How to Test your Facebook Ads

Interested in getting the most out of your ads? Testing is the only way to guarantee your ads are working at their optimal performance. Testing can and should be done with any type of marketing campaign, but here are instructions specifically for Facebook ads.

1. Test your offers.
   Before you can do anything, you need to come up with what you're going to offer. Your ad should be designed to give an offer, the user then clicks your ad to take them to a page on your website to subscribe to that offer. You don't have to be a genius to create great ads, you just have to keep testing until you find something that works.
   
   To do this, start by writing two different headlines for your ad. The headline is the bold blue text that appears above the image. Writing headlines is an art of its own, much too complicated to go over in this article alone. If you don't know where to begin, start looking at other ads to get some ideas.
   
   Next, write two different offers for the body text of the ad (the portion below the image). Your body text should give them a reason to click the ad right then- here's an example of a successful ad I created:
   
   Target: Women within 50 miles of San Diego
   Headline: Become a Jewelry Designer
   Text: Learn to make jewelry for yourself, for friends, or to sell. Click here to sign up for a free class in San Diego.
   
   Now that you have two headlines and two offers, you can pair them up to make four different ads. After a day or two you'll be able to clearly see which headline and which body text is the most effective. Once you see which ads are not performing, immediately delete or pause those ads, as they will bring down your overall CTR.
   
   
2. Test Your Images
   Quite possibly, the greatest benefit of Facebook ads is the ability to display an image with your ad. In my experience, the image you choose will be the largest determinant of your CTR. You may need to purchase stock photos, but the right images will be well worth buying for your ads.
   
   To start, resize several photos to 110x80 pixels (if you don't have an image editing software you can do this free at http://www.photoshop.com or there are several free programs you can download- or your digital camera should come with some basic software which will allow you to resize your images.)
   
   Pick four of the images you think will be the most attention getting for your target market. There's no way to know for sure which ones will be most effective, which is why we test. Now create four ads with your most effective headline and body text (from the testing you described above), each with a different image. After a day or two of the ads running, you'll clearly see which images are drawing a higher CTR. Pause or delete the ads with images that are getting the lowest CTR. You can repeat this process infinitely to constantly refine your ad to have the absolute most effective image.

What you Must Know Before Testing Facebook Ads

If you're an experienced marketer, you probably know the value of testing your ads and email campaigns. If you're a novice, testing might sound like difficult chore, more complicated than you're willing to try. In either case, you will definitely benefit from doing some simple testing of your facebook ads. This process is simple and easy, and will improve your results dramatically.

Some things to know when testing Facebook ads:

• Your CTR will decrease over time as your target market becomes familiar with your ad. This means you have to test quickly and rotate your successful ads. Once an ad starts to decrease its CTR over time you should pause it, then restart it again after a few weeks. If the CTR continues decreasing, pause the ad for even longer before starting it again.
• Your test ads will compete against your successful ads. In most cases, your target market will be small and not all of the users will be online at the same time. This means that if you keep your poorly performing ads running, they will hurt your successful ads and lower your CTR overall. For this reason, you cannot test your ads for too long. As soon as you can see which ads that are underperfoming, pause or delete them, as they will dilute your click through rate.
• Facebook intelligently distributes more successful ads. I haven't found any literature from Facebook describing exactly how they distribute the ads- but through testing its obvious that they give more impressions to ads with a higher CTR. If users don't start clicking your ad right away, its likely that Facebook will not distribute this ad very much. You can use their intelligence to determine whether your ads are successful or not, usually in the first couple days of testing. Again, if your ads are underperforming, get rid of them- they are just watering down your results.
• Don't test too many ads within the same target market at the same time. For the same reason as what is described above- if you have too many ads showing to the same market at the same time, they will be fighting against your successful ads. I never test more than 4 ads against each other. A way to work around this is creating a new campaign for your test ads with a much smaller daily budget. This way your budget will max out on those test ads early in the day and leave time for your best ads to display. This won't work if your target group is too small.

For instructions on creating your test ads, please read our post about How to Test your Facebook Ads.

