Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 Anyone can pay to advertise their products and services on Facebook. They want to gain more click-throughs, views, and product sales. Without doing much research, they set it up, choose whatever settings sound best, and then sit back waiting for organic leads to roll in. But this strategy is useless. There is no plan behind how these leads will come in, from whom or where, and what this will cost. Little thought was put into the framework for how these ads are supposed to increase revenue and bring in new customers. With Facebook advertising, there are so many different factors to consider when creating an ad campaign. Setting up a campaign can be overwhelming at first, but by narrowing it down to a few key factors, you’re guaranteed quicker results with more conversions. Best of all, you won’t have to break the bank. If you want conversions worth your coin, you need to optimize how you advertise. Let’s go over three different ways to do this. 1. Pick the right campaign objective You might roll your eyes if someone gives you advice as simple as setting goals and having clear objectives for your ads. But this is the number one way to save money on your campaign. The reason businesses lose money through their advertising strategy is mainly that they haven’t put enough thought into their objectives. Facebook lets you choose between three main categories for your campaign objectives: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Awareness: Choose this option if you’re trying to spread the word about your brand and what you do. This is a good choice if your business is just starting out and you’d like more eyes on your content. Consideration: Use this option if your audience already knows about your product or service, but now you want them to consider making a purchase. Conversion: Pick this after you’ve already established awareness and consideration. This stage means your customers are already loyal enough to be interested in making a purchase of your product. Many people assume that because they ultimately want sales, they should jump to conversion. Wrong. You need to build your audience’s interest and loyalty in your brand before you can even think about trying to sell them something. That’s why it’s called a sales funnel; you have to funnel through steps one and two to get to three and four. If you’re just starting out, you first want awareness of your business and services. You wouldn’t buy something without knowing anything about where it came from, and neither will your customers. You need to choose your campaign objective based on what stage your business is in. Once you have enough awareness, you can move on to the next objective. Facebook advertising allows you to tailor your goals to match the kind of conversions you want, whether that be traffic, engagement, leads, or reach. Your objective will directly determine where your campaign goes, so choose accordingly. 2. Optimize your target Stop wasting money on ads shown to the wrong audience by using Facebook’s detailed targeting. This feature allows you to choose who sees your ads based on details about them, such as page views, purchase behaviors, and demographics like gender, age, and location. You can choose to include or exclude certain groups of people to narrow your audience further. Detailed targeting looks at your website visitors, people similar to your already-existing customers, and people with interests specific to the product or service you want to sell, and uses that information to show your ads to them. You can set exactly who you’re looking to advertise to. Take advantage of Facebook’s Audience Insights tool to gather more information on your audience. You can access their page likes, how often they’re on Facebook, their age range, where they live, and more. It’s like getting a look into what your potential customers want so you can tailor your ads to their interests. 3. Schedule ads based on data Just as Twitter and Facebook have peak active times during the day, so do conversions. Use Audience Insights to pay attention to what times in the day your potential customers use Facebook, engage with similar content to yours, and make purchases. It’ll benefit you to tailor your content schedule to their behaviors because it prevents you from having to run ads all day every day with little to no conversions. No conversions mean money down the toilet. To set an ad schedule, go to Ads Manager and click on Budget and Schedule in the left-hand sidebar. Click Show Advanced Options. Scroll down further until you see Ad Scheduling and tick the box that says Run ads on a schedule. Here, you can choose exactly when your ads will run for better conversion optimization. Note that this option will only work once Facebook approves your campaign. Now you can use data from Audience Insights to figure out the best times for your ads to show. If your audience is mainly on Facebook at a certain time, you’ll want to schedule your ads for that time block. If your conversions aren’t where you want them, you might need to adjust your ad schedule. Wrapping up Facebook ad optimization is all about trial and error; what works for another business may not work for you at all, and that’s okay. But it’s worth it to do your research and plan accordingly so that you save time and money in the long run. Now you should be able to optimize your ad campaign so that it converts clicks to paying customers, gets more eyes on your content from the right people, and saves you time and money by researching the best campaign objectives for your business. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Thomas Griffin.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Thomas Griffin Follow @jthomasgriffin Thomas is the president and co-founder of OptinMonster and TrustPulse, the leading conversion optimization sites. … View full profile ›More by this author:How to Blend Online and Offline Communications5 Key Reasons Your Social Media Strategy Is Not Succeeding4 Critical Steps in Your Customer Acquisition Journey