First Experience: Facebook Ads

“Advertisers are putting more into it every year, and more advertisers are coming on to the platform. They haven’t hit their peak yet. Facebook still has a ways to go.” – Unknown

When I first decided to embark on the journey of my month-long portfolio project I was all too aware that learning Facebook Ads and MailChimp was going to be a big part of it.

As I began digging around in the world of Facebook Ads and all that it has to go with it. I was a bit overwhelmed, to say the least. At first, I watched a few videos and read a couple of blog posts. These were extremely helpful and eased my anxious self a lot. 

Once my book was published I decided to just jump right in. I had been getting notifications to promote my page for a little bit. I had explored all that Facebook Ads has to offer without actually paying for an ad yet. 

Commit

It was time to commit.

I went onto the Facebook Ads manager and I looked up different keywords for the marketing eBook I was creating the ad for. Aiming for a somewhat niche audience (less than 100m) and noting if age and gender are split evenly or not. I looked up things like marketing, digital, social media, books, etc. 

I used some stock pictures and www.befunky.com to make some collages and add text to the pictures. This alone was a learning experience, luckily I have always loved the designing aspect of it all so it was fun messing around with it for a few hours. After I was satisfied with the ads I made sure that I saved them at the highest quality possible. 

Fun Part

Here comes the fun part.

Now it was time to officially do everything for the ad itself. My goal for the ad was to get more traffic and website clicks for my eBook on marketing. Now you can do a split test, at this point I was not entirely comfortable with using this function yet so I decided to go for a basic ad. 

After this I found it rather easy, you just fill out the questions and make sure that everything is looking okay. Your ad has to be reviewed once it is completed, this can take as little as ten minutes or as long as two days.

Reasons that your ad may be rejected include:

• Promising unrealistic results
• Landing page doesn’t work
• Clickbaiting 
• Suggesting sexual activity 
• Showing age-restricted content 
• Implying personal attributes
• And many more

Conclusion

I made a rookie mistake and had quite a bit of text in my ad but thankfully it was still approved. Once your ad is live you can follow the analytics that Facebook provides to see how your ad is doing and how much money you’ve spent. 

Easy as pie right? Although, I’m sure if you’ve ever attempted to make a pie you understand that it is quite the opposite of easy.