Have you been running ads but you don’t understand how you can make it work for you or you wonder if the demographic is right?

It’s possible that you feel like you aren’t getting ROI on your ads spend and that you’re not making sales from your ads.

Maybe your ads don’t seem to be reaching many people.

If Facebook™ asks you if you got what you needed from the ads and you say no! then this blog post can help you!

#1 Too many interests

In regards to your ideal customer, they might have like Oprah Winfrey’s Facebook™ page. So if you type Oprah Winfrey in the interests section you can target your ad to people who like the Oprah page and her posts.

What I see a lot of people do when they are creating ads is to choose a LOT of interests to cover a lot of bases. To make sure that they cover a lot of the things that they think their audience is interested in and to reach as many people as possible.

It looks a bit like this:

Nooooo!!! Don’t do it!

Why not?

Because if your ad succeeds you won’t know which interest made it successful and similarly if it flops you won’t ever know why and you won’t be able to succeed again.

What to do instead:

Instead of bundling all of the interests into one ad, its best to create campaigns with multiple ad sets within them, each ad set with its own single interest.

The easiest way to do this is to make one ad with one interest and once the ad is approved, you can go into the ad set and click “Duplicate”. Once you’ve duplicated it, you can edit the interests with another, different interest. After a few days, you’ll be able to see which one is performing better and then send your budget into that ad. Essentially it’s a kind of split testing that gives you much better feedback and information about your audience to create future ads with.

#2 Advertising to multiple countries in one ad set

In a way very similar to too many interests, I see a lot of people trying to run a single ad to multiple countries inside one ad set. 

The problem with this is the same as too many interests: if you ad flops or succeeds you’ll never really know why.

Another very good reason NOT to bundle countries is that certain countries are much more expensive to advertise to that others. Your ads could be costing you more than they need to. 

What to do instead:

Have complete clarity about where your ad is going to be displayed.

If you are truly a global brand and you need to advertise to many countries at once I’m sure you have a budget to run different ads to different countries. PLUS each country has it’s own cultural nuances that require different images and wording so get real about whether your ad is really going to cut it in an international market or if your $10 is better spent starting off with a small local audience and building up to a global empire.

Then, it’s just like the actions in #1 – go ahead and create duplicate ad sets and edit the location details. Here’s what that part of the Facebook™ ads manager looks like in regards to location:

#3 Running ads with a start and stop date

When you are setting up your Ads Set, another option you have is to do with the Budget and Schedule. Many people want to run a short ad to reduce their ad spend and that is fine.

The only trouble with an ad with a start and end date is that the robots don’t seem to give you as good results as if you run an ongoing ad and then turn it off once you reach your budget.

Some people don’t want to run an ongoing ad in case they go over their budget. My experience is that if I’m spending money with Facebook™ ads, it’s on my mind. There is very little chance I will forget that I’m running an ad.

If you are really worried about forgetting you could always set an alarm on your phone or calendar.

If you’re not convinced that this is true, you could run your own experiment and run 2 ads – one that is ongoing and one that has a start and finish date and see for yourself. I’d be interested to hear your result! Let me know if you do this.

An ongoing ad

What to do instead:

You have options: you can either take my word for it and run ongoing ads which you turn on and off as you need OR You can run your own test as described above and see what the reality is for your business.

Ultimately, I would always recommend extensive testing around Facebook™ ads because everyone’s audience is so different and everyone’s business is so different. It’s smart and savvy to be invested in your ads process and your audience and your business so be patient with yourself and use it as a learning challenge.

Learn more about Online Marketing and Business that doesn’t require you to sellout on your soul.

Do your Facebook™ Ads sink like the Titanic?

Oh – didn’t you know there was an iceberg there?

Nope.

Most people don’t know about the underlying factors that make your ads sinkers or floaters.

So I made a video about it!

Watch this then let’s talk!

Learn more about Online Marketing and Business that doesn’t require you to sellout on your soul.

Today I’m going to explain the most important parts of your Facebook™ “Insights”, what they mean and what you could possibly be aiming for.

