6. Creating Ads: General Strategy

Now you know how to create all of the latest, greatest ads. You know how to use the ad reports. Now, let’s begin to bring the two together.

Ready? Let’s go!

What You Are Going to Learn Today

Today’s lesson is Creating Ads: General Strategy. We’re going to focus on the following:

• Overview of General Ad Creation Strategy
• Example of New Ad Settings

The Lesson

Overview of General Ad Creation Strategy
You’ve created hundreds of ads in your time. You think you know exactly what works and what doesn’t. You know that the News Feed is best. Mobile is better. CPM is better than Optimized CPM. And you’ve narrowed down the perfect target audience.

But you don’t know jack.

It’s important to never assume you know it all. Sure, you can lean on prior learnings. But things change. And no two ads were created equally.

What works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow. And I can tell you from first hand experience that I’ve seen that happen over and over again.

If you accept this, you won’t be frustrated when the ad you expect to work fails. If you are stubborn, you’ll likely end up claiming Facebook ads don’t work.

In order to find out what works — and to take advantage of the new ad reports — two things are necessary:

1. Create many variations of ads based on targeting, copy, imagery, bidding and ad types
2. Create very broadly targeted ads based on Placement, Geography, Age and Gender

You should know by now why you’d do this. Your split testing will help you optimize based on the first group. Facebook ad reports will tell you the rest.

Example of New Ad Settings
You can easily do a similar exercise with any ad type. But I’m going to use a Page Like Sponsored Story — an ad that every marketer should be running — as an example.

Here is how I would handle the areas that Facebook ad reports will take care of:

• Placement: All Facebook
• Country: Name your top 5-10 countries that engage with your content. I use six.
• Gender: Male and Female
• Age: All

There are examples when you’d be a bit more strict. If you’re promoting a mobile app to mobile devices, obviously, that’s different. If you are a local company only, that’s different. If you know that you only appeal to men or a particular age bracket (particularly based on law), that’s different.

Now let’s look at where I’d focus my time on split testing and creating ad variations…

Copy: Where applicable. I’d create at least two variations of a single ad to see what works.

Imagery: Where applicable. At least two variations.

Type: Will a Page Like Sponsored Story or an Ad for a Facebook Page work best at generating Likes?

Targeting: Create variations with and without Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences, Precise Interests and Partner Categories. Mix and max. Try each by themselves or combine them.

Connections: Target Fans, friends of Fans and all non-Fans.

Other Targeting: Experiment, where applicable, with relationships, languages, education and workplaces (I rarely mess with these, other than languages).

Bidding: Compare results between CPM, CPC and Optimized CPM. As well as results using conversion specs for various goals like Post Engagement, Video Plays and Link Clicks.

Need personal one-on-one help from Jon?
Set up a training session!