You can create ads built for faster approval , and we can tell you how.
Read on to learn:
Thanks to a long list of Facebook Ad guidelines and strict ad approval process, many marketers using Facebook advertising tools enter the land of confusion.
Population: 90% of Facebook Advertisers.
When working with Facebook Ads, it’s been always been difficult to find answers when you run into trouble. Dealing with Facebook ads that haven't been approved is no exception.
With little information provided from Facebook, you can often end up wasting time, money and ultimately, after enough disapprovals, can risk your ad account being flagged.
This can be extremely frustrating and leave you feeling hopeless about your ad performance. No one, I repeat no one, enjoys seeing the tiny red warning sign pop up in the account (or worse their inbox).
Luckily, we’ve seen a lot of Facebook ads not approved, for a variety of different reasons, and we’ve been able to find workarounds—now, we want to offer up some advice.
We want to help you go from this…
To this.
During the ad review process, Facebook checks the ad's images, text, targeting, and positioning, in addition to the content on the ad's landing page.
Facebook cites that your ad may not be approved if:
The majority of disapprovals come from that last bullet point. If you’d like to take the time to sort through the rather vague and quite long list of Advertising Policies, be our guest. However, for the majority of advertisers, it’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong with an ad, and more importantly how they can fix it given the information in the documentation.
👋 Facebook bid their 20% text rule adieu, and we couldn't be happier. →
In terms of Facebook Ad disapprovals, there are two main categories: those you can fix and those you can’t. Once you’re notified that your ad isn’t approved you typically have two options, either edit the original ad or appeal the decision.
Although you can appeal the decision immediately, or choose to simply re-submit the ad again, I suggest you first take a look at the short explanation text within Ads Manager or the ad notification in your email. If you find that your disapproval doesn’t match anything on these lists, I highly encourage you to submit an appeal for the ad.
Every once in a while, an ad that was previously rejected becomes approved after submitting it again (the system isn’t perfect).
Keep in mind, too many disapprovals can flag your ad account, so be careful. If you don’t want to risk your account being disabled (meaning all current campaigns will be shut off), you may want to edit the ad.
When editing the ad, the fixes range from super simple image swaps to more complex, full redos. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, we’ve included some of the common reasons Facebook might deny your ad and some steps to take to fix those issues.
One of the most common reasons for an ad not getting approved, (as well as one of the easiest fixes) is the use of targeting within headlines or ad copy. Ads can’t contain text that “asserts or implies personal attributes.”
This includes a person’s:
The fix: Typically, removing the word “other” or “you” from the copy, will allow the ad to be approved.
Avoid these topics on Facebook
Sensational Content
Any ad containing “shocking, sensational, disrespectful or excessively violent content” will be rejected.
Struggling to picture this? Here are some examples:
The fix: A quick image swap or slight change of copy will have you back up and running. Keep in mind, images showing violence (real or fictional) will be flagged. Try and keep sensational content at a minimum as there really isn’t a set formula for images that work better in this scenario.
“Deceptive, false, or misleading content, including deceptive claims, offers, or methods.”
In terms of misleading content, we tend to see the majority of disapprovals in the health and wellness space and when used to discuss money payouts for certain situations.
“Learn to Lose Belly Fat” is very different from “3 Shocking Tips to Lose All Your Belly Fat”. The first headline would be approved, but the second would be denied.
The fix: As a general rule of thumb, only include accurate and non-misleading claims within ad and landing page copy. Make sure information about services or the product is clear and not exaggerated.
Unless you’re showcasing a statue within the ad, “nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative” will not get approved.
No artistic or educational images are allowed, even if not explicitly sexual. This includes:
The fix: When working in underwear, bathing suits, or any other industries that might get flagged—the more clothing the better. No tight cropping on individual “areas” (as mentioned above), and no poses that are “suggestive”. If possible, flat lays of the product are a great workaround. Once the item is on the model, you start to have a longer approval process and leave yourself open to the possibility of disapprovals, as well.
🔍 Find more expert tips and videos to boost your Facebook ad performance. →
As we mentioned earlier, these are some of the most common issues we’ve seen while running Facebook Ads. However, according to Facebook’s Advertising Policies, there are many other reasons why your ad may get disapproved.
Things like:
Disapprovals You Can’t Fix
Unfortunately, there are some disapprovals you can’t fix when working with Facebook Ads. Typically these disapprovals have to do with the product or service you’re promoting either has a general restriction, or more in-depth requirements within the ad targeting.
Some products that you can’t advertise on Facebook include:
Since the approval process for an individual ad can take up to 24 hours (sometimes longer in other cases), be sure to be mindful and double-check your work.
Avoid having to go through the whole approval process all over again because of a simple and fixable word misuse.
As with everything else, building Facebook Ads takes practice. Especially when just starting out or implementing new campaigns, it’s important to not let disapprovals discourage you. The majority of disapprovals we see are typically small mistakes that can be solved with quick fixes. Dropping the “you” in the headline, or making the ad copy less sensational gives you an easier starting point and can minimize future disapprovals.
At the end of the day, Facebook’s main goal is “to keep Facebook safe for people.” Keeping that goal in mind and being ready to make small tweaks to bring your ad into alignment with Facebook’s Ad Policies can have you back on the road to Facebook ad success.
If you're tired of spending time wandering the Facebook ads maze, why not bring on some help? Book a call with a growth expert to learn more about maximizing Facebook ads with the help of a top growth marketing agency.
There's no question here—we love advertising with Facebook because the platform continues to provide tools for eCommerce markers to reach an ever-broadening audience.
In 2015, Facebook launched Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs), a way for companies to get their ads in front of people who had visited and/or interacted with their Facebook page or website in the past. In 2017, Facebook expanded on this advertising format by launching Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABAs). This tool dramatically expands the potential reach of Facebook ads, helping eCommerce businesses improve ad performance.
DABAs expand on the concept of DPAs. However, instead of showing your ad to people who have previously interacted with your company, with DABAs, Facebook expands that audience to those people who have searched for a similar product or service to the ones you offer and/or who have interacted with a company similar to yours.
Obviously, this changes the dynamics of these ads from simply "preaching to the choir" to exposing your product to those who want what you are selling, but haven't yet heard of your company.
When you're not preaching to the choir, your ads can pop-and-lock their way to reach expanded audiences.
DABA campaigns aren't limited to Facebook feeds alone. They can appear on any of the Facebook platforms, including Instagram and Audience Network. They can be single-image ads, carousel ads, and collection ads. In addition, these ads are available across devices, including PCs and laptops, as well as mobile traffic.
With more than 2.5 billion registered users on Facebook and another one billion on Instagram, the potential of this marketing tool is difficult to ignore.
DABA campaigns are a great tool for reaching new customers aka top-of-funnel traffic. This ad tool considers the user's interest, behavior, and demographic data when deciding what ads an individual user will see. This can be beneficial when introducing a new product or a new marketing campaign. You can get your product information in front of potential customers who have already expressed interest (via their actions) in a product like the one you are promoting.
To make the most of your DABA campaigns, we suggest the following Best Practices:
1. Make sure that you write your ad to appeal to new customers. Since the goal of DABAs is to attract new customers to your eCommerce business, you want to write your ad to draw in those people. Don't assume in your ad copy that the reader has any knowledge or preconceived notion of your product or business.
2. Use demographics to fine-tune your audience. While Facebook and its subsidiaries have more than four billion registered users, it's not likely that all of them will have an interest in your product (unless you’re selling pizza—we imagine that’s a pretty universal sell 😋).
For example, are you interested in marketing to customers overseas? If not, you can limit your ad placement to US users. Are you looking to drive business to your local eatery? If so, then you'll want to hone your demographic information even more, so that only people within driving distance of your restaurant see your ad.
