Facebook ads can still make you a lot of money in 2020 if you know what you are doing.  90 million small businesses use Facebook and there are at least 1.49 billion active users on Facebook which means there are a lot of potential customers online.

And the amazing part about Facebook ads is that it does a lot of the work for you because Facebook wants you to make money so that they can make money.

But since there are a lot of competitors it’s really important for you to create a competitive advantage for yourself so that you can create ads that convert.

And although it may seem overwhelming at first, I am going to take you step-by-step through the whole process from creating your business account all the way to helping you learn how to split-test to continue to find winning ads.

So let’s get started.

1) Create A Business Account On Facebook

The very first step I highly recommend you do on Facebook before you run ads is to create your business account on Facebook and the reason is simple…

You want to separate your personal Facebook account from your business account.

Facebook takes its bans very seriously so you want to make sure that your personal account doesn’t get affected and to create an ad account specifically for your business.

Plus, it’s possible to create multiple business accounts in the future for any other business ventures you will have.

The way to do that is first by going to business.facebook.com and create your free account right here…

Facebook Business Manager

After that, it’s going to ask for you to sign in and put in your business name and business email.

Now once you finish with that you are going to end up on the home screen and the first thing I want you to do is to go to the settings here…

Facebook Business Settings

What we are going to do is to connect your business Facebook page with your business account like this…

Connect Facebook Business page

If you don’t have a business Facebook page yet then what you need to do is to go back to your personal profile and go to the upper right on the home page where it says “create” and click create a page like below…

Create Facebook Page

After that, you just have to pick the niche your business is in and the name of the page.

Now the reason why I went through setting up your Facebook business page is that when you run ads you want your business page name and profile picture to show up when you are creating ads like below…

Example of Facebook Ad

This is because you only have 2 seconds to grab the attention of your customer and it is very important that you create a sense of trust instantly.

Having control of what the name of the Facebook page name and profile picture works to your advantage because you want to make your ad look like it is coming from a professional business selling a real product.

Plus, it sets you up in the future with a business page to interact with your customers and answer any questions that they have with your product.

After you have created your business account it is time to start researching your target audience.

2) Research Your Target Audience

The reason why we are researching our target audience first is that the best ads know the customer inside and out meaning…

You know exactly what they want and how to convey it in an ad so that they buy from you.

Every business has a specific audience that they are trying to sell to. Plumbers are trying to sell their services to people whose toilets broke down. Dog walkers are selling their services to people who own dogs. People who enjoy fishing may want to buy new fishing equipment.

You have to know exactly who your target audience is before you start creating your ad.

Let’s say you are on Facebook and you are a business that sells fishing equipment. Facebook has a lot of information on people’s pages they liked, groups they joined, friends they have on Facebook, etc. So that means you are going to want to target people who have liked fishing pages, maybe joined some fishing groups, and maybe have some friends that they enjoy fishing together and talk about fishing.

Even better would be to target people who have already bought flowers online within the last 30-90 days. 

And the best way to get that information for Facebook is Facebook’s Insight Audience. 

Facebook’s Insight Audience

You can reach this menu by first going to the homepage of your business account → business manager → Expand menu → Audience Insights like the following below…

Facebook Business Manager menu

Now you are going to end up at the home page and what I want you to know is that it is going to give you a lot of information like:

Let’s continue the example with our fishing business. I would add in interests on the left side who are interested in fishing and look at the data that it gives me:

Facebook Audience Insights

And just from the first page I learned that:

This is important because it gives you tangible data that Facebook uses that you can use to create your ads.

Now one thing I really like to do is to scroll through “Page Likes” and see what type of pages that my target audience likes to give me some ideas on how to create ads.

Just like the following below:

Page Likes, Audience Insights

After scrolling through a bit I noticed that Bass Pro Shops might be a good place to test out an ad so I decided to investigate it a little further.

And after scrolling through I see that they are indeed selling fishing equipment below…

Facebook page of Bass Pro Shops

The important thing is to look at the engagements. 

It has 328 likes and 14 comments with 4 shares which shows that there are indeed some customers who enjoy things like that and may give you ideas to create a similar ad for your page.

Facebook’s Retargeting Ad

Another strategy you can use is to check out competitors websites and let Facebook retarget you similar advertisements on your newsfeed.

Here’s a guide on how to set up retargeting ads on Facebook but the idea here is to gain some ideas on what your competitors might be doing.

If we look at my newsfeed below you can see that there are some advertisements that pop up specifically for me partly from joining marketing groups but also because I was recently searching on marketing courses on Google below…

Facebook Ad Example

What this does is it gives you a sneak peek on what other people are advertising, giving you more ideas on how to shape your copy and images for your target audience.

