Category: Facebook

With almost 2.5 billion active users, it goes without saying that Facebook is an enormous market.

It offers businesses almost endless opportunities to find their audience and advertise to it.

Marketing on Facebook is also very accessible and cost-effective: anyone can set up an account and start promoting their business.

And companies know it.

That’s why 93.7% of them use Facebook for promotion, according to a recent survey by Buffer.

But how do you start advertising?

This guide shows you how to set everything up for your first campaign step-by-step: from getting your Business Manager account to creating your Facebook Ads Account.

What is Facebook Business Manager?

Facebook Business Manager is a powerful tool that helps you manage all your pages in one place.

It allows you to create and publish ads, see reports and analytics, manage and share your audiences, add and remove ad accounts and team members.

It also rids you of the fuss of managing a page through a personal account: anyone you work with can log into Business Manager without the need of juggling e-mail addresses, passwords and permissions.

Business Manager also comes with Facebook Ads Manager: a tool that unlocks all the possibilities of Facebook advertising.

This is the place where you can precisely target your customers, create audiences and different types of campaigns and ads, manage your budgets and deliveries and much more. Clicking “boost” on your page just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Setting up Facebook Business Manager

First of all, you will need to create your Business Manager account. Here’s how you do it:

Go to facebook.com and click Create Account in the top right corner.

Fill in the information required: yours and the name of your business and the e-mail you intend to use for Business Manager. Note that this information, not your personal profile, is visible to other people that have access to your Business Manager.

That’s it! You’ve created your Business Manager account and now you can start adding your pages, people, assets and setting up ad accounts.

Adding and managing your assets is simple: click on Business Settings in the top right.

You will see a drop-down menu: in the “Users” tab you can assign roles to your team members.

There are different permissions for each role. Take your time and learn what specific roles do. To assign someone to a role, you just need to enter their work e-mail address and choose what you’d like them to do.

The “Accounts” tab allows you to add, create or request access to pages, connect Instagram accounts and apps, as well as create Business Asset Groups and set up ad accounts.

In “Data Sources” you can create tracking pixels, offline events, conversion events and more assets that help you register and keep an eye on website purchases, adds to cart, return on ad spend and other important metrics regarding your customer’s conversion behaviour.

If you’re aiming to sell your product, and not just boost followers and engagement, these are vital in understanding how much money your ads are actually making. Plus, they allow you to retarget your ads. Make sure to familiarise yourself with these assets.

You can also view your payments, customise your notifications and see and edit your business info in the Business Settings menu.

Adding a Facebook Ad account for your business

Before you can kick off your first campaign, you need to set up an ad account. It holds information about your time zone, preferred currency and payment method, typically a credit card that Facebook will use to charge you for the ads you run.

Setting up an ad account is fairly straightforward. You can do it right in the Business Manager. Here’s how.

Go to Business Settings/Accounts/Ad Accounts. This page displays existing ad accounts connected to your Business Manager. To add a new account, simply click the blue “+Add” button.

Here, you can choose between three options. You might add an existing ad account to your Business Manager and manage it from there. In order to do this, you need to have admin permissions for both the ad and Business Manager Accounts. Once you tie the two accounts you can’t reverse the action.

Second option allows you to ask to use someone else’s ad account. The admin of that account can provide you access and choose the permission levels you’re granted.

These two options require you to enter the ID of the account you want to add or request access to. Account ID is a unique six-digit number assigned to each account.

You can see this number in the Ads Manager. The drop-down menu shows all of the accounts you can access, along with their IDs. In order to request access, you’ll need someone to share their account ID with you.

Lastly, you can choose to create an account from scratch. If you’re just starting out, this is the option you’ll most likely choose. Let’s see what goes into creating a new ad account.

Creating an Ad Account

In order to create a new ad account for your business, Facebook will ask you to provide information we mentioned before. When you click “create a new ad account” you’ll see a window looking like this:

Choose the name for your account, as well as the time zone and currency. When you start advertising, Facebook will use the time zone and currency you chose to show you information about your campaigns.

It’s also important that your chosen currency matches the one you’ll use to pay for your ads.

Finally, you need to provide a payment method. You can connect a credit card, a PayPal account or use a coupon code.

Adding a credit card requires you to enter your credit card number, expiration date and security code. Note that EU citizens need to provide their VAT number.

Don’t worry, this information is scrambled and Facebook guarantees no misuse by them or third-parties.

Once you’re done, hit continue and you have your ad account! Now you’re ready to start running campaigns.

Tips

Now that you know how to set up an ad account for your business, check out some closing tips before you get started.

Businesses new to Facebook advertising are limited to one ad account until Facebook bills them first time. After that, the number rises to 5.

We recommend to make use of this: create a separate ad account for each card you intend to use. For example, you can use one account to focus on conversions and promoting your online store, and another to boost your social media pages. This helps you never lose sight of what you’re billed for and when.

Another tip is adding a secondary payment method to your ad accounts. This way, your campaigns won’t be paused if Facebook is unable to bill your primary card. You’ll just get billed from your secondary card and your ads will keep going.

Also, keep in mind that you can always change payment settings in Business Settings/Payments. Here you can add and remove payment methods, set a spending limit for your account, manage your billing thresholds and more.