3. If you're using product sets, make sure to include a good number of products in each set. Facebook uses AI with DABAs to "learn" about its site visitors' preferences and extrapolate what products might interest them tomorrow...or next week. By including a large number of products in your set, the Facebook algorithm has room to work its magic and match a broader number of potential customers with products.
4. Exclude your current customers. Since you are looking for new customers with your DABA campaign, you want to exclude the people who have purchased from you in the past. We suggest those who purchased in the last 30 days. This function is found under "targeting". You exclude these people because you don't want your numbers to be skewed by people who already know and like your products.
5. Engage in ad testing to see what's working. Ad testing (which is an umbrella term for split tests and lift tests) will show you if you should replace some of your existing prospecting campaigns with DABAs.
Setting up a marketing campaign using DABA isn't difficult. It just takes a few steps. The good news is that you only have to do most of these steps once.
Dynamic Ads for Broader Audiences can dramatically transform your business. However, it does take a little bit of time and effort to set up.
At EmberTribe, we've been optimizing social media advertising like DABAs for our clients for several years and can do the tedious legwork for you so that you can concentrate on what you do best—interact with your customers.
To learn more about using Facebook ads for eCommerce and how to make dynamic ads for broad audiences work for you, book a call now!
In this post:
Search marketing refers to getting your website, social media pages, or other web pages to rank well with search engines like Google and Bing via paid and unpaid methods.
Try saying that five times fast! If it seems like a mouthful, that’s because it kind of is.
Ranking well with search engines is essential to getting your web pages noticed by potential customers. Even the best-written pages will be ineffective if they languish on page six, ten, or 100 (the horror!) of search results.
According to Forbes, as many as 92 percent of web users look no further than the first page of search results. With around1.2 billion websites active today, the competition for those top spots is fierce.
The best search marketing efforts combine both paid and unpaid methods of increasing search engine ranking. Organic (unpaid) growth can be more cost-effective, but it usually takes longer to realize even small movements in ranking using unpaid methods. The good news is that once you've gained ground using organic growth, the results tend to stay awhile.
Conversely, the effects of paid advertising on search engine results (and website traffic!) are more immediate but vanish immediately when you end your paid campaign.
Search marketing is a big space in the digital advertising world, so buckle up as we dive right in.
Search Engine Optimization, usually referred to simply as SEO, is the art and science of making your web pages rank highly with search engines using organic methods (aka unpaid traffic).
Entire books have been written about what makes up good SEO techniques. In a nutshell, it involves creating content that is useful and beneficial to your readers and letting the search engines easily detect what your pages are about. The algorithms know best, in this case.
There are three types of SEO: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO, as the name implies, involves what you write on your web and social media pages. Good on-page SEO technique includes publishing good, interesting, and useful content, using a few, carefully chosen keyword phrases to let search engines know what your page is about. A popular planning strategy for good on-page SEO is using the topic cluster model of content development.
You’ll want to make sure you’re using those keywords and phrases in the right places on the page (e.g. in the first paragraph, in at least one "H2" heading, in the page title, in your image caption) so the Google machine doesn’t get confused. (The Google machine is very particular.)
Of these on-page elements, having good content is by far the most important. Google, in particular, seeks out websites with what it deems to be good content. Google uses a sophisticated machine-learning algorithm to evaluate content.
While the exact algorithm is a well-kept secret, it's safe to say that it works by matching your content to that of a known authority in your field (like a university site or a non-profit). It also looks at how long readers stay on your pages, using the theory that good content encourages readers to stay longer to read it. It looks at things like images—which might be optional for an opinion site—but necessary for a food, gardening, or craft site.
Without good content, none of the rest of the information and tips on this page are likely to make any difference in your page ranking.
Technical SEO is the "page-office" stuff. This includes crafting a good META title and META description, making sure that you site loads quickly, having the necessary security measure in place, making your site adaptable to a variety of screen sizes and mobile-friendly, and organizing your website logically.
Off-page SEO has to do with your relationships with other well-regarded websites. Who is linking to your site? Are they sites that increase your image of authority in the eyes of search engines...or are they cheapening your brand? A good way to get good backlinks is to offer to write a guest post for websites that complement your site. (Oh by the way, have you read this blog post from Sellerly about us? ← See what we did there?)
👍 SEO in action: This client engaged us for SEO help and reached #1 on Google!
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is using paid advertising to help your web pages show up on search results pages. We like to call this a rent-to-own approach to marketing. Basically, you’re taking up prime space with paid ads until you can reach that same prime space without paid ads.
By using Google AdWords (or the similar Microsoft Advertising platform through Bing), you can bid for and purchase keywords and phrases that best represent your business. If your business focuses on local traffic, you can add the city, with a keyword like "Atlanta hair salons" or "Boston pet food stores".
When someone searches for something similar to your keyword or phrase, your ad will be in the running for ones that they'll see at the top of the page (without having to scroll down...this is key). If someone clicks through to your website from one of those ads, Google (or Bing) will charge your account. Your ad will stop running when you've hit your agreed-upon monthly maximum marketing budget.
So...why should you pay for a good search engine ranking when you can (at least theoretically) get the same results for free, using good SEO practices? Using paid search advertising helps put your listing at the "front of the line" and increases the likelihood that you'll show up at the top of Google (at least in the short run), outsmarting your competitors who are using exclusively organic methods.
However, it's wise to keep in mind that there is a subset of consumers who bypass the paid ads in search results on general principle. By using paid search methods exclusively, you'd miss out on that segment of the web buying public.
👍 SEM in action: This client employed PPC ads to drastically increase product sales.
SEO vs. SEM, paid vs. unpaid...which one is better?
The answer is that it depends.
It depends on your industry, your goals for your digital marketing, your budget, and how much time you have to devote to your SEO or SEM efforts. It's our view that everything "depends" in marketing.
SEO is best for those companies that have more time than money. If you have a lot of time to devote to crafting stellar content, approaching other websites about guest posts and writing them, and manually updating your pages and links so that everything is constantly fresh, then SEO will save you money and, done well, will yield long-lasting results.
SEM helps to speed up the process and yields results even if you have limited time to devote to search marketing. If it is done well, SEM can get your site placed above the organic sites. SEM is also a good choice for a promotion that has specific parameters, such as Red Lobster's "Lobster Fest" month. The downside to SEM is that when you stop paying for ads, your visibility (and traffic) will decrease abruptly.
Our opinion is that the best digital marketing plan uses a combination of SEO and SEM.
Both SEO and SEM will help your web pages stay visible to consumers and drive a more targeted base of readers to your web pages. SEM can get you instant web traffic while you build your content and the depth of your site enough to attract readers organically.
Back to the "rent-to-own" approach...When you combine SEO and SEM you're getting the best of both worls. You pay first for results, and you end up "owning" your good ranking by virtue of your well-built, well-organized website and its stellar content.
To learn more about how to increase your search engine ranking using SEO and SEM techniques, book a call with one of our growth experts!
Facebook unveiled a new way of monetizing live online events in 2020 and we were quick to take this new feature for a test drive.
Before we give you the details of our experience, first let’s take a look at the details of paid online events.
The need for Facebook paid online events arose from COVID-19 shutdowns that required large gatherings to either shut down or move to a totally virtual format. Enterprising businesses began using Facebook Live broadcasts more frequently to engage customers even when they couldn’t be together.
Facebook paid online events allow businesses to monetize their live online events by charging a one-time access fee collected upon guest registration. The goal is that businesses can create an event, get registrants, and collect fees all in one place—and then host their event from that same platform.
This is a pretty neat, accessible idea, especially for businesses with fewer resources on-hand to facilitate online events.