Google Trends

Learning about the customers through Google is also another viable strategy to see what they people are actively searching for and interested in.

Although it doesn’t use Facebook’s data, it can help generate more ideas on what people are actually searching for to help you target your ads better.

Let’s say I’m curious if people are interested in bass fishing to use for my advertisements so I check out “fishing equipment” and here were the following results:

Google Trends chart

I noticed that there was a huge spike for people searching fishing equipment (I’m guessing COVID-19 has something to do with it) and gives you another idea on how to shape your ads.

Now that you know that people are highly interested in fishing equipment right now it may be a good time to start testing out ads on Facebook with fishing equipment.

Google Keywords Planner

Another great place to generate ideas for your ads is to look through Google’s Keyword Planner.

We want to generate lots of ideas on how we will shape our copy and images for our Facebook ads.

So I decided to search for “fishing equipment” and the following came out…

Example of Google Keyword Planner data

Some possible ideas I might have are…

By learning how to research properly you are knowing exactly what people are searching for and you want your ads to be the solutions to their problems.

After you have done your research it is time to start creating the actual ads.

3) Creating The Actual Facebook Ads

Step 1. Read Facebook’s Ad Policy Thoroughly

The reason why I want you to read Facebook’s ad policy carefully is that Facebook takes their bans seriously. You can make one tiny mistake and can just get banned instantly making you unable to create any more ads so I highly encourage you to read their entire ad policy.

And if you do get banned then you would have to send a request asking them why you were banned which can take multiple weeks for them to get back to.

The general rule of thumb is:

Step 2. Create Images/Videos For Your Facebook Ads

Now you want to create your images with the proper resolution that people are going to see. You can use your own photos, find some free photos you can use online, or even buy stock photos from sites like Getty Images for your Facebook ads.

And what I like to do is to go to Canva to resize my photos to 1215 x 675 like this…

Canva

And just fit the photo that you want into the dimensions. You want to do this for all the photos that you want to test.

Step 3. Creating The Actual Ads On Facebook

After you have created and resized your images it is time to go back to your business manager account and click on “create ad.” After that, you want to make sure to click on “Conversions” like below…

Selecting conversion type, Facebook Ads

After that, you want to choose the destination “website” and have your Facebook pixel to something near the end like “add to cart” or “purchased” below…

Destination of Facebook Ad conversion

Now you want to target the audiences that you researched below…

Target audiences, Facebook Ads

I like to choose an audience size between 500,000 to 4 million because you want it big enough to scale your ad but not too small that you are limiting Facebook’s pixel in finding your ideal customer.

As you can see I was able to narrow down to 3.3 million people by…

It’s also very important to name your ads with what you are specifically targeting so that when you have hundreds of ad groups that you know exactly which ad is targeting which.

After that, I like to choose manual placement → only Facebook newsfeed because that’s where most people look.

Manual placement, Facebook Ads

Now comes the fun part of actually putting your Facebook business page and image together like below…

Selecting Ad format, Facebook Ads

Then you want to put in your headline and description for your ads. Here’s a quick guide on copywriting of how to structure for any business but a good rule of thumb is to:

As you can see I have created some headlines and descriptions below…

Facebook Ads copy

Remember the best ads are the ones that test the most headlines and descriptions to see which ones resonate with the audience the most.

And once you are done with that it is time to start running your ads.

4) What To Do After You Have Created Your First Ads

Now that you have created your first ad it’s time to start doing the extra things in Facebook Ads that give you a competitive advantage over your business competitors.

Learning how to analyse and split-test properly will ensure that you will find your winning ads will be found faster.

1) Analyse The Data On Your Ads And Start Split-Testing

It’s hard to give you a benchmark because every business is different but what you are looking for is to see if the ad was able to bring you any sales or not.

If you saw that many people saw your ad but never clicked through then maybe you need to change the ad copy or images…

Or maybe you need to start targeting different people.

The more split-tests that you can do the better.

2) Use Facebook’s Custom Audience and Lookalike Audience

Once you are getting the hang of using Facebook Ads and you have a winning ad that creates a lot of sales it might be time to start using the lookalike audience. Here’s a great guide on how to use it and what it basically does is it brings in users with similar interests and allows you to target them with the same ad hopefully bringing you more sales and profits.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this helped you learn a little bit more on how to create Facebook ads as I showed you step-by-step on how to create your business account on Facebook and the importance of connecting with your business page. I then went through the entire process on how to learn how to target properly for your target audience and helping you find your ideal customer to show your ad to. I then went on to show you how to collect ads and create ads that create sales that even a beginner can do. And I gave you a glimpse of what you can do after you start to find a winning campaign and how to further optimize your ads and create more winning ads.