Now that you’re ready to advertise on Facebook, you might want to check out our guide to Facebook advertising for travel companies, if you need a bit of help. It’s full of expert tips, great ideas and valuable insights.

Facebook is the most popular social media platform and is visited by almost 2 billion people daily.

Facebook is like a journal of life, and this huge amount of data allows Facebook to target users in an un-paralleled way.

It has become one of the best marketing platforms which is used by all sorts of businesses due to its huge reach and demographic targeting options.

Facebook Ads are very effective for travel businesses.

Due to its advanced targeting options, Facebook is a a goldmine for reaching and engaging with new customers.

Today, more and more people are using Facebook for to research and book their travel; including browsing hotels, resorts, holidays and as such it has become an indispensable tool for travel companies of all sizes.

With a very visual product and a fun subject to share online, there is lots of opportunity to get high levels of engagement, and subsequently low CPCs, for your travel business

Despite the current popularity of Facebook as a marketing tool, lots of travel businesses are still unaware of it’s potential.

So, we decided to write a Facebook Advertising guide for travel companies, to cover all important aspects of Facebook advertising.

Why use Facebook Ads?

Travel companies have realised the importance of social media platforms for attracting new business and engaging pre-existing customers.

Almost all tour and travel agencies, hotels, resorts, travel agents, and airlines actively use Facebook for marketing in some form.

Facebook is one of the most widely used digital advertising platforms and it has several advantages over other online advertising platforms.

Facebook allows you to create highly targeted ads which will be shown only to the audience which is more likely to buy your products or services.

Another often overlooked advantage of Facebook Ads is the fact through Instagram, a popular image sharing site is owned by Facebook, you can cross promote your ads to Instagram followers also.

With Facebook Ads you can create highly targeted ads and target users based on the following parameters:

Location (City, State, Country, Postcode)

Demographics (Age, Gender, Language)

Behaviour

Interests

Relationship Status

Birthday

Education

Workplace

As is clear from the above list, few other platforms can match the targeting capabilities of Facebook.

Facebook offers the option of re-targeting, which is quite like the remarketing ads offered by Google AdWords, as you can target users who have visited your site in the past.

Most travel businesses have Facebook pages which can be promoted to potential customers to increase page likes.

Liking a brand’s page allows the business to continue to reach out to the follower through targeted ads, as well as on-going exposure to the brands social posts.

Facebook Ads uses quite scary targeting to show your page to people it considers likely to be a customer based on their interests or behaviour.

Target a Specific Audience

Many marketers wrongly assume that showing your ad to millions of viewers will result in increased sales and profits.

Several studies have proved beyond doubt that targeted ad campaigns perform much better than generalised ones and this is a mistake which marketers continue to repeat.

Targeted ads, on the other hand, tend to have higher CTRs and conversions.

Unlike generalised ads, you are reaching people who are my likely to turn into a customer.

Lead Nurturing

Facebook allows travel companies to target users throughout the sales funnel.

Marketers can easily track the movement of a lead during the sales process and show them relevant ads at each stage.

Facebook also remains one of the most effective tools for lead nurturing, as there is a high chance that a user will use Facebook on a continuous basis from the time he first arrives on your site to the moment when he is finally ready to place an order for your travel products/services.

How to Create Facebook Ads

Creating targeted ads via Facebook is not difficult.

To make things easy for our readers, we’ve decided to show each step for creating a targeted Facebook ad campaign.

First, you need to head to the Facebook Ads Manager, which can be found in the left corner of the Facebook News feed under the explore tab.

Now you’ll need to click on the Audiences tab as shown in the image below:

Facebook uses three audience types:

Saved Audiences

Custom Audiences

Lookalike Audiences

Facebook saved audiences are the audiences which you can define based on people’s interests, behaviour, age, and other metrics such as location.

You can create saved audiences in the campaign set up phase or later on in ads manager.

Once you decide to create an audience, Facebook will display a screen similar to this one:

As you can see in the above image, Facebook allows you to choose audiences based on their gender, age, languages, and it also gives you the option to exclude specific audiences based on attributes defined by you.

With interest-based targeting you can target people who are specifically interested in a subject directly related to the product or service which you are selling.

As shown in the above image, interest-based targeting is quite useful for screening out any uninterested viewer as your ads will be shown only to the people who are already interested in your services.

You can also use the behaviour-based targeting option listed under the detailed targeting tab as shown in the image below:

Here you will be able to choose people based on their behaviour and you can decide who will see your ad based on several factors such as anniversaries, digital activities, mobile device use, multicultural affinity etc.

To fully utilize the targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads platform, you’ll need the Custom audiences which are essentially audiences defined by you.

Custom audiences allow you to re-target past visitors of your site or people who have interacted with your content or mobile apps.

Facebook will show the following screen when you press the button for creating a custom audience for your advertising campaign:

You can create a custom audience in several ways as Facebook gives you plenty of options to target people whom you want to show ads.

You can upload files in CSX or TXT format containing information about your audience such as their phone numbers, email, mobile advertiser id, first name, last name, date of birth etc.

As is clearly shown in the above image, Facebook also allows you to create custom audiences on other parameters such as:

People who may have interacted with your content on Facebook

People who have visited your website or specific web pages on your site

People who have taken a specific action in your app or game

Facebook lookalike audiences are quite similar to your existing audience and this feature essentially means that Facebook will use its own algorithm and will create an audