Are your Facebook Ads working well for you?  If you aren’t choosing the right type of ad to match your goal, your ads may be missing the mark.  Which means you are wasting your money.  And we don’t want that.

Many clients I work with are posting something on their Timeline and then just clicking Boost Post to push that post into the News Feed.  That isn’t always the best option.

The Boost Post is really best for getting more engagement on that particular post.  It doesn’t always work to drive traffic to a website if that is what you are looking to do.

Let’s dive into some of the options that you have.  Note that I’m not including the all the Power Editor  options you have because I find that you can be very effective with most of your goals just by using the Facebook Ads Manager.  But I do like using the Custom Audiences in Power Editor to help you do some advanced targeting.

Facebook’s changes to the Ads Manager has made your choices a little clearer.  To get to the Ads manager, just click on the wheel in the upper right and then select Manage Ads or you can go right to Create Ad.  You can also access the Ads Manager directly from https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/  Side note:  Even if you are creating an ad for a business you have to create the ad from your personal profile.  Each personal profile can be a manager of several different Ad accounts (see my post on 2 essential steps to running a Facebook ad for a client)

Once you have selected Create Ad, you see these choices:

 

And you also have the choices for the Boost Post right from your Timeline.

 

Given these choices, here is a handy graphic to help you make sense of how to match your specific goal to some of the Facebook Ad options you have:

Let’s dissect these options just a bit

Engagement of your Current Fans

The Boost Post option is not a bad way to go to engage your current fans.  One of the issues is that you can only select the target as your Fans and their Friends.  So this option works better if you think that your Fans friends will also be interested in your business.  If you are local business this is a good choice.

Another way to go with focusing on your fans only is to use a Promoted Post which is the Page Post Engagement selection in the Ads Manager.  Once you have selected the exact post you want to promote, you can select that only your fans see this ad.

 

Remember that any Boosted post or Promoted post that has an image (even within the link) has to comply with the 20% maximum text rule!  Use the Text Overlay Tool to measure the percentage of text in your image.

 New Likes

There are a couple ways to use ads to get new Likes and I have tested them and have had different results for different niches.  So I encourage you to test what works for you.

If you select Page Likes in the Ads Manager, you then get to add text to encourage new Likes.

Or you can use the Promoted Post area that is available right from the Page itself.  I’ve done some recent testing on this and you can add some targeting so that you can reach your perfect demographic.  Not all the targeting is available so I would just test this with a small budget first to make sure you are getting good conversions.

 

Convert Subscribers to Fans

You may be interested in growing your Facebook fans with the people who already love you – your e-mail subscribers.  But sometimes sending out an e-mail message with a “Like us on Facebook” doesn’t always work.

I like using Custom Audiences to do this.  Take a look at this post I wrote on How to Analyze Your E-mail List with the Facebook Power Editor.  Now it’s even easier to upload a Custom Audience right in the Ads manager area.  Just go to Audiences and click Create Audience.  Upload your e-mails and then you can use the audience in the Targeting to only advertise to them.

 

The other thing you can do is to run a contest with a Like-gate on the contest tab so that before people enter, they have to Like your Page.  Then you can e-mail your subscribers to come and enter the contest.

Increase E-mail Subscribers

The best way to make sure you are getting a return on your Facebook ads is to set up a Website conversion ad.  To do this you use a Conversion Pixel.  I’m not going to give you all the steps in this post or it would be crazy-long.  I’ll just give a quick plug to tune in to my free Facebook Advertising Secrets webinar on Tuesday February 25th.  We’ll talk more then 🙂

 

You can also use some of the other options that I’ve mention with the Facebook contest (I wrote a guest post about this on Jon Loomer’s site:  How to Engage Your Audience and Grow Your E-mail List with Facebook Contests).

If you have a custom tab on your Facebook Page that includes an e-mail signup, you can run an ad that specifically has people go to that landing tab.

 

If you don’t have a custom tab yet with your e-mail optin, read how you can easily create one here:  8 Apps to Enhance Your Facebook Page

You can also run a Facebook Offer to grow your e-mail list.  You just need to send the traffic for the offer to your freebie.

 

Event Promotion

If you have created a Facebook Event, you can advertise it through Facebook Ads.  But the Ads only appear on the sidebar and not in the News Feed so you will be missing all of the mobile users.  But I’ve recently been running Event ads and they’ve actually been converting quite well.

The other way to promote your event is to either send people to a Website or use the Website Conversion if you have a “thank you” page where you can install the Conversion Pixel after people register.

Sales

Straight selling from Facebook can be tricky.  People aren’t always looking to buy something when your ad comes through their News Feed even if you are doing your targeting right.

The Website Conversion method is best so that you can track if your ads are working.

But you can also use a Promoted Post.  The benefit of this is that you will have more text to work with rather than the traditional 90 characters.  Here is an ad that I think works well as a sales message.

They have a special deal on the item, they show the different colors you can get right in the photo and they have a big arrow showing you where to click to get this product along with their call to action.  But you can see there are thousands of comments and likes on the post.  Remember that you will also pay for a comment or a Like as a click.

So there you have ways to match your goals with the perfect ad vehicle.  If you want to get more information on Facebook ads, make sure you sign up for my free webinar on Tuesday February 25th at 2 p.m. ET:  Facebook Advertising Secrets.    Hope to see you there!