There are a video and written instructions but please comment if you need a hand to understand.

First things first

What are the “Insights” or analytics?

When you post on Facebook™, all the data about how many people saw it and how they responded to your post is recorded and { explained } for you in a tab of your business page called “Insights”.

This image shows the tabs up the top there – there is Page, Inbox, Notifications and then Insights ?

So, go ahead and click on the word Insights and you will see what they call the Dashboard.

A lot of the time when you are trying to monitor your social media with a view to growing your business, it’s easy to get caught up in what is sometimes called “Vanity Numbers”.

These are things like:

• number of followers
• number of like
• page views
• etc

Don’t get me wrong, these can be important, especially if you are an influencer or you are selling advertising. In that case, you would want to be able to demonstrate that you have a great following.

But if you are trying to connect with people, with a view to serving them – then numbers don’t really matter so much.

Building relationships is what matters. So, that brings us to the next analytic – Posts.

Here is one that counts…

Okay, here is one I think is helpful. Above you can see a tab called “Posts”. Click that one and you should see something like the image here.

Now, what this Insight shows you is what time your followers are on Facebook™ and what numbers show up on the different days of this week.

Now it’s getting relevant!

What does this mean?

This shows you when you are likely to get the most reach for your posts. Your people are online, so if you post right around that time and on those days it’s more likely your ideal audience will see it.

Issues with this:

Facebook™ is essentially “Pay to Play” in my opinion. Especially for businesses.

If you are getting great engagement on your Facebook™ business page AWESOME. But I would say that it’s the exception rather than the rule.

Part of that is because of the Algorithm. It’s a mathematical equation that controls what we all see in our timelines on Facebook™.

But

Having some understanding of the days and times that your audience are on Facebook™ can definitely help you try to get comments and shares on your posts (these are the best actions to encourage to get in front of more people without having to pay for ads).

Reactions, Comments & Shares = how many people Reacted (like, love, wow, angry, sad) to your post, commented on the post or shared it.

This is important.

I recommend you review these at least weekly so you can learn what your audience is responding to.

You can also see what “type” of post it is – image, video, text, link or share. It is important to pay attention to what “type” of posts tend to perform well on your page.

If you find that videos do well then you are best to do more of these. There will be a tipping point – where people stop responding because you have saturated their desire for your videos. So it is important to keep it fresh too.

I recommend cycling between the different types of post -image, video, text, link or share. Try to keep your content personal (pics of you), and novel. Try not to be too predictable. Humans love novelty.

One other thing:

Facebook™ will share more of the content your audience likes. So if a post you have shared starts to get more Reactions, Comments and Shares the algorithm will show it to more of your audience.

JARGON ALERT!!!

AUDIENCE: your audience is simply the people you want to be talking to. Your page likers, but not necessarily. Sometimes people are engaging with you and they haven’t “Liked” your page yet.

Another Important One

As well as knowing what your audience likes, it helpful to know who they are. Are they male or female? What age are they? Where do they live?

Facebook™ can tell you a bunch of things about your audience which is very helpful. Especially, when you are ready to start running ads. You can see here, my main audience is women between 25 and 54.

You can’t control this so I can’t tell you what would be ideal here. This is just super helpful information for you to have. In the case of this page, it would make sense to run a workshop in Sydney since that’s where most of my audience are from. And maybe Melbourne too. See?

Are you doing well?

Well, the only way to tell this is by checking in on these Insights on a regular basis. It would be great if your numbers are growing BUT, like I said before, numbers are not always the goal. If you feel like you are connecting with PEOPLE then I would say you are doing well 🙂

What should you aim for?

I would suggest that you aim to be in dialogue with the people who are liking and commenting on your posts. They are people, not numbers. You should be aiming to build your relationship with them so that when you meet them, they feel like they know you. You should aim to have some steps in place for AFTER social media. Like – what happens after they click on a link to a blog post? Do they book a session, do they sign up for a free eBook? What happens next?

What do you think?

Do you feel like you are making personal connections? Do you want to talk to me more about how I could help you with your marketing?

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