How to: Facebook Ad Budget — Full Stop Social Media

We hear it all the time from clients…

“Oh Facebook Advertising is so expensive, and we didn’t even see results.” Our question to this is always: “did you set a budget, or simply wing it?”

If the answer was wing it, don’t worry this is a safe space, we won’t judge you, but we will make you read this blog so you #NAIL it next time! See our top tips for saving money on your social media advertising efforts.

Strategy Is KEY.

Most people don’t have a social media strategy, let alone have a marketing budget. We can’t stress this enough; you NEED a strategy and a budget to succeed with your social media ads. When we sit down for a strategy session with our clients, we ask the big questions. Who is your Audience? What are your goals, and what is your budget? With these three key questions, we can develop a plan of attack!

TRACKING

You need to be a stage 5 stalker on your ads. From impression to purchase, you need to be following your audience's journey. Having a Facebook Pixel installed on your website is an absolute MUST. From here, you can create specific ‘events’ in your Facebook Business Manager so you can keep on top of your standard conversions, and your custom conversions. For instance, you may want to track how many people clicked on a booking form but didn’t complete the process. This is ideal for your retargeting ads. So even if you missed them the first time, you can capture them with a specifically designed ad after the fact.

METRICS

What are social media metrics? And why are they important to track? As a social media ad specialist, they are key to showing the value of our work and support the decisions that we make throughout a campaign. As a business owner, it is important you understand which metrics matter for your business, however, they can be broken down into 4 main categories:

Brand Awareness: these metrics illuminate your current and potential audience.
Engagement: these metrics show how audiences are interacting with your content.
Conversion: these metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of your ads
Consumer: these metrics reflect how active customers think and feel about your brand.

The key metrics for each of these in terms of an ad strategy are:

Brand Awareness: Impressions
Consideration: Landing Page Views, Adds To Cart
Conversion: ROAS (Return On Ad Spend), Cost Per Purchase
Consumer: LPV (Leads Per Visitor)

Having a supreme understanding of these metrics is vital to a successful ad campaign!

REPORTING

Social Media Ad campaigns should not be a set and forget task. We suggest at a minimum, have monthly reporting set up so you can see the effectiveness of your ads towards those all-important goals. At FULL STOP, we check ads daily, run weekly reviews for our clients, and then provide in-depth monthly reports to show continuous growth towards our goals. The idea is to continually test and optimise your ads to ensure maximum ROI for the lowest Cost Per Result. If ads are not working, they need to get the boot!

INVEST TO SAVE – DIGITAL ADVERTISING MANAGEMENT

Spending money to save money is a thing! We see this a lot, clients can manage their own content quite easily, but when it comes to managing the ads side of things, it usually gets thrown in the ‘too hard basket’. Giving Facebook Advertising ‘a go’ yourself can be an expensive exercise. Sometimes your results seem pretty good, but you don’t realise the cost of wastage or lost leads. Other times, someone sets a daily limit to $100 instead of $10, and you get a nasty surprise at the end of the month (yes we’ve seen it all). Investing in advertising management means every dollar you spend is being watched by a hawk (us) you will be amazed at how much you can save and the results we can achieve.

‘As it happens’ ads = DISASTROUS

You know the one ‘Just chuck $100 and see what happens’ Big no-no. No one ever successfully implemented an ad-hock marketing strategy cost-effectively. When things are done on the fly and without careful consideration, they will cost you more and potentially waste your money because those all-important three key questions have not been addressed! If your ad decisions on the fly marketing decisions, PLZ stop and #LetsChat.

Overall, Social Media Advertising can be a daunting task, as no business owner wants to waste money. We are here to help you each step of the way, so if your ready to up your social media game, and start seeing ROI, click here to book a FREE consultation.