Your page is eligible for paid events as long as you’re in compliance with:
✔️ Facebook's Partner Monetization Policies
✔️ Paid Online Events Terms and Conditions
✔️ Apple's App Store Guidelines for In-App Purchases
✔️ Google Play’s Monetization and Ads Policy
Plus, your Page has to be in a region where paid online events are available.
You can check your Page’s eligibility for monetization by going to Creator Studio > Monetization > click the View Page Eligibility button in the Status widget at the top of the page.
💡 Promote your event to increase registrations and raise awareness to new audiences.
💡 Start your live stream early to tackle those pesky technical difficulties that can occur when starting an event online.
💡 Communicate expectations for your event so that registrants know what’s going to happen. Post a schedule in your event description or in posts on the event.
💡 Change the date and time if you have no purchases but still want to hold the paid event. This will give you more time to reach registrants.
💡 Only post content you have the rights to and make sure it’s in compliance with community guidelines.
EmberTribe scheduled a paid online event for one of our clients and ran an event response campaign to promote it. Here’s what we learned from our first experience with paid online events through Facebook.
The pros: solid targeting, good clickthrough rates, and good CPMs.
The cons: with $1000 spent, we only got 4 sales and $80 in revenue.
What we learned: While it’s possible that not enough people were interested in the topic or the price was too high, we believe that ultimately the problem is with event response campaigns themselves.
With event response ads, people don't even need to visit your event page. They can just click "interested" and continue scrolling through their feed. We theorize that's what most people who saw the ads were doing.
Our takeaway: Paid online events might be successful if you have really good organic reach, but we’re now wary about putting a big advertising budget behind them. If you do run an event response campaign, it's probably best to just do retargeting.
Rejoice! Facebook made its recommendation guidelines public this year and there’s a lot to dig into. With so many users blaming the platform for not detecting problematic content, this move comes as the platform’s efforts to increase transparency for its users both on Facebook and Instagram.
Examples of Facebook recommendations experiences include Pages You May Like, “Suggested For You” posts in News Feed, People You May Know, or Groups You Should Join.
To make it simpler for audiences, the social network has released a list of five categories that are allowed on Facebook but do not qualify for recommendation under the Facebook recommendation guidelines.
To improve user experience, the following content will not be recommended to other Facebook/Instagram users:
Content that jeopardizes a safe community, such as:
Post regarding finance and health, such as:
Posts that diminish experience aka annoying stuff, such as:
Poor quality content, such as:
Misleading content, such as:
It sure is tough to be the social media marketing manager of a borderline page...
Some of the content restricted by the Facebook recommendation guidelines feel like they overlook context. But that’s nothing new for algorithms that rely on AI.
In the world of marketing, what do the recommendation guidelines mean for digital marketers?
We already fine-tune our content strategy to fit the community standards set by the social media platform. Content producers will have to continue to navigate the Facebook maze to generate posts for organic campaigns, but with a little more information to guide them.
Here are some tips to follow to avoid being blacklisted from Facebook’s recommendations:
👍 In order to be recommended as a page, you should sweep the history of content that you've posted and align it to Facebook's recommendation guidelines. This means if you set a sponsored campaign in motion but have chosen to re-share someone else’s post that does not fill the recommended criteria, your content may be negatively affected by your move. As always, be vigilant about what you’re sharing to your social media!
👍 Make sure to deactivate affiliate pages regarding your business, especially if you post the same content everywhere.
👎 Pages that have bought likes and followers will no longer be recommended.
👎 On top of this, Facebook will also not recommend accounts that have been banned from Instagram Ads or Facebook Ads, and communities that promote violence in an offline movement.
👍 And finally, keep creating content that’s relevant and provides value to the audiences you’re trying to reach through your social media presence.
If you’re using Facebook ads, the Facebook pixel is a huge asset.
You should be using this key tool to realize the full potential of your social ad budget. With a little learning under your belt, you can use the pixel to gain major advantages for your results.
Facebook Pixel refers to code on a website that measures an advertising campaign’s effectiveness by interpreting the actions visitors take on the website.
In other words, the Facebook Pixel is an analytics tool that helps you track the conversion rate generated from Facebook ads and builds the target audience for future ads. Businesses can use it to ensure that their ads go to the right people.
It sounds a little weird, right? We train horses, dogs, sometimes dragons…
But a snippet of code is a whole other animal.
Training your pixel means that you don’t run a campaign with the purpose of getting a huge profit but rather to find the right audience. When you find the right audience, conversions should naturally follow.
The only conversion that you can optimize for without a pixel is link clicks. On the other hand, a pixel makes it possible for you to optimize a variety of conversion types in close alignment with the goals and aims of the business.
The Facebook pixel allows you to gain insight into how people interact with your website and allows you to track customers across the various devices. To put it simply, it can track whether the customers saw your ads on mobile and turned to the desktop before making a purchase, or the other way around.
It’s the real brains of your Facebook advertising operation.
To sum up, training your pixel is essential because it creates a customized audience that will most likely convert and turn into a lead by learning about your audience.
This brings us to the next point.
The Facebook ads delivery system uses machine learning to optimize for results. The delivery system collects more insights about the right target audience each time one of your Facebook ads is displayed (or as ad pros say, “served”).
You’ll know that your ad is in the learning phase because the Delivery column in your ads manager will indicate the ad set is “Learning.”
The learning phase is a critical time for Facebook’s machine learning to kick in and collect helpful information that will help you optimize your campaign. Thanks to the learning phase, you can get information that can take your ads from running on your assumptions to running on a data-backed hypothesis.
The learning phase is typically defined by 50 conversions that need to occur per ad set within one week’s time. Sometimes this number might be more, sometimes less, depending on your particular niche. We like to say 50 is a good rule of thumb, but not a magic number.
Now this part is important. It might go against your instincts to tweak and optimize, but during the learning phase you should avoid changing any of the following:
You can’t touch these!
Because if you do, Facebook will start the whoooole thing over again. Basically, by trying to tweak with variables during the learning phase you’re not allowing Facebook the chance to properly learn.
It would be like introducing a new topic in math class every day and expecting a student to master the information on the fly. Not fair.
At this time, Facebook has had the chance to explore all the best possible options to deliver your ad set.
Each time your ad was shown, the delivery system learned how to optimize your ad’s performance. This in turn helps you learn what ad strategies are working for your business and which ones you can toss out.
If you don’t get past the learning phase, Facebook will let you know that the ad set came back as “Learning Limited” — the ad set is not getting the required number of conversions for optimization or the system predicts that the ad set won’t be able to garner enough optimization events in the coming future.
It’s not the end of the world, but it does mean you’ll have to try again with a different ad set. We really value failure here, so even though Facebook comes back as “learning limited,” it’s definitely possible for you, the advertiser, to make educated adjustments to your ad creative to improve on future ads.
👍 If you’re not getting to that 50 conversion benchmark for purchases, try moving up the funnel and adjusting your ads for things like link click, page views, etc. That way you’re more likely to get the ad set through the learning phase and you’re getting more eyes on your ads (always a good thing). Once you’re optimized for top of funnel conversions, you’ll be better set up for bottom of funnel conversions.
👍 Run fewer ad sets in the beginning of your process. Remember: quality over quantity! If you have a limited budget, focus on a few key ad sets early on that you can really get through the learning phase as quickly as possible with a solid basis for scaling your ads for conversions.
👍 If you're not getting whatever the objective is that you’re going after, it could be that your ad creative just isn't hitting right with your target audience. So try testing new ad creative. Try out creating multiple ads, changing up the headline, making other bold changes to the ads before you enter the learning phase and see if any of these succeed.
Just like training a dog, training your Facebook pixel takes a lot of time, flexibility, and patience. But if you stick with it and make it through that learning phase to start optimizing, your pixel will be able to fetch you better results.
Advertising on Facebook is not for the weak-willed. There’s a lot to know and a lot to learn about Facebook ads to master Facebook marketing skills. That’s one of the reasons there are so many educational resources about Facebook advertising—there’s so much to know!
Luckily, the overlords folks at Facebook have produced tons of learning materials for us lowly marketers.
The Facebook Blueprint certification exams are targeted to digital marketers looking to demonstrate advanced proficiency using Facebook advertising services across platforms. There are 8 total certification levels:
One of our own EmberTribers, Joe, set out to test what a Facebook Blueprint Certification Exam is like and determine if it’s worth the hassle. He took the 100 level “Digital Marketing Associate” course as his test. After finishing his exam (passed with flying colors!), he reported back to us about his experience.
Here’s what he had to say:
Some other questions that our team had for Joe about the process:
Do you think the 100 certification is necessary for Facebook competency?
No, this level is not too difficult and covers a lot of the basics that any seasoned Facebook advertiser would already have under their belt. Taking the certification exam for the 100 level is more of a resume builder than a knowledge builder for those already familiar with Facebook digital marketing.
Was there a fee attached?
Yes, the fee for each exam is $99.
Is it a lifetime or time-limited certification?
The certification is good for 1 year.
Facebook's Blueprint course is a great foundational tool for advertisers. But what about the spaces "in-between" where many marketers find themselves wondering how to address using ads for growth?
Since our agency's inception, we've profitably spent more than $100 million on Facebook runnings ads for ourselves and our clients. We wanted to put all of this practical knowledge to work by creating a free Facebook ads training course for founders who are serious about growing their business with paid ads.
If you're not familiar with Facebook ads yet, you will want to start with the Facebook Blueprint course. Once you're done, we recommend bookmarking our free Facebook ads course or signing up for lessons sent directly to your email inbox.
In these training modules, we outline strategies and tactics that you won't find in the Facebook help section. Take time reviewing these training videos to learn from our deep knowledge of Facebook ads.
Digital marketers seeking a higher level of proficiency in Facebook ads should consider studying up on the 200 and up level certification to get the most bang for their buck. The certification itself, while nice to have, isn’t necessary to become a competent Facebook advertiser, but the lessons can help you boost your skill level.
And if you’re not comfortable learning the ins and outs of Facebook, it might be a good idea to bring in someone steeped in Facebook ad success. Hey, we know some people 😉.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced a new user interface that would overtake so-called “classic Facebook” in September. This means bye-bye 👋 to the old look and hello to a refreshed, updated interface. One of the main motivations for switching to a new Facebook interface (or FB5 as they call it) is a company-wide pivot toward privacy-focused communications.
Another big motivation is simply that Facebook’s desktop UI has remained essentially unchanged for years, and what worked in 2012 doesn’t really translate to a great 2020 user experience. Oh, how time passes...
What the new design addresses:
Among the changes in the new interface:
Unfortunately for Facebook, the UI change has been received with very mixed reviews, and despite the months-long lead time on changes, it seems likely that people will continue to have to grapple with getting used to “new Facebook” for a while.
The new Facebook design has triggered quite a few (negative) emotions from users. The change was made permanent on September 1, 2020, so users and Facebook engineers will have to adapt and make the best of a new situation.
A quick search for “Facebook interface” on Twitter shows that a lot of people aren’t loving the updates, and some are even reporting issues with the desktop interface loading. Well, anyone who has ever done anything knows that it’s impossible to please everyone, so these mixed reviews are far from shocking.
Some common criticisms (so far):
Well, truth be told, our team feels pretty lukewarm toward these changes. However, since we’re in the business of paid social, a big interface change like this could have unexpected influence over Facebook advertising strategies. To put it plainly: the success of Facebook ads is intrinsically tied to the functionality and popularity of Facebook itself.
With web browsing increasingly trending toward mobile usage, this change seems like a warranted update to accommodate evolving preferences.
It’s hard to say right now if these changes will turn out to be positive for the overall user experience or anger frequent Facebook users to the point of no return. But from a personal point of view, if users haven’t been deterred by previous Facebook updates, scandals, and complaints, this remodeled UI seems unlikely to push users away.
For now, Facebook advertising is safe (and we love to see it!). If you're ready to run Facebook ads that get results, let's talk.
Have you scrolled through your Facebook feed and had a good product review catch your eye? Maybe you even ended up buying a product because you were swayed by a positive review from a friend, a relative, or even other online users you don’t really know.
That, my friend, is a result of social proof!
Social proof is social influence derived from the same principle as “word of mouth.” It generally inspires trust between your potential customer and users who leave testimonials about a certain product or service you offer.
Social proof doesn’t just rely on reviews or feedback — it’s also about what people see in your public social engagement such as the number of reactions, comments, and shares your ad receives.
If your ad gained around 1,000 likes whether organically or not, a customer’s natural reaction is to find out why. All thanks to a social phenomenon called FOMO or “fear of missing out,” people always want to know what the next big thing is.
Social proof is part of almost every successful social media marketing campaign and can negatively or positively impact customer’s purchase behavior.
When a customer is in a brick and mortar store, they have full capacity to weigh out options and directly see which product is the best for them. Things are a lot more complicated when shopping online.
Your potential customer needs an external factor to rely on to make a decision — and this is where social proof steps in.
The key to having effective social proof is using specific and authentic user-generated content (such as reviews) in your ads that are targeted to warm audiences. Your warm audiences are people who are already familiar with your products and just need a bit of a nudge to make that purchase.
Your Facebook campaigns can contain reviews that are not too in-your-face or too dry and unexciting. Although reviews are not exactly reactions or shares on your actual ad, they still showcase how other people love your brand and your products.
You can fit these testimonials into your ad copy or creative image into your actual ad depending on the length. Here are 4 stunning social proof examples used in Facebook ads.
Review in headline:
Review in ad:
Review in ad text:
Yup, you read that right — Facebook has ad text rules that you need to be wary of before running your campaign.
Facebook’s advertising guidelines include a 20 percent text rule. This specifically means that your image text cannot take up more than 20 percent of the photo. Facebook typically suggests no more than 500 characters and an image that is 400x400 pixels for News Feed ads, simply because they perform and drive results better.
Keep in mind that you can test your ad photos with Facebook’s Text Overlay Tool and see if they fit the standards before officially running your Facebook ads.
How will you use social proof to engage audiences?
In this post:
Check out this TribeTalk from our Marketing Specialist, Kathryn Betancourt chatting with our Director of Operations, J.P. VanderLinden, and one of our Growth Specialist, Melanie D'Angelo.
We often talk to Amazon sellers who want to run digital ads for their Amazon stores/listings from other platforms. The challenge is always in tracking/optimization. Is it working? Are the Facebook, Google, and Pinterest ads actually driving the Amazon conversions? How do we teach the ad platforms what to do more of?
Earlier this year, Amazon rolled out a solution to help with the first question. There's a dashboard in Amazon Stores that displays data by source including visits, page views, sales, and sales units. This isn’t just for Facebook but also tracks ads on Google, Pinterest, etc. See the picture below.
This helps pull data into Amazon but there are still issues for how to pull data OUT to other systems. It's not perfect, but it's more than we've had before, and it might be enough for folks to start exploring.
We've also discovered thatSellerly, a collection of Amazon business tools by Semrush, offers excellent marketing tools for Amazon listings designed to make selling on the marketplace easier and more effective. If Amazon's data insights are still not sufficient for you, give Sellerly a try!