How Your Bead Store can Profit from Facebook Ads

How would you like to start building relationships with everyone in your town who lists beading as an interest in their Facebook? Here are some of the ways you can utilize Facebook ads to start getting immediate results.

1. Advertise your store events: We know you have classes, parties, sales, and tons of other things marked on your calendar. So why not get these events packed by using Facebook ads to tell people about them. Make a Facebook ad with the basic details of your event that links to a page on your site about the event. To help track your results your ad could even link to a page where they print a "free ticket" or something of the like.
   
   
2. Build your Email List: If you have a successful store I can pretty much bet you have a strong email marketing program. If you are struggling heavily, then I would guess your email campaigns need some work. In either case, you should appreciate more relevant people signing up for your list. The Facebook audience doesn't like to shop while they're browsing, but they certainly will participate in your contests or raffles, or will even give their email address in exchange for good beading tips.Offer these things in your ad, and make your ad link to a page where they can submit their email in exchange for your content.
   
   
3. Branding: You don't have to have built a strong brand already or have to be a branding expert to take advantage of getting your name out with Facebook ads.To do this, use Facebook's pay-per-impression method. The difference between paying per impression (PPI) and paying per click (PPC), is that with PPC, you pay for each time someone clicks your ad, where with PPI, you pay for each 1,000 times your ad is shown, which is a very inexpensive method. To do this, create an ad about your bead store, linking to your web page. Have that ad running all the time and pay-per-impression to have your ad shown the most at the lowest cost. After six months of running this ad, you can potentially be the most well known bead-store in your town.
   

Facebook ads can be very effective, but don't work for everything. Facebook is for relationship building, not direct sales. Basically, as long as your landing page (what the ad links to) is not a page that asks your customer to buy, you are doing the right thing.

Be more clever than just trying to get sales- create an interaction with the customer. Have a contest, use your Facebook ads to drive people to the contest. Make it fun and interesting, and forget about selling for two minutes. Feed them content- I'm sure you have great beading tips of your own to give away. Before you know it, you'll have a giant pool to market towards, eagerly waiting to hear from you. Your sale days will be packed, your events will be fully booked, and you will reap all the benefits.

Why to use Facebook Ads for your Bead Store

Wondering how you can get more people in your bead store this year? A sure-fire and VERY inexpensive way to see more new faces is by taking advantage of Facebook advertising.

Don't confuse Facebook advertising as a complicated mess of social networking, twittering, and spending hours on the web. Facebook advertising is a simple tool for creating highly targeted pay-per-click ads shown to Facebook users (which there are now over 350,000,000).

Main benefits of Facebook advertising:

• Specific Targeting:You can specifically target people by interest (say, beading?), location (say, your small town?), and a number of other factors including place of employement, relationship status, gender preference, etc.
• Budget Control: Minimum budget for the ads are $1/day. Now, I doubt you'll see much result by spending so little, but the point is that you have absolute budget control with Facebook advertising. Also, because you spend according to how many people actually click your ad, there is no big upfront cost to get started, like most advertising.
  
• Return on Investment: Fortunately, if you are a bead store, you will have a very easy time with Facebook. The kind of relationship marketing Facebook provides coincides perfectly with the clients in our industry (I'll explain more later).
  
• Low Competition: How many bead stores do you think are utilizing this type of advertising? Now, how many in your town? You have very little competition in the Facebook market. If you are lucky, the people in your town browsing Facebook
  
• Trust Factor: Facebook screens all of its ads for inappropriate images, poorly written content, and relevancy. The result is that the users experience only ads which are relevant and, well, not "spammy." This relates to very high click through rates (the number of people who click your ads).
  

Facebook advertising is not a good solution for those looking to turn immediate sales from each click (i.e. online retail sales). People browsing Facebook do not have their wallets in their hands, ready to make a purchase in your online store. Rather, Facebook is a tool for creating relationships with people in specific demographics with specific interests (i.e. people in your town interested in beading).

Get started today by visiting:
http://www.facebook.com/advertising