement posts.  These are infographics, cartoons, images, jokes, fill in the blank questions, trivia, etc…  The goal is simply to get people to find you interesting so they will engage with you and your posts will show up on their news feed.  These posts can be a mixture of generic (entertainment industry, breaking news, books, etc…) as well as industry specific.  In real estate, for example, we like to post pictures of unique looking houses and ask our fans to ‘sell this house’ by providing a unique one liner.  This post has become our most popular types of posts because people love coming up with funny one liners.
• 3 posts – this is industry specific news.  Find articles from news sites (or videos & infographics) and share this information.  This part of the strategy accomplishes two goals:  1)  you’re attracting people who are interested in your industry and 2) you’re becoming credible since you are providing valuable information.  Since you’re promoting links from other well known news sites, you’re not seen as being promotional, which helps you gain trust.
• 1 post – the ‘money’ post.  To this point, you’ve been entertaining & credible while sharing information relevant to your Fans.  Now is your one post dedicated to getting people to your landing page.

Don’t make the mistake of being overly self-promotional.  Following this 10 x 3 x 1 will give your money posts the biggest bang for its buck.

5)  Create A Marketing Calendar – once you’ve figured out what your 10 x 3 x 1 strategy will be, create a calendar detailing what you will post each day at what times.  Then, follow this religiously!  If necessary, use a  third party software to assist you in scheduling these posts.

But if you want people to opt in or buy, then you’ll need to look a paid advertising.  This article will be dedicated to showing you ways to get the best bang for your buck out of Facebook Marketing.

6)  Use The Call To Action Button On Your Cover Photo – Facebook now allows pages to use a Call To Action button for it’s cover photo.  The cover photo is an 815 x 351 advertisement for your product or service.  Adding the CTA button will help you get more clicks to your website, so make sure you’re adding it in your image!

7)  Use A Recognizable Profile Image – One of the biggest mistakes a business makes when creating a Fan Page is to use a text logo as their profile image.  Remember, while you’re uploading a 180×180 image that looks perfectly readable on your Fan Page, your image will reduce to a small thumbnail in other people’s news feed.  Therefore, I recommend using an image that’s relevant to your business that is also unique.  For example, for our Fan Page, we use our small ‘Einstein’ avatar.  It’s unique to us and is easily recognizable on people’s news feeds.

One of the biggest disadvantages of Facebook Pages is the fact that the reach is so small.  To really provide the best Facebook marketing solutions, you will want to use the Facebook Ads Platform.

What Is The Facebook Advertising Platform?

Facebook has over 1 billion users on it’s social network, and more than 2 million small businesses are advertising to them.  Can your business afford not to participate in this ad platform?

With Facebook Ads, you’ll be able to use their incredible targeting capabilities to do the following:

• Increase online traffic and conversions
• Find your target customers among the 699 million people on Facebook everyday
• Drive people to your website with one click from the most engaging place on Facebook
• Measure how your ads are performing, and optimize them for even higher returns

8)  The simplest way to use the Facebook Ads platform is a sponsored story.  When you notice that you’re getting great engagement on a particular Facebook post, offer, event, etc. then this activity will trigger a post, or “story,” that the user’s friends (and their friends) may then see in their News Feed. These “stories” are generated naturally but are often buried in the News Feed. Opting for sponsored stories basically means you are paying to increase the likelihood that these stories will be seen in the news feed!

Facebook Advertising Guidelines

Don’t get crushed by Facebook because you didn’t follow the Ads Guidelines!

Before you advertise on Facebook, you will want to understand the rules.  Failure to adhere to Facebook’s policies can result in your ad account shutting down.  Here are some of the most common reasons for ads being denied / accounts being shut down and what you can do to be compliant with the social network’s guidelines:

9)  Always Read Facebook Advertising Terms & Conditions – prior to placing an ad, always read this section.  Facebook is constantly updating it’s rules, and reading this first will save you much time, money, and frustration.  Trust me when I say this:  there’s nothing more frustrating then planning out a campaign, creating multiple images & copy, implementing, and spending hours on this process only to violate a policy that was listed under Terms & Conditions.