Marketers understand that different ad types work better at different parts of the funnel. For example, Search is great at BOFu, Display at TOFu, etc. But what about how they work together?
Google released a report that marketers advertising on YouTube saw better conversion volume and rates from their Search campaigns. Specifically, Search conversions were 8% higher, conversion rates were 3% higher, and Search CPAs dropped 4%.
We all know that advertising on YouTube increases brand awareness and ad recall. The big questions are: Is this something driven by traditionally understood marketing practice? Or is Google itself actually influencing the algorithm to favor buyers who spend across multiple components of it's ad platform?
Regardless of what’s going on Google’s side, we recommend testing YouTube. Don’t just measure the direct performance, also measure the "halo effect" on other channels like Search & Social.
Yabba DABA Do!! Let’s discuss Facebook DABA campaigns. We think these campaigns have a lot of value for our clients.
Most folks think of Dynamic Ads as only supporting retargeting your website visitors and app users, limiting your audience size to the number of people who’ve interacted with you in the past. That’s why, despite the great performance, the possible investments advertisers have been able to make have been fairly restricted — typically, the biggest share of their budgets goes to acquiring new customers.
To help advertisers reach these audiences with top-performing ads, Facebook now offers the possibility to expand the reach of Dynamic Ads campaigns outside retargeting audiences.
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABA) expands your dynamic ads to reach beyond your website or app visitors to generate demand. DABA campaigns serve personalized recommendations based on browsing activity and showcase the relevant inventory from your catalog to people likely to purchase.
Unlike lookalike audiences and retargeting site visitors, broad audience targeting captures intent in other places like:
DABA campaigns will have your potential customers saying….
What questions do you have for us? Have you tried DABA campaigns? Are you running YouTube ads? Comment below.
Most business owners running digital ads are trained early on to focus on ROAS. By definition, “return on ad spend” sounds like it MUST be the holy grail metric of digital marketing. You’ve spent money on advertising with the expectation that in return, you will receive revenue.
However, few words sum up the panic and despair you feel when, in the early days of your ad campaigns, you see $150 in Shopify revenue on one tab and $500 in ad spend on the other.
⬆️ Level up your ROAS with Snapchat ads. →
For most business owners, it’s impossible not to lose sight of the long-term goals.
In that moment, it’s important to take a step back and consider the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve, both as a company and in your digital campaigns.
The digital marketplace is complex. There are countless variables that influence whether or not someone buys from you.
😱 Are your analytics lying to you? →
Ad creative, ad copy, price, promotions, free shipping, the purchase process, trust in the brand, trust in the website, customer service, other sites selling the same product, other sites selling similar products, people who sit on a cart to decide – and then forget.
Every one of these variables – and many more – have a direct impact on whether you will get a return on your ad spend. And whether your company will be around in 6 months.
However it’s impossible to know, much less get these critical factors, right if your sole mission statement is to increase ROAS month over month.
Knowing and understanding what creates a growing and sustainable buying process requires time, iterating, testing and repeating – all of which require some ad spend.
No one wants to hear this: investing money to know your buyers’ process and what will make your company successful will lower your ROAS, as some of your money is diverted to testing. But invest, you must.
Founders are engineered to trust their gut, sometimes to a fault. They don’t want to spend money – or time – on iterating and testing because they are sure their assumptions are correct.
💊 Hard to swallow pill: Facebook ads don't always work. Here's why. →
The unfortunate reality is that the longer you begrudge ad spend on testing, the more money you waste on less effective ads, the lower your ROAS, and the longer you’re wasting money and suffering a low ROAS.
For instance, you may have perfected a BBQ rub that you sell out of every weekend at the local farmer’s marketing. You’re positive that as soon as you get your online store up and some ads running, your greatest obstacle will be keeping up with inventory. I mean, people LOVE this stuff. 😋
You get a Shopify account and start to run some ads. The ads are driving a lot of traffic to your site – you may even be getting some adds to cart. Unfortunately, your orders are bumping around 3 a day.
You may have forgotten to account for some of those critical variables or external factors we mentioned – like trust-building elements, shopping flow, technical issues and shipping issues. No one is buying from you for one or many reasons.
This is a classic case of "You don’t know what you don’t know."
Credit: peerinsight.com
However, now that ads are driving traffic to the site, testing various usual suspects, you come to understand that people need some convincing with testimonials, BBQ awards logos, reviews, free samples – and they need free shipping to push past the finish line.
🍨 Get the scoop on conversion rate optimization. →
These external factors can be smoked out as quickly as possible (pun intended, see what we did there?), removing obstacles to people buying – and increasing that flow of ROAS back to you. But more importantly, you’re building a stronger company and a brand with staying power. You now know what’s important to your customers and are removing barriers that frustrate them. This is an exercise in growth marketing!
Let’s say your investment in market research by way of ad traffic pays off, and you get to a comfortable ROAS. It’s tempting to assume you’re good to coast into retirement on the back of your world class BBQ blend.
You may have hit a ROAS that makes you happy, but it’s important to continue viewing that number as one indicator metric of many. Even when it’s trending upward, it cannot become the focal point of your business.
As a growing company, it’s important to turn your attention and an allotment of your ad spend to understanding bigger metric fish: like the lifetime value of each customer.
And what makes one customer more valuable than another, and how do you specifically target more valuable customers?
Which customers are more likely to advocate for your product, resulting in more customers and more sales?
Your main objective for the first few months of any digital campaign should be to come away with a deadly accurate pulse on your market conditions, your purchasing audience, what compels them to pay for your product and any obstacles getting in the way of paying for your product.
Armed with this knowledge, you can make critical decisions around HOW to market your product in digital ads, through a keen understanding of your audience’s pricing tolerance, preferred messaging and detailed targeting.
For the first phase of your digital campaign, ROAS is simply the cherry on top. You’re building the sundae from the bottom up, starting with:
While any business owner would jump at the above information, few actually get there. Far too many are dissuaded from the testing it takes to uncover this valuable information by one difficult truth: These kinds of objectives are often at odds with increasing short-term ROAS.
Unlocking seven or eight figures of revenue might mean taking a hit on the first few months of ad spend. Brace yourself – it may be even more with big ticket items or those with a long purchase path. That's not a bad thing if you're laying the foundations for long-term success!
🏫 Want to get schooled? Check out our free training resources. →
You can create ads built for faster approval , and we can tell you how.
Read on to learn:
Thanks to a long list of Facebook Ad guidelines and strict ad approval process, many marketers using Facebook advertising tools enter the land of confusion.
Population: 90% of Facebook Advertisers.
When working with Facebook Ads, it’s been always been difficult to find answers when you run into trouble. Dealing with Facebook ads that haven't been approved is no exception.
With little information provided from Facebook, you can often end up wasting time, money and ultimately, after enough disapprovals, can risk your ad account being flagged.
This can be extremely frustrating and leave you feeling hopeless about your ad performance. No one, I repeat no one, enjoys seeing the tiny red warning sign pop up in the account (or worse their inbox).
Luckily, we’ve seen a lot of Facebook ads not approved, for a variety of different reasons, and we’ve been able to find workarounds—now, we want to offer up some advice.
We want to help you go from this…
To this.
During the ad review process, Facebook checks the ad's images, text, targeting, and positioning, in addition to the content on the ad's landing page.
Facebook cites that your ad may not be approved if:
The majority of disapprovals come from that last bullet point. If you’d like to take the time to sort through the rather vague and quite long list of Advertising Policies, be our guest. However, for the majority of advertisers, it’s hard to know exactly what’s wrong with an ad, and more importantly how they can fix it given the information in the documentation.
👋 Facebook bid their 20% text rule adieu, and we couldn't be happier. →
In terms of Facebook Ad disapprovals, there are two main categories: those you can fix and those you can’t. Once you’re notified that your ad isn’t approved you typically have two options, either edit the original ad or appeal the decision.
Although you can appeal the decision immediately, or choose to simply re-submit the ad again, I suggest you first take a look at the short explanation text within Ads Manager or the ad notification in your email. If you find that your disapproval doesn’t match anything on these lists, I highly encourage you to submit an appeal for the ad.
Every once in a while, an ad that was previously rejected becomes approved after submitting it again (the system isn’t perfect).
Keep in mind, too many disapprovals can flag your ad account, so be careful. If you don’t want to risk your account being disabled (meaning all current campaigns will be shut off), you may want to edit the ad.
When editing the ad, the fixes range from super simple image swaps to more complex, full redos. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, we’ve included some of the common reasons Facebook might deny your ad and some steps to take to fix those issues.
One of the most common reasons for an ad not getting approved, (as well as one of the easiest fixes) is the use of targeting within headlines or ad copy. Ads can’t contain text that “asserts or implies personal attributes.”
This includes a person’s:
The fix: Typically, removing the word “other” or “you” from the copy, will allow the ad to be approved.
Avoid these topics on Facebook
Sensational Content
Any ad containing “shocking, sensational, disrespectful or excessively violent content” will be rejected.
Struggling to picture this? Here are some examples:
The fix: A quick image swap or slight change of copy will have you back up and running. Keep in mind, images showing violence (real or fictional) will be flagged. Try and keep sensational content at a minimum as there really isn’t a set formula for images that work better in this scenario.
“Deceptive, false, or misleading content, including deceptive claims, offers, or methods.”
In terms of misleading content, we tend to see the majority of disapprovals in the health and wellness space and when used to discuss money payouts for certain situations.
“Learn to Lose Belly Fat” is very different from “3 Shocking Tips to Lose All Your Belly Fat”. The first headline would be approved, but the second would be denied.
The fix: As a general rule of thumb, only include accurate and non-misleading claims within ad and landing page copy. Make sure information about services or the product is clear and not exaggerated.
Unless you’re showcasing a statue within the ad, “nudity, depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative” will not get approved.
No artistic or educational images are allowed, even if not explicitly sexual. This includes:
The fix: When working in underwear, bathing suits, or any other industries that might get flagged—the more clothing the better. No tight cropping on individual “areas” (as mentioned above), and no poses that are “suggestive”. If possible, flat lays of the product are a great workaround. Once the item is on the model, you start to have a longer approval process and leave yourself open to the possibility of disapprovals, as well.
🔍 Find more expert tips and videos to boost your Facebook ad performance. →
As we mentioned earlier, these are some of the most common issues we’ve seen while running Facebook Ads. However, according to Facebook’s Advertising Policies, there are many other reasons why your ad may get disapproved.
Things like:
Disapprovals You Can’t Fix
Unfortunately, there are some disapprovals you can’t fix when working with Facebook Ads. Typically these disapprovals have to do with the product or service you’re promoting either has a general restriction, or more in-depth requirements within the ad targeting.
Some products that you can’t advertise on Facebook include:
Since the approval process for an individual ad can take up to 24 hours (sometimes longer in other cases), be sure to be mindful and double-check your work.
Avoid having to go through the whole approval process all over again because of a simple and fixable word misuse.
As with everything else, building Facebook Ads takes practice. Especially when just starting out or implementing new campaigns, it’s important to not let disapprovals discourage you. The majority of disapprovals we see are typically small mistakes that can be solved with quick fixes. Dropping the “you” in the headline, or making the ad copy less sensational gives you an easier starting point and can minimize future disapprovals.
At the end of the day, Facebook’s main goal is “to keep Facebook safe for people.” Keeping that goal in mind and being ready to make small tweaks to bring your ad into alignment with Facebook’s Ad Policies can have you back on the road to Facebook ad success.
If you're tired of spending time wandering the Facebook ads maze, why not bring on some help? Book a call with a growth expert to learn more about maximizing Facebook ads with the help of a top growth marketing agency.
#Realtalk: If you’ve got fundamental cracks in your business model, there ain’t no Facebook targeting or performance strong enough to build revenue on that foundation.
There are a lot of great eCommerce ideas out there, started by some pretty smart entrepreneurs. And because Facebook has been a successful advertising platform for so many eCommerce businesses, it’s tempting to think that Facebook advertising is the silver bullet that can sell anything.
But before you pour all of your hard-earned resources into Facebook ads, you need to take a step back and ask the hard questions about your business itself.
Let's dig into the most common reasons why Facebook ads don't work for eCommerce brands.
Ask yourself: Could people buy my product, or one almost exactly like it, somewhere else?
If you’re a dropshipper, a reseller, or your product is just fairly common, it’s critical that you know all other outlets where customers could buy your product. You need to have a solid answer to why someone should buy from you, specifically—particularly if you’re competing against trusted outlets like Amazon Prime or the option to stop at Target on the way home.
If price is your top hurdle for customers, you probably have a bit of a red flag 🚩 on your hands. With price as your primary differentiator, you’re signed up for a road race to the lowest possible dollar, slashing your margins. Matched against huge wholesalers and deep pocket retailers online, it’s a tough race to win.
All too often, a business will run a great ad campaign, driving eager customers to their website—only to have most customers open another tab to their Prime account, enter a few search terms, and one-click-purchase, two-day-ship it within seconds.
The solution: Build high-quality, descriptive landing pages.
Quality landing pages prominently displaying solid differentiators can go a long way in mitigating this. We'll talk about this a little further down, but if you can't compete on price, you have to find some way to compete. It could be by highlighting great packaging, promoting a specific lifestyle, or even going super niche with your audience focus.
Keep testing and optimizing until you find the winning combination of audiences, ad creative, and campaigns.
Ask yourself: If people see 88 other websites today, will they really remember mine?
A staggering percentage of Facebook ad failures have nothing to do with the ads. The website users land on is a yawn, and they immediately bounce—especially if the product isn’t particularly remarkable.
If you’re selling water bottles, your website better make visitors spit water all over the screen in excitement. (And then maybe consider selling water bottle-keyboard bundles? Just a thought...)
Take Welly for example. They sell bandages. Big whoop, right? Well, actually, they were able to make bandages not only look cool but also create a website that gets viewers really amped about bandages and first aid kits. Now that's impressive!
The solution: Put your creative hat on and make your site the go-to site for products like yours.
We recommend promoting curated bundles, product reviews, usage videos, comparison charts, and anything else to make the buying experience worth those few extra dollars and time in transit.
Ask yourself: Is my unique value proposition really all that unique?
Can you immediately answer why your product is better than similar products? Or, if not your product, your brand/company/story?
Don’t expect people to throw money at you if your big UVP is warm sleeves on coats. People expect coats to be warm. However, If you sell coats with secret inner sleeve pockets created to sneak sour patch gummies and Diet Coke (because you believe in a balanced diet) into the movie theater....now we're talking.
Even if your product is fairly common, you can be strategic in your marketing. Identify the strongest benefits of your product and broadcast them. Your ads need to quickly get to key differentiators and value-adds of the product or brand.
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Do your homework and learn what your closest competitors are saying about their similar products—and stop trying to say the same things. Shake up the product dialog with features and selling points they can’t match. You've got a unique value proposition; don't keep it hidden!
The solution: Think about the problems your potential customers face and show how your product solves those problems.
Try reading through customer comments, questions, and reviews. Do some brand soul-searching to figure out what makes your company distinctly unique.
Ask yourself: Do I have enough people to sell to?
