Bootcamp Part Three: Setting up a Facebook ad campaign that works

Welcome to part three of a free video course aimed at getting you your first sale or scaling up your advertising, taught by an experienced businessman named Ezra Firestone. If you’ve missed the first two parts of this series, we recommend checking them out. Part one goes over the core of online marketing and gives you context to work with. Part two helps you understand the importance of video advertisements and how to make them in an effective way.

This part is long but incredibly useful. It will take you through the steps of building a Facebook advertising campaign, including how to target an audience, how to write a campaign, how to get it going and how to understand your data.

Start small: Tools you need to set up first before you start your campaign

VIDEO - Jump right in with Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is a tool that connects directly to a Shopify store and has four functions: Tracking conversions, optimising your audience to give you people who are likely to convert, remarketing to target people that aaaalmost bought something but didn’t, and “lookalike creation” to help you find new customers you might not have thought of before.

VIDEO: Implementing Facebook Pixel

This video builds off the last one, and guides you on-screen to integrating Facebook Pixel with your Shopify store. It also shows you how to manage your advertising spending, and goes over the importance of having a Facebook business account.

VIDEO: Creating a targeted audience framework

This video is a short exercise to help you brainstorm who you might be targeting and what it is they like. You’ll use your answers to directly feed into your campaign that you develop soon.

VIDEO: Build five targeted audiences and save them for later

This video builds off the framework you’ve just developed, and by the end you’ll have specific target audiences saved. The goal is to build out five different audiences using Facebook’s big-data driven “Audience Insights” feature. This feature is super helpful (and a teeny bit creepy if we’re being honest) when figuring out how to phrase your ads, what kind of inspiration you should be looking for, and even what competitors you have but didn’t know about.

At this stage, you should have set up your Facebook for Business account, and you can follow along onscreen to get building.

VIDEO: Facebook Placements

This is a short video that goes over the concept of “placements” or where exactly your ads will set. Basically, he recommends starting out with only putting your ad on desktop and mobile, directly on the newsfeed (and foregoing other channels like Instagram or sidebars for now). That’s because they’re the most effective so start with the basics before expanding.

Ready, Set, Go

These videos are follow-along-as-you-go tutorials using the audience and placement tools you’ve just done with the videos above.

VIDEO: Set up a Facebook Ad Campaign part 1

There are a lot of ways to create and manage a campaign. We’ll start with the “Power editor” which is a Facebook tool that lets you prepare, build and publish on the timeline you want. It helps you launch ads when you’re ready for them to go live, and edit as you learn more.

The basic structure of using Facebook ads is Campaign → Ad Set → Advertisements. You set up a campaign to promote a certain product video, use the ad set feature to incorporate your different audiences, and “advertisements” refers to all of the actual iterations that are launched. You can include multiple ads with different copy or photos to the same targeted group of people.

You’ll set specific objectives here, such as increasing conversions on your website or increasing engagement with your media. These objectives will be looked at later to see how your ad has done, and what steps you should take next. 

Ezra goes over actions like choosing a budget, picking your saved audience (see previous videos), and optimising for the “middle of the funnel” -- or choosing the add-to-cart event for Facebook to monitor. For each action he gives his personal recommendation of what to start with, including which settings to change.

VIDEO: Set up a Facebook Ad campaign part 2

This video is a continuation of the previous one, and starts with uploading your advertisement videos. He goes over some nitty gritty things like aspect ratios and thumbnails, how to edit your auto transcriptions (a lot of people forget to and it looks terrible if you don’t!), duplicating an ad for multiple audiences and changing your copy and CTA.

Though most things in this video are useful, one big takeaway is to link directly to your product offer page. This is where all that setup from part one comes in, because if you set up an ad to drive traffic, but that traffic goes to a badly optimised page, you’re missing out. You can consider your offer page to go to your website directly, or even to your Facebook sales page.

What have you done??

Marketing is just shooting in the dark unless you check your data correctly.

VIDEO: Get the most from your Facebook Ads data

This is probably one of the most interesting and useful videos for geeks like me. Ezra goes over the types of data you can pull from your ads that you just set up. Use this video to set up a dashboard that shows you the most useful and actionable stats including KPIs like:

• Impressions (how many times was your ad seen?)
• Reach (how many unique people did it go to?)
• How many unique clicks did your ad get?
• How much did it cost you to make a sale?

This last one is one of the most useful tools for moving forward. Facebook will be able to tell you how much it cost in advertising money to make a particular product sale, by demographic and channel. He uses his own example of a $90 product he was advertising. On average, he spent $24 per purchase on Facebook ads -- but that’s just an average. It cost him $40 for people shopping on desktop but only $20 for people shopping on mobile. It also cost him $40 for the 45 year olds to buy, but his 65+ audience was convinced for just $21 per customer. So what are his next steps? Send the same ad just to 65+ year olds on their iPhones.

Gimme more

Congrats, you’ve made it through the majority of Get Your First Sale Bootcamp. This section was the longest and went over exactly how to set up your own Facebook ad campaign. Be sure to check out the other parts, and move on to what’s next in the concluding segment.

Part One: Introductions, an overview of online marketing, getting your baseline and setting up an optimal product offer page

Part Two: Learning about video campaigns and making a video that works for you

Part Four: Conclusions and what’s next for you (2 videos)

Want to open up a Shopify account and try it out yourself? Sign up here!