Facebook advertisements aren’t much different from other types of online advertisements. They are Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads that are flashy and appealing to their target audience. To appeal properly to your target audience, ads must be easy to understand and provide something to hook the viewer in.

Great images or video can grab the attention of potential customers, but compelling copy can be the difference between someone clicking or ignoring your ad. Here are some easy to follow Facebook ad guidelines:

Write Compelling Ad Copy

Writing your ad copy in a clear and concise manner is one of the best things you can do to increase the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of your advertisement. Your ad should explain exactly what the viewer will get from clicking your ad. Being too vague can not only lead to low CTR and conversion rates, but could also drive ad spend up and drain your budget.

An ad with bad copy will almost always fail to explain what the product or service does, or lack insight on how clicking the ad will benefit the viewer. Good ads clearly state what you can expect from clicking the ad, and load a landing page with the exact contents you expected. Whether this is a promotion, a sale, or some other unique selling proposition is totally up to the advertiser.

Use a Call-to-Action to increase your CTR

Your Call-to-Action (CTA) should always be as clear and attractive as your ad copy. A good CTA tells people viewing your ad to take action, to do something urgently. Here are a few examples:

· Get it now

· Sign up today

· Download now

· Get Started

· Learn More

Having a strong Call-to-Action can significantly increase your Click-Through-Rate and improve the overall response to your ad. Besides the images or video in your ad, the CTA is one of the most important aspects you can focus on to grab a viewer’s attention.

Test your Facebook Ads

After polishing up your ad copy, creating a strong CTA, and targeting a relevant list of Facebook interests, you can finally publish your ad. Within a few days your Facebook Ads dashboard should begin to populate with data depending on the budget you have set. This data will include stats such as your Click-Through-Rate, Ad Impressions, Engagements per Ad, and conversion tracking data such as your conversion rates if you have taken the time to set that up.

To improve CTR and conversions you will need to A/B test multiple ads to find out what style of ad viewers will respond to best. You can test different headlines, images, and CTA’s. Both advertisements have to be set up within the same campaign in order to be tested against each other. The version of the ads with the best response will become the ad displayed more frequently.

Optimize Your Targeting

When setting up your Facebook ads it’s extremely important that they are geared to target the best Facebook audience. Facebook targeting goes really in-depth so there are many options you can tweak to focus on the right group. From age and gender to country and income-level, you want to set these parameters according to the market research you have done for your product or service.

Having a clear list of attributes for your target audience is much better than targeting anyone and everyone, which can be very cost prohibitive. Facebook even goes a step further than most advertisement platforms are capable of and enable you to select specific interests your audience has. There are Facebook marketing tools that allow you to gather the best list of Facebook interests so you can outperform your competitors. These Facebook marketing tools typically use Facebook’s API to dig up buried interests you can target that Facebook hides away for aesthetic purposes.

If you run a sports gear company for example, you may want to target people who:

· Are between the ages of 18 – 25

· Live in the United States

· Have a high income

· Shows interest in famous athletes

These are only a couple of ways to use Facebook’s targeting features. Depending on your Facebook ad budget, signing up for a Facebook keyword tool could be one of the best decisions you make.

Constantly Monitor your Data

How would you know your profit if you’re not tracking your Return-On-Investment (ROI)? There are certain data points you should pay close attention to. If you sell Baseball gear for example and you put up an advertisement, you need to calculate how much money you spend per ad to generate one sale. To calculate your cost per sale, simply divide your total ad spend by your total revenue from sales. If you’re spending an average of $100 per ad to make one $15 sale, there’s probably some optimization issues within your ad that you can correct to target a more receptive audience.

Running A/B tests can help you optimize your targeting and figure out the best path to a positive ROI. Once you have experimented enough to know what helps lower your cost-per-conversion, you can confidently increase your ad spend and gather data from current customers to help you learn exactly who your customers are and how you can reach them.