What a Serial Entrepreneur Learned From Spending Nearly $1M on Facebook Ads When it comes to Facebook ads, you might feel like you've won the lottery if your ads perform well. However, you couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, I've spent more than $900K on Facebook ads in over 4 years. Facebook ads are a complex and nuanced form of marketing. Spending close to a million on ecommerce, real estate, festivals, mobile apps, and much more, I can say that I've learned a thing or two about running successful Facebook ads. 1. Keep a bigger audience. When people start running Facebook ads, they often try to have the most laser-targeted audience and often end up aggregating around 100,000 people. This might seem like a big audience, but it really isn't. What's more? By targeting "interests" people have, you have to remember that those are not set in stone. For example, Facebook thinks I like hunting but I've never done it before. That's why it's important to target a larger audience of at least one million people at first and let Facebook find people who like what you're promoting. 2. Retarget with a large enough audience. Don't start segmenting your retargeting at the beginning. For example, you could have segmented audiences of people who visited your website in the last 7 days, 14 days and 21 days, but you shouldn't just yet. I suggest regrouping all your custom audiences at the beginning to make sure your audience...

The Facebook 20% Rule: How to Check Your Ads With a Text Overlay Tool The best billboards demand your attention with bold fonts, in-your-face messages, and bright, eye-catching graphics. The best Facebook ads take the exact opposite approach. If you want to reach and engage with potential customers on Facebook, you need to create ads that blend as seamlessly as possible into the rest of the content on their newsfeeds. This means focusing on simple, high-quality images, straightforward messages, and most importantly: minimal text. Facebook knows that the best performing ads include images with little to no text, which is why they created the 20% rule. This rule states that in order to run an image-based ad on Facebook, your image(s) must contain less than 20% text. For a complete guide to creating Facebook ads, check out our article here. It's important to note that the 20% rule only applies to text that covers images attached to your ad. It does not include text on your ad outside of images, like the description copy or call-to-action button. There are a few exceptions to the 20% rule, including images of book covers, album covers, event posters, video games, and some product images that contain text (e.g., a cereal box). Text-based logos are not an exception to the 20% rule, and will be counted as text when Facebook reviews your images. So, why exactly does the Facebook 20% rule exist? It all comes down to what users want to see...

The 11 Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives and How to Choose What’s Right For Your Business Facebook ads are a great tool to get your message in front of the platform’s 2.5 billion monthly users. With such a large audience, you can understand why the platform is attractive to advertisers. Over 7 million advertisers to be exact. To succeed and maximize your return on investment (ROI) among so many audience members and competitors, start with why you want to use Facebook ads and what you hope to achieve with them. After all, your campaign objective is the first thing Facebook will ask you about when you go to create an ad. Your Facebook campaign objective — meaning the action you want someone to take after they see your ad — is one way the platform determines who should be shown your ad. Within Facebook Ads Manager, there are 11 objectives spanning the three overarching categories of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and conversions. Source With so many options, the thought of determining which objective is best for you may feel a bit overwhelming, but no sweat — we’ll break them down below. Check out HubSpot's free course on Facebook Ads Training: How to Build Great Ads & Audiences Awareness Facebook Campaign Objectives Awareness objectives help generate interest in your product or service. 1. Brand Awareness As you may have guessed, these ads help increase people’s awareness of your business. If you’re looking to introduce your brand to new...

How to Run Facebook Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Facebook When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked. Are you targeting the right people? Are your image dimensions to scale? Are you running the right type of ad? If we're being honest, it can get a little confusing. With more than 2.6 billion people using Facebook every month, and nearly 1.7 billion users every day, Facebook offers up a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their organic efforts. The trouble is, with both an investment of time and money on the line, there's not much room for oversight. To help, we've put together a checklist to help you keep all of your campaign details straight. Or watch this short video on how to increase the effectiveness of your ads and budget. These will help ensure that you're tapping into the right audience with the right ad at the right time.   Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements: Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets. Ad sets. If you're targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you'll need an individual ad set for each. Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy, images, etc. With that terminology out of the way,...