There are probably a LOT of left-handed people in snowy climates who would be thrilled to buy your glove-installed, left-handed, heavy-duty ice scraper. But you’ve already cut off a huge percentage of people to target. It’ll likely take a lot of testing audiences, creative and placement to arrive at ads that’ll consistently sell something so niche.
(Note: at the time of writing, Facebook has yet to target in which hand the user holds the mobile device.)
Similarly, “shop local” can be a bad thing if you’re too localized. There might be at least a dozen people in your neighborhood interested in your dog-walking service, but until you expand into other neighborhoods, you’re capped from growth.
🗺️ You are here. Reach customers where they're at. Literally. →
With hyper-specialization and micro-localization, your digital marketing is in a tough place. You need a broad enough audience to start gaining traffic and driving sales. If your potential audience is too small, you may just spin your tires indefinitely.
The solution: Think of diverse ways to use your product or broader groups of people who can benefit.
Target auxiliary groups very specifically with messaging zeroed into reasons why this seemingly esoteric product could benefit them.
Ask yourself: Would I scroll past my own creative assets?
Studies show that people see, on average, over 5,000 images a day. Deduct out the cat memes, and that’s still literally thousands of bland stock photos, manufacturer product catalog images, and stale advertising.
If you want your digital ads to catch a scroller's attention, provide imagery and creative assets that stop your target audience dead in its track. Think: product videos, boomerangs, animated gifs, slideshows, and lifestyle product photography.
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We can point to countless creative tests and anecdotal examples where interesting creative drove engagement and sales, always beating out boring flat-lays and manufacturer-provided model images. Dropshippers, it’s easy to just forward on white background product pics, but trust us: lifestyle or in-use imagery beats this out Every. Single. Time.
Never lose sight of the story your creative is telling about your brand. What does your imagery say about the business and about the product?
Ask yourself: What’s stopping a customer from clicking "Complete Purchase"?
People shop online because it’s easy. Facebook ads can drive traffic to your site all day long, but if you’ve created ANY inconvenience for the buyer, you can count on losing sales—maybe even most.
The solution: Identify friction in your store or checkout process by doing a conversion rate optimization walkthrough.
If the issue is more abstract, like customers would like to try on before they buy or feel the quality first hand before making a big-ticket purchase, brainstorm ways to remove the friction and turn the solution into a selling point.
Take Warby Parker, for instance. Many people are insecure about how glasses, particularly Warby’s bold, trendy frames, will actually look on their face shape. Warby turns Free Shipping and Free Returns (offered by many retailers) into “Try on before you buy without ever having to visit the store!”
After flooding you with reasons businesses fail with Facebook advertising, we want you to know one thing:
No matter where you stand on the spectrum of answers to these questions, brutally honest self-evaluation has the power to deliver up creative solutions that can transform your business from a pretty good idea to a company that customers return to time and again, telling their friends and family about—a reliable money-maker.
If you want an outsider's perspective about why your Facebook ads aren't generating sales, book a call with our team for expert insights.
In this post:
We love Facebook advertising as a marketing tool, and a Facebook ad that gets a lot of likes, shares or comments, is a HUGE asset. This type of engagement is called “social proof,” and it can turn your ad from drab to fab by rolling over your hard-earned reacts and comments.
Social proof is like a Jedi mind trick for your audience - they inherently TRUST more when there's strength in numbers.
But what happens when you try to duplicate your high performing ad and show it to a new audience? All of those likes, shares and comments are GONE!
In this tutorial post, we’ll walk you through how to re-use those high performers over and over again across different audiences without losing all your precious social proof.
One of the most powerful assets that you have as a Facebook advertiser is an ad that gets a lot of engagement.
Shares, likes, comments—all of that creates what we call social proof.
It builds trust with the people that you're trying to reach. It shows them that there's been a positive response to what you're putting out there and it really helps create a more effective ad.
Here's the kicker, though: when Facebook advertisers try to reuse those ads, oftentimes they lose all of those likes, shares, and comments all of the social proof.
Never fear! We have a quick fix for using those same high performing ads against new audiences without losing all of that social proof on the ad.
Now, let's walk through the 6 easy steps it takes to reuse ads with the most social proof. 👇
Now in order for this tactic to work, you have to create a dark post. Essentially, that means you're creating a post that's just not public or published on your page. You can learn how to create dark post on Facebook in this easy-to-follow 3 minute tutorial from Jon Loomer.
What the dark post allows you to do is:
All without losing the social proof you built up. So we definitely recommend taking the 3 minutes or so to master this skill!
Now you need to find the ad that's working really well for you. This is the ad that you'll use to recreate the magic with the added bonus of built-in social proof.
In Ads Manager, select the ad you want to use and click the edit button.
Under Ad Preview, locate the box icon in the right corner and click that, then scroll down to select the Facebook Post with Comments option.
You'll see that this loads up the ad that you're wanting to reuse. In our example, we chose this ad with plenty of social proof:
Now you need to copy the entire URL from the browser bar. We recommend copying and pasting the URL into a tool like Notepad or Sticky Notes so it's easier to manipulate the text.
And what you're looking for from the full URL is the post ID. You'll find the post ID after the /posts/ portion of the URL. Check it out below:
So grab this number all the way up to the question mark and then copy it. You're going to use that in a later step.
Now the next step is to create a new ad just like you're used to doing for your any other Facebook ad. As usual, you'll want to choose whatever objective makes the most sense for your goals.
Continue by choosing a new audience just like you would when building a normal Facebook ad campaign. This stuff is probably all old hat for you at this point! The real juicy stuff that you're here for is this:
Navigate to the Ads section and then click on the Use Existing Post button. This is the key!
Normally, you're probably creating a new ad and using one of the typical options like carousel, image, video, and so on... but in this case, we're going to be using an existing post.
You'll notice that there are quick ways to grab page posts that have run before, but you don't need to worry about digging through old posts to find the right one. Instead, just go ahead and click Enter Post ID to find the exact ad that you need.
Now it's all coming full circle, right? Remember that post ID you grabbed for the last step? All you have to do is paste it in the box and click Submit.
And ✨voila ✨ it appears right here.
You can scroll down and see that the same reactions, the same comments are still there.
The beauty of this is that you can go back to the Ad Set, choose a new audience, segment, and run the ad in a totally new location...but the ad and ad creative has all of the same engagement and social proof that we had before.
Remember:
→ You need to start with creating a dark post.
→ Then find the URL of that dark post.
→ Locate the post ID,
→ Create a new ad
→ Select Existing Post.
→ Enter your post ID
...and that's it!
You can do this as many times as you'd like for new campaigns, for new ad sets. And, again, the real star of this trick is that you can take that social proof and carry it with you wherever you go, and whatever your audiences you want to test out.
Have you added this test to your digital advertising experiment queue? Let us know in the comments!
Custom audiences are one of the most powerful features of Facebook advertising. Being able to target a list of customers or leads opens up a world of opportunity for marketers.
We’ve used custom audience targeting to drive millions in revenue for our clients.
But did you know that you can help Facebook go to work even harder for you? Let’s dive in.
Custom audience targeting is one of the most powerful features of the Facebook advertising platform.
Being able to target specific lists of your customers or prospects and find them on Facebook is just an incredibly powerful resource to have at your disposal.
🛍️ 6 Facebook audiences you need for your eCommerce advertising. →
A lot of people don't realize that they're not even scratching the surface of how powerful these custom audiences can be for their marketing efforts.
So, in this video, we want to show you some of the things we've done to raise our chances of succeeding with custom audiences and these tactics have resulted in millions of dollars of revenue for some of our clients who are advertising on Facebook.
