Understanding Facebook Ads - How Do They Work?

Well first, why would you advertise on Facebook?

I mean for someone who knows nothing about them, that's a reasonable question.

But to someone like myself, who runs them every single day for clients and my own business, it is a stupid question.

Simply, Facebook Advertising is powerful. And I don't say that lightly.

Active users on Facebook:

• 1.28 billion daily active users on average for March 2017
• 1.94 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2017

This is straight from Facebook themselves - Facebook Stats.

You can see the reach they have not only in the United States and Canada, but throughout the entire world.

And the best part.....

Us advertisers can tap into their data base and show ANYONE the ads that we want. We can also tap into their information to more clearly define exactly who we want to see them by segmenting them by their behaviours, interests, income level, relationship status, and much much more.

It gives you, as a business owner or professional, an unfair advantage over your competitors who simply aren't willing to adapt and evolve in this new digital age.

Let's Talk About How They Work

Facebook Ads work as "Natural Selection Machines".

Now, what do I mean this?

When advertising on Facebook, Facebook has so much data and their algorithm is so strong that it simply puts variables in different combinations to get a winning "formula". Basically, what I mean is, it shows the ad to the people who are most likely to click on it and then optimizes it to find the winning combination. The variables that we get to enter in is The Audience, The Ad, and The Image. These things we can control and obviously need to continuously work on our copywriting so we can get more clicks. We can also choose a specific goal we want our targeted audience to do which Facebook will then optimize for.

For example:

• Traffic - Take them off Facebook and to our landing page.
• Impressions - Get someone to like, comment, or share our ad.

So by telling Facebook, I want to target people 25-35, who are married, interested in Golf, and make $70,000+ a year and get them to click on our ad to take them to our landing page - Facebook's algorithm will key in thousands of variables to optimize for that action. Once you get the result you are looking for, and your ad is successful your Facebook's pixel (your FB ID or "tracker") will start to strengthen and it will then start to optimize and find similar people who fit that criteria to take that action. Us, as advertisers can only influence the performance of the ad from the initial stages, but once we click submit and our ad is out working for us, we have no influence whatsoever - the algorithm will do all the work.

And by Natural Selection, I mean not showing the ad to people who don't fit in that criteria and start showing it to people that do and take the desired action.

The Key To Successful Campaigns

The key really is to find the "winners" and kill the "losers" - aka the ones who aren't performing. Once we find a few winning variables, as I call them, or target audiences, our Facebook pixel or our personal algorithm will strengthen and we can start ramping up the ad budget to reach more and more in our targeted audience to take the action we want them to take.

This really is the key, to get your pixel so strong that it basically does all the work for you.

While most Facebook Advertisers and marketers will tell you it's about low CPC (Cost per Click) or CPL (Cost per Lead), I have to tell you that is inaccurate.

You see, Facebook Ads work as a system or unit rather. You could have a low CPC of people that aren't your ideal clients and then leave as soon as they hit your page. Or have a low CPL but they don't buy....

I would rather pay $500 for leads of my ideal client that buy every time, than pay $1.00 for leads that never buy... And you probably would too.

Once you realize there's most to these numbers and don't get caught up in their deceit, your ads will perform much better.

Summary Points

• Start advertising on Facebook, or hire someone who is insanely good.
• Find the Winners and kill the Losers.
• Let your pixel and the Facebook algorithm optimize for optimal results.
• Don't be too concerned with the numbers - look at it as a unit and ask yourself, "am I getting a good ROI?" If not, iterate and improve it. Find more winners.

If you would like to learn more about how you get a predictable client generating system for your financial services, I put together a FREE Case Study:

"Simple, Proven, 4-Step Process To Generate 5, 10, 20 Even 30 New "High-Value" Clients For Your Financial Services Every Single Month On Demand And With Predictability."

You can check out my blog and subscribe to get updates when I put more of these articles and posts out here: blog.mitchgonsalves.com

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To your success!

-Mitch Gonsalves