The Ins and Outs of Facebook Landing Pages How many times have you interacted with an ad on Facebook and gotten lost down a rabbit hole? If you're like me, your answer is probably up in the dozens. I could click on an ad about ice cream, and five minutes later, find myself looking at YouTube videos of homemade sundaes. Sometimes, though, I come across an ad that's seamless — They're quick to grab my attention, and it tells me everything I need to know when I reach the landing page. This morning, for example, I checked my timeline. I came across this ad while scrolling, and because I saw my favorite colors in the ad, I had to click on the image. The landing page wasn't busy. In fact, the simplicity caught my attention. All the page had was text, an image, and a CTA. I noticed how the ad and landing page were centered around the same product. It was effective because its only purpose was to get me to fill out the free trial offer, and that's exactly what I did. After all, I wanted to track my personal Instagram posts. As far as Facebook landing pages go, this one was great. Have you ever made a landing page specifically for Facebook ads? If the thought of creating another landing page just for social media sounds like a burden you'd rather avoid, don't worry. In most cases, you won't need to make more...

A/B Testing on Facebook: How to Do It Right According to HubSpot research, Facebook is the top distribution channel for content, and provides the biggest ROI for marketers. In fact, over half of marketers agree that Facebook is where they see the most ROI, and Facebook Advertising is one of the top features for hitting those goals. Are you one of the marketers that can relate? To illustrate, do you always have a tab devoted to Facebook Advertising efforts? Is one of your daily tasks to check the performance of your landing page ads? Further, are you testing those ads before they get published? Facebook offers so many ways to test the performance of your ads before they go live. One of the most popular tools Facebook offers is A/B testing. A/B testing, or split testing, is a term used to describe the process of running marketing experiments to see which version connects better with your audience. Usually, they're tested simultaneously, and the variables can be anything from layout, copy, or multimedia. A/B testing is a very popular marketing method because it gives marketers an idea of what types of ads or UX visuals earn the highest conversion rates. Essentially, if you run an A/B test, you can begin to identify the performance of a piece of content before publishing. Here, let's dive into how you can A/B test your marketing ads on Facebook. A/B Testing Facebook Ads On Facebook, you can create A/B tests in multiple ways....

A/B Testing on Facebook: How to Do It Right According to HubSpot research, Facebook is the top distribution channel for content, and provides the biggest ROI for marketers. In fact, over half of marketers agree that Facebook is where they see the most ROI, and Facebook Advertising is one of the top features for hitting those goals. Are you one of the marketers that can relate? To illustrate, do you always have a tab devoted to Facebook Advertising efforts? Is one of your daily tasks to check the performance of your landing page ads? Further, are you testing those ads before they get published? Facebook offers so many ways to test the performance of your ads before they go live. One of the most popular tools Facebook offers is A/B testing. A/B testing, or split testing, is a term used to describe the process of running marketing experiments to see which version connects better with your audience. Usually, they're tested simultaneously, and the variables can be anything from layout, copy, or multimedia. A/B testing is a very popular marketing method because it gives marketers an idea of what types of ads or UX visuals earn the highest conversion rates. Essentially, if you run an A/B test, you can begin to identify the performance of a piece of content before publishing. Here, let's dive into how you can A/B test your marketing ads on Facebook. A/B Testing Facebook Ads On Facebook, you can create A/B tests in multiple ways....

The 5-Step Process HubSpot Uses to Optimize Facebook Advertising Costs When Mark Zuckerberg shocked the digital marketing world with his announcement that Facebook would overhaul its algorithm to let users engage with their friends and family more and less with brands, the social media giant’s CPM skyrocketed 122% -- the highest spike in Facebook ad prices over the previous 14 months. Today, organic and paid reach are still flatlining, causing ad costs to balloon to unprecedented levels. And in a space where advertising has historically been cheap, how can marketers sustain their revenue without having to increase their Facebook ad budget? One word: optimization. In a nutshell, ad optimization is getting the maximum bang for your buck for every single dollar you spend distributing content. To do this, you need to constantly test your Facebook ad strategy and use data to course correct it enough to maximize your results every time you send out an ad. There are a number of ads tools available that can help -- many of which are free. But still, ad optimization is easier said than done. To help you implement an efficient and effective Facebook advertising strategy, we'll flesh out HubSpot's five-step process for optimizing Facebook advertising costs. Read on to learn about our approach to Facebook advertising. The 5-Step Process HubSpot Uses to Optimize Facebook Advertising Costs 1. Choose a campaign objective. From a fifty-thousand foot view, we usually pursue two types of Facebook advertising campaigns: direct response and branding. Direct...