Kate Meyers Emery

Our local visitor industry council hosted a seminar on Facebook ads with Camille Zess of Break the Ice Media. I’ve used Facebook ads before, primarily to promote events, so I knew that this was something I needed to learn more about. The seminar walked us through the basics of creating an ad, different types of audiences, and how to create reports that are meaningful. Here are some of the top takeaways from this seminar:

Think critically about what you want to do in advance

A little planning goes a long way with Facebook ads. Instead of simply boosting a post or just sending out something that looks like your other Facebook posts on your page, Camille suggests thinking about what success means for this ad, and how you’re going to demonstrate that. This will help you decide what type of campaign, which audiences to target, and whether there should be different ads within the same campaign.

Create campaigns, not singular ads

Instead of creating an ad and moving on to the next, you can create a general campaign with multiple ads within it that target different audiences and have different budgets, but the same goal.

On a practical level, it makes navigating the Power Editor a lot easier- instead of lots of individual campaigns you have just a few to move between. It also makes reporting easier- you can quickly compare how your different ads did, like whether one audience or the other worked better.

Experiment and adjust

While it may seem easier to create an ad and let it run for weeks, Camille suggests that it’s better to create ads, check in on them, and adjust given the results. By doing shorter ads you have the opportunity to test out different audiences. Create a campaign, try two different short ads with different audiences, compare the results, and then run whichever one works for a little longer.

Use lookalike audiences

Did you know you can upload a list of people who are already following your business, and Facebook will find an audience online that has similar interests and behaviors as your current audience?! That way, you are promoting to people who have a higher potential of liking your content but aren’t already following you. Mind blown.

Use Pixels

One of the issues of social media is not knowing whether a post inspires people to take action. By using Pixels, you can fix this and track people throughout the process. Pixels are a code you add to your website- when someone clicks on your Facebook ad and then takes action on the website, the Pixels code will report it back to Facebook.

This seminar definitely inspired me, and I’m excited to experiment a little!