10)  Have A Detailed Privacy Policy – Facebook requires you to have a privacy policy that details what exactly you are doing with people’s information.  In addition, if you are using Facebook Conversion Pixels or Retargeting Customers, then you must state this in your privacy policy, as well as provide information as to how members can opt out of this.

11)  Understand The Facebook Image Ads Guidelines – what does Facebook consider risque and inappropriate?  Also, if incorporating text, you’ll want to be aware of their ‘20% rule’.  This 20% rule means that ads images cannot contain more than 20% text on the ad.  I’ve found this to be the most common reason for ad disapproval.  If you use power editor, Facebook now tells you if your ad violates this guideline prior to uploading (which is a time saving blessing).  However, not all of Facebook’s services are rolled out at once.  If you don’t have this function on Power Editor yet, if you use Ads Manager, or if you’re in doubt about the text percentage, then you can upload your image here and see if it will violate Facebook’s image ads guidelines or not:  http://www.social-contests.com/check-image/

12)  Advertising On Facebook Using Personal Characteristics Is Forbidden – while Facebook has incredible targeting capabilities, it does not want you stating in your advertisements that you are using them.  Here is what Facebook specifically has to say about using its attributions:  Ads may not assert or imply, directly or indirectly, within the ad content or by targeting, a user’s personal characteristics within the following categories:

• race or ethnic origin;
• religion or philosophical belief;
• age;
• sexual orientation or sexual life;
• gender identity;
• disability or medical condition (including physical or mental health);
• financial status or information;
• membership in a trade union;
• criminal record; and
• name

(Read More At https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php)

13)  Other Facebook Ad Requirements For Images and Copy – Ads will be denied (and accounts possibly closed) based on user feedback.  If people are leaving negative comments, hiding the ads from their news feed, deleting them, or sending complaints to Facebook, then these ads probably aren’t meeting the Facebook ads requirements and will be denied.  Here are 6 examples of ads that may violate community standards:

• A.    Illegal Activity – Ads may not constitute, facilitate or promote illegal activity.
• B.    Harassment – Ads may not insult, attack, harass, bully, threaten, demean or impersonate others.
• C.    Hate Speech – Ads may not contain “hate speech,” whether directed at an individual or a group, based on membership within certain categories. These categories include, but are not limited to, race, sex, creed, national origin, religious affiliation, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or language.
• D.    Minors – Ads targeted to minors must not promote products, services, or content that is inappropriate, illegal, or unsafe, or that exploits, misleads, or exerts undue pressure on the age groups targeted.
• E.    Sex/Nudity – Ads may not contain adult content, including nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.
• F.    Shock Value – Ads may not be shocking, sensational or disrespectful, or portray excessive violence.

14) How To Write Effective Facebook Ads Without Violating Their Ad Guidelines.  The video below is useful if you’ve had your account shut down and need to get it back.  The folks involved in this Google Hangout spent over a combined $10 million on Facebook advertising last year, so they are definitely the experts in the field of Facebook Marketing and how to be compliant.

Tips On How To Advertise On Facebook With Facebook Ads

15)  Use The Facebook Ads Manager Platform: Facebook Ads Manager is where you can create & manage your Facebook ads. From the Ads Manager, you can do the following:

• Create Facebook Like campaigns & ads
• View all of your campaigns, ad sets and ads
• Stop or restart your campaigns, ad sets and ads
• Make changes to your bids and budgets
• Access and export your ad performance reports

16)  Use Facebook’s Power Editor.  According to Facebook, power editor is… “our bulk ads creation and management tool, tailored specifically for large advertisers. Power Editor is our best tool for advertisers who work at scale and need precise control of their campaigns.