So one of the things we need to understand about Facebook custom audiences is that when you upload a list of leads or customers, Facebook goes out and tries to find those people on their platform, find their usernames. So you provide an email address, they try to go back and find a Facebook profile.
Why?
Because you want to be able to show ads to those people. But, in order for Facebook to do that, they need to know what their profile is, what their user account is.
So we call this a match rate.
You upload a hundred names to Facebook. It may only be able to come back and get 30 or 40 or 50 of those people that you can then advertise to. But we want to get that number as close to 100 as possible. And that's what the rest of this video is going to go through.
So what a lot of folks don't know, is that Facebook will take up to 15 different pieces of information on your leads or customers, in order to use that to try to find those people on Facebook.
So the more information you have, the better the chance of finding them on Facebook.
So I'm looking at one of the steps here where you go and you are uploading your list to create a custom audience.
You can see email addresses, one of them phone numbers, but there's a lot of others here, including things like first name and last name and zip code, date of birth, gender, age.
All those things can be used to find these people.
So there's a template that you can download to try to fill out further before you upload this to Facebook and the advice here is to get as much information as possible.
Now, what if you have a newsletter list, right?
You have thousands of email addresses that you have acquired over time of people subscribing to your newsletter list. You want to want to start advertising those people on Facebook.
Well, what I want to show you today is a tool called Clearbit.
Now, we love Clearbit because it's just a powerful tool that you can use in a sales process. You can use it in your marketing.
We're going to show you how to use it to level up your custom audiences.
So go sign up for a free trial of Clearbit. They have a Google Drive integration which I'm using here and I'm going to show you an example.
Let's pretend that I have these five people on my email address. They all happen to be from Apple, very lucky I know.
Now, you can see the add-on here for Google Drive from Clearbit has an enrichment tab.
I'm going to select the emails that I want to enrich. In other words, select the emails that I want to get more information on and then click enrich selected rows.
We're going let that work.
It's magic. it's going to open up a new sheet and you can see little by little it's starting to fill out more information on these people.
I started with just having an email address but now I have their first name, their last name, I have their location, I have other things as well like actual latitude and longitude, and we could use some of those things to maybe triangulate a zip code. There's job titles in here. There's a lot more that really can help you learn about the people who are on your list.
So even before we try to create a custom audience, use this to create some charts and some pivot tables. Figure out what their job titles are, who they are in aggregate, and how can I serve them better as my audience.
You can see where this is going.
My next step would be to take the fields here from the Clearbit enrichment and then add them to this spreadsheet.
This is your upload sheet that Facebook gives you to create a better custom audience. So, right off the bat, you have first name and last name.
You have maybe city and there's some other pieces of information here that you can get from Clearbit to fill this our more fully.
So before you just go and add your list of names to the custom audience, try to go ahead and enrich it first.
Then upload it and get a much better match rate, which means you're going to be able to target much more of your list on Facebook, increase engagement, increase your chances for actually reaching these people, and bringing them to the next step in your funnel.
Facebook is a powerful paid social advertising platform, but it doesn’t scale the same way as paid search. In this post, you'll learn the 3 rules for Facebook ad scaling that we swear by (and why).
In this quick tip video, we’ll demonstrate how you can best scale your ad spend without killing the performance of key metrics like cost per lead.
These three "rules" are what we used to scale one client's efforts on Facebook from 0 to 400k new users every month (you can check out that case study here).
We're going to share the scaling strategy we use for our clients that allows us to spend more each month, increase the volume of incoming qualified leads, all without hurting the performance of those campaigns.
When you follow these three rules for scaling Facebook ad campaigns, you can help save your performance as you increase ad spend.
There are so many targeting options to choose from on Facebook, it's easy to get excited about getting very, very granular, and specific about who you want to target.
But if your audience size is too small, you're not going to have enough runway to scale your ads. Remember: there's always going to be opportunities down the line to create more segments. Don't overdo it from the jump!
Instead, if you find that a certain segment of your target audience has responded well to your campaigns so far, you should optimize for that segment. It's important that you don't shoot yourself in the foot by creating a too-small audience size from the start.
Don't get so locked in on one audience segment that you're going after because eventually, you're going to wear them out.
You need to get creative about the ways that you can expand to new audiences. That means taking full advantage of partner categories in Facebook, different interest targets, and especially using options like lookalike audiences.
Make sure that once you've converted a healthy number of people, you want to create a lookalike audience to allow Facebook to start expanding the target reach of your ads.
This third rule is very important. It's probably the most important rule when it comes to scaling your campaign—be mindful about how you manage your budget.
Oftentimes, the biggest mistake that we see advertisers make is that when they see something work, they have a knee-jerk reaction that they need to pump ad spend in their campaign. Unfortunately, this turns into blowing the doors off of their budget.
What you want to do instead is very incrementally increase the budgets.
The reason for this incremental increase is that Facebook optimizes through an algorithm that determines who they should show your ads to, based on who they think will respond most to your message.
If you give them too much information to optimize for, the algorithm can't work correctly. In other words, if you've increased your budget too much and try to get too many people through the funnel, Facebook just won't be able to keep up.
So, your Facebook ad campaigns need time to adjust to a new level of budget.
Try to wait two or three days before raising the budgets on your campaigns if you're testing a new angle or you launching a new ad set.
When you do raise the budget, keep each budget increase as incremental gains, like 30 to 50 percent increases to the budget.
That's going to safeguard your ads against seeing major campaign performance decline. Over time, you'll be able to scale to a higher budget...but without tanking all the hard work the algorithm has done for you so far.
There's a lot more that goes into managing your campaign than these three rules. But with these principles, you're going to be head and shoulders above 90 percent of the advertisers that don't have this 3-rule framework to scale their campaigns.
Good luck, and may your next campaign scale beyond your wildest dreams!
Find out how EmberTribe can manage your Facebook ad campaigns for you by booking a call with one of our growth experts.
This is the first installment of a tutorial video series called, Quick Tip Tuesday #QTT! It's a weekly series of videos that bring you highly actionable advertising tactics in 90 seconds or less.
In this first episode of "Quick Tip Tuesday", we'll walk you through how Facebook advertisers can grow their audience for free while they run their campaigns.
If you want to make the most of your campaigns, spending 10 minutes or less each week, this tip is for you!
💡 Boost your Custom Audience match rate with this quick tutorial. →
Hey there, in this quick video I wanna show you how you can get more mileage out of your Facebook advertising campaigns without spending more money and really spending no more than 10 minutes a week.
This is going to make your advertising campaign more effective, it's going to let you take advantage of interacting with
some of the people who have been interested in your ads, but haven't taken action yet.
So let's take a look.
The beauty of running Facebook ads is that it's a social platform, so as you run ads, people are going to start liking and sharing your ads. So what I want to show you is in three easy steps, how to make the most of when people engage with your ad.
Step one is you have to find your ad in the Ad Manager. Now, we're gonna click Preview which is that little eyeball in the upper right.
Okay that this point, scroll down and click the link where it says View Post Permalink with Comments. Okay, (step two) the next thing that you're gonna do is go down here.
You're going to see where people have liked or engaged with your ad.
Now step three, there's an option here to invite the people who have liked this post.
Now here's the beauty of this; you might have paid for the ad to get it out there and to get it in front of people, but inviting people to like your page is actually completely free.
Now great, six people, big deal. We attracted some new followers to the page, but what if you have an ad that you run for a lot longer and say there's like a thousand or so people who liked it?
Well now you can go through and start inviting all sorts of people who have engaged with your ad and showed interest in the content that you're sharing. When you've built up a decent amount of social proof (which is basically digital advertising gold), you can reuse that ad with social proof for different audiences.
So use this tactic to make the most out of your Facebook advertising by inviting people for free to your site to like your page.
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