A lot of marketers believe that using Facebook Ads will directly increase their sales, like put a dollar in getting two back like affiliate marketing.

Totally neglecting the fact that Facebook is a social platform where billions of people are hanging and not a money-generating machine. And thus, in order to succeed in Facebook advertising, you have to follow some strategies.

This guide shows you how to create simple and more advanced Facebook Ads campaigns, offers a step-by-step formula for creating a proven landing page and running an effective split test so that you can boost your conversion rate.

Here is what we’re going to review:

• Before creating your campaigns on the Facebook Ads Manager platform, check the possible success and failure points for each campaign on the Power Editor platform. Read at least some of Facebook’s documentation, in case you’re not very familiar with running paid ads.
• On your landing page, make sure that a user can do what he or she is supposed to do while using one hand only. Do not require the user to click many times or scroll down a long page. The more often a user can perform the desired action in one go, the higher your conversion rate will be.

• For an ad campaign on either platform, determine how much you are willing and able to spend each day, and calculate how many daily visitors will be needed to reach your revenue amount. Keep in mind that a large number of visitors is better than a small, engaged, loyal audience due to Facebook’s rules about the relevance and quality of pages for promoting ads, so do not opt for high relevance or page quality targets right away.

• Decide what you want from people who visit your landing page: to subscribe, share something with their friends or take some action based on your ad. Be sure that you either know where they are coming from (i.e., the source of traffic) or the offer is very specific – otherwise it will be difficult to achieve targeted results and keep costs low enough to reach the level of ROI (Return On Investment). Also decide how much money per conversion you are willing to pay. Too low of a bid may cause you to get less clicks, while too high a bid may result in a higher cost-per-click and poorer results.

• Create Ad Sets for each campaign, define their colours and names so that they can be easily recognized on both the Facebook Ads Manager platform as well as the Power Editor platform. Once you have defined your first strategies, start putting them into practice with a sometimes non-negligible budget (at least $100) per day – depending on how much time you spend getting things up and running before optimizing your campaigns. You’ll almost certainly notice some level of success during this initial period; don’t forget to study what worked and what didn’t work in order to optimize your campaigns.

• If a call-to-action on any of the platforms is something more than “click here,” include an element that displays the number of people who have already clicked (call it impressions and/or conversions). This will create more engagement with the user for whom a click or conversion means acknowledgement that something good has happened – and this kind of feedback can, in turn, multiply their involvement by 10 times.

• Optimize your ad copy using A/B testing so you can see which version works best with each audience, how much time it takes to get there, and what revenue is generated as a result. It’s important to know how long it takes ads to become profitable since you want to decrease costs while increasing conversions.

• Depends on the offer and your expectations, consider running a split test between ads and landing pages – or even both A/B testing each element by itself: an ad can include text in different colours, images of people with different faces, etc., and the landing page can include one graphic versus another, or more text than before. Utilise various kinds of texts on your Facebook Ad Offer (AOI) based upon what you’ve learned from previous A/B tests of other elements; for example, rich media elements usually get clicked better when they are placed above plain text rather than below it as is usual practice in publishing. Using rich media will also increase ad engagement since it draws the user’s attention to what is being offered.

• To get more people to click on your ads, try including an image that will immediately catch their eye, some kind of funny meme or something pretty (avoid pornography). Make a video that tells a story, or get one of those viral celebrities – like Ryan Gosling – to endorse your product and you’re likely to hit that all-important engagement factor.

• If you can’t think up anything clever yourself, search for creative content and/or ideas online through sources like AdEspresso and Facebook Creative Shop . There are also experts who charge by the hour for this kind of thing if you aren’t tech savvy enough or don’t have time for it. Make sure you follow your agency’s creative brief so that they don’t end up creating content for your competitors.

• Another great tip is to send yourself a “View Post” request from your personal Facebook account (so as not to be charged any money) and see who actually sees the ad, how long it takes them to reach the landing page, and if they make it there at all.

• While a lot of people say that more words in an ad are a bad idea (because it increases costs), don’t dismiss this completely since this will increase engagement. Try different things out and settle on what works best with each audience based upon their reactions. And remember – most users won’t read the entire text anyway, so it’s best to say what you have to say in four or five lines, and don’t waste time on double negatives.

• If you want more people to click on your ads (and who doesn’t?), include a question that demands an answer – for example, “Do you need better grades?” People will view it as an open invitation to respond and the only response they can give is “Yes.” This makes them feel part of something; everybody likes to be needed.