17)  Choose the best advertising objective for your campaign.  The advertising objectives you can choose from are:

• Clicks to Website: Send people to your website.
• Website Conversions: Increase conversions on your website. You’ll need a conversion pixel for your website before you can create this ad.
• Page Post Engagement: Boost your posts.
• Page Likes: Promote your Page and get Page likes to connect with more of the people who matter to you.
• App Installs: Get installs of your app.
• App Engagement: Increase engagement in your app.
• Offer Claims: Create offers for people to redeem in your store.
• Local Awareness: Reach people near your business.
• Event Responses: Raise attendance at your event.
• Video Views: Create ads that get more people to view a video.

18)  Use The Best Ads Platform – there are 3 main types of advertisements that you may run on Facebook:  news feed, mobile, and right hand column ads.

• Desktop News feed Ads – these types of ads are the most common ads as they will appear on the news feed of a users’s desktop or laptop computer.  The character limit for a headline is 25 characters and, if you’re using Ads Manager, the character limit for copy is 90.  However, if you use Power Editor, you have unlimited copy characters (though 500 is recommended, as everything thereafter is truncated).  Below is an illustration what consists of a news feed ad:

Another benefit of desktop news feed ads not illustrated above is the link description.  Located under the headline and above the CTA button (item 5), you can have up to 3 lines of description about the image & advertisement to help further sell the user on clicking the link.

• Mobile Ads – these are ads that are specifically designed for showing up on a person’s mobile device.  The biggest design difference, when compared to desktop news feed, is that there is no description box under the headline.

Below is an illustration of the mobile news feed design:

•  Right Hand Column Ad – right hand column ads are simple and quick display ads that show up on the right hand side of the desktop news feed.  These have an absolute character limit of 25 for the headline and 90 for the text.  In our experience, these types of ads are best used for retargeting or video ads only.  Below is an illustration of what makes up a right hand column ad.

How Much Does It Cost To Advertise On Facebook?

In order to understand the cost of advertising on Facebook, you must understand some of the vernacular associated with ads.  Here are a few terms with which to familiarize:

Actions – number of engagements associated with your ads.  For example, 2 page likes, 2 comments and 1 web click would be counted as 5 actions.

• Audience – this is a group of people who can potentially see your ads.
• Budget – the maximum amount you’re willing to spend on each campaign.  You can set daily budget or campaign budgets.
• CPA – Cost Per Acquisition – the cost it takes to acquire a customer who purchases a product or service.
• CPM – Cost Per Mille (mille is Latin for Thousand) -> this means that it is the cost that you pay per thousand impressions.  Each time your ad is shown on one of the Facebook ad platforms, it counts as an impression.  Notice, this has nothing to do with whether or not your ads was clicked… just shown in the news feed or right hand column.
• CPC – Cost Per Click is when you bid how much you are willing to pay for a click on your ad.  Typically, Facebook will suggest a bid that would allow you to win an auction among advertisements similar to yours.  While Facebook always provides you with a bid range, you can always raise your bid over their suggested amounts.  In fact, we recommend bidding at a higher rate than they recommend… this strategy doesn’t mean that they will charge that amount, but your high bid will get accepted before others, so it’s a great bidding technique.
• Cost Per Conversion – The average cost for each person who opts in on your website as a result of your ad.
• Cost Per Website Click – The average cost for each link click you’ve received from your ad.

19)  Ultimately, for you to have success in Facebook marketing, you will want to know the lifetime value of a customer (not just at acquisition, but any repeat sales & upsells).  From there, you can reverse engineers your costs and determine what you’re willing to pay per opt in.

How To Manage Your Facebook Advertising Cost

Tips On Managing Your Facebook Costs

20)  Avoid Suffering From Paralysis By Over Analysis – If one ad campaign is giving you a $2.50 cost per website click and the second ad campaign is giving you a $3.00 cost per website click, which campaign is performing better?  Now what if the first campaign has a 10% conversion rate ($25 per opt in) and the second had a 20% conversion rate ($15 per opt in)… which one is better?  Too many times, people focus on the cost per click, cost per impression, cost per website click, click thru rate, etc…  But the truth is, the only real measurement that you required to understand in order to run profitable ads is….

21)  …Your Cost-Per-Acquisition (HINT: The Most Important Cost You Need To Manage) – Cost-Per-Acquisition is the one number you need to watch. It is the cost of acquiring one new customer. All of the other cost numbers are just parts of the equation for calculating your final cost of getting one new customer.  Here’s how to calculate it:  CPA= (Total Ad Costs/ Total Customer Acquisitions)

Advertising On Facebook With Videos

Tips For Running Profitable Facebook Video Ads

Did you know that 80% of your online visitors will watch a video, while only 20% will actually read content in its entirety?  With this statistic, it’s no surprise that video ads on Facebook perform very well.  Here are a couple of tips for running video ads on Facebook:

22)  Upload Your Videos Directly To Facebook – the difference between uploading the video to Facebook versus posting a YouTube link is about 30% (based on our experience).  This stat makes sense because Facebook would prefer to keep people on its network rather than having their customers leave to visit YouTube.  Also, autoplay has an impact on people watching ads.  Finally, the video has dimensions of 1200 x 628 when you directly upload, versus an image about half that size when you post a link.

23)  Set Your Goal Prior To Choosing Your Campaign Objective – now this is a big topic in our Agency.  What is the goal of your video campaign?  You goal should be one of three things… 1)  get people to watch the video, 2)  get people to watch the video and click your link, or 3)  get people to see your video ad and opt in.  Option 1 should be the objective ‘video views’.  Option 2 should be the objective ‘clicks to website’.  Option 3 will be the objective ‘website conversions’.

24)  Keep Your Videos Short – did you know that (according to Rhythm Insights) 88% of people will watch a Facebook video ad to completion if it’s less than 30 seconds?

25)  Use The Mobile Platform – online video now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic and up to 69 percent of traffic on certain networks. (Bytemobile Mobile Analytics Report)

26)  Retargeting – using video ads on Facebook for retargeting is a great way to specifically re-invite those people who have visited your website but not opted in or purchased.

27)  Call To Action Button – if you use power editor, you can link a call to action button to your website at the end of your video!

Use These Facebook Targeted Ads Tips To Maximize Your Results

Facebook’s targeting capabilities are one of the top in the ads industry, and the time & effort that you put into creating your customer avatar, the better your Facebook marketing results will be.  Here are some of our ‘best practices’ when it comes to running ads on Facebook:

28)  Create Facebook Ads Targeting Your Existing Members Using A Custom Audience – upload a list of customer emails (or phone numbers) to Facebook.  Facebook will then allow you to create an ad and specifically target these individuals.  Here’s how it works:

• Go to your Ads Manager.
• Select Audiences from the left side and click Create Audience.
• Choose whether you’d like to upload your Custom Audience through MailChimp or a data file.
• If you’re uploading a file, create a .CSV file in Excel with a customer list you want to create a Custom Audience with using email addresses. The document should have a single column of data with no heading.
• Follow the required steps to upload your Custom Audience.

So what can you do with a Custom Audience Campaign?  Here are three tips to targeting your Facebook ads with this tool:

29)  Target Those Who Don’t Open Your Emails – segment your list to those who don’t open your emails and create a specific ad for these individuals.

30)  Target Non Buyers.  Do you have people on your list that have opted in for a VSL, ebook, webinar, etc… but never purchased?  You can upload the list, create a custom audience, and create ads specifically for these individuals. 

31)  Target your direct mail list.  Do you send out direct mail?  Have your list company add emails or phone numbers to the list, upload to Facebook, create a custom audience, and you know have an additional marketing tool.

32)  Create A Lookalike Audience – after you create a customer audience, you can choose to create a Lookalike Audience that targets people who are similar to your Custom Audience list.   Facebook looks at the common qualities of the people in your source audience, such as demographics and interests, and then find the people in the country you specify who “look like” your source audience the most.  These Lookalike audiences help you advertise to people who are most similar to your existing, current customers.   To create a Lookalike Audience from Ads Manager:

• Go to Ads Manager and then click Audiences.
• Click Create Audiences in the top right and then select
• Create a Lookalike Audience.
• Select your source (any Custom Audience, conversion pixel or Facebook Page), choose the country where you’d like to find a similar set of people, and then select your desired audience size with the slider.
• Click Create Audience.

You can choose to optimize any type of Facebook ad for “Similarity” or “Greater reach.  Here’s how Facebook differentiates the two options:

• When you optimize for Similarity, your lookalike audience will include the top 1% of people in your selected country who are most similar to your custom audience. The reach of this new audience will be smaller, but the match will be more precise. This option is best when you want a very specific match or have a limited budget.
• When you optimize for Greater Reach, your lookalike audience will include the top 5% of people in your selected country that are similar to your custom audience, but with a less precise match. This option is best if you want to get your message in front of more people who are likely to be interested in your business.

33)  Layer Your Targeting – in addition to custom or lookalike audience, you can further target, or ‘layer’ your targeting by using various targeting parameters.  Here are other targeting parameters that you should consider when building your ad campaigns:

• Standard Demographics:
  • Age
  • Geo
  • Device level (iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy, iPad, etc.)
  • OS (iOS6, JellyBean, etc.)
  • Location
  • Jobs
  • Education Level
  • Relationship Status
• Interest Based Targeting:
  • Precise Interests
  • Broad Categories
  • Partner Categories
  • Similar Apps
  • Relatable Brands
  • Technology
  • Music
  • Sports
  • Fashion

34)  Use Conversion Tracking Pixels – According to Facebook … A conversion pixel is a piece of HTML code that places a blank 1×1 pixel image on your website. When someone visits a page of your website where you have installed a conversion pixel, the pixel will ping Facebook and record their visit and information such as whether they saw any of your ads. Conversion pixels are used to to track if a person has landed or converted on a specific web page (ex: adding a product to a cart or clicking a button to buy a product). (read more:  https://www.facebook.com/help/447834205249495/).  You will want to put a tracking pixel on every page that you are sending traffic.

Facebook Advertisement Images Specs

While there are many factors that go into a successful Facebook ad, probably the most important part of the ad is the image.  Understanding the exact specs for different types of Facebook platforms will be extremely important.  There’s nothing worse than creating an awesome image and only having 75% of the image show because the sizing is off!

Thanks to the good folks at Social Adstool for putting together the infographic below detailing all the image and text specs:

3 Bonus Facebook Marketing Tips

40)  Always Be Testing:  Continuously testing is crucial as you setup your campaigns. The fact is that you never know what’s going to work until you test & verify results.  You want to fully understand which ad specs work best for the audience you desire to reach and which ad create performs the best. In order to do so, you should create multiple ad campaigns and identify which works best and why and then continue to optimize from there. Here are some simple items you should always be testing:

• Image
• Headline
• Copy
• Targeting Parameters
• Platforms
• Short creative vs. long creative
• Video vs Image
• Call to Actions

41)  Proper Testing Mindset – when I met Dan Kennedy at the Kentucky Derby a few years back, he gave me some mind-altering advice on dealing with testing: “You never fail when you test.  You successfully prove what works and what doesn’t work.”  The key is to take action on testing and then take action on the results.  You don’t have to wait for everything to be ‘perfect’ (perfection never happens) nor should you expect to get it right the first time.  To paraphrase Thomas Edison… I never got it right, I just ran out of ways to do it wrong!

42)  Avoid Micromanagement – In the land of direct mail, it may take you 30 days and thousands of dollars to get results on your direct mail piece.  In the land of Internet marketing, it may take you 30 days and thousands of dollars to get the results of your online marketing campaigns.  The difference, though, is that you can turn off a campaign and stop spend at any point with Facebook Marketing.  However, it doesn’t mean that you should do this.  In fact, the biggest mistake I see is people stopping a campaign after $10 spend or 2 days of testing. You must give Facebook advertisements a chance to run its course before determining whether or not it’s successful.

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Nick Bridges

Nick is an Award Winning web designer, is also the Creative Director for the Agency, assisting in areas like funnel creation, copywriting, Landing Page development, and more. Nick also oversees all of the technical components of the creation and implementation of Social Media Ad Genius.

Latest posts by Nick Bridges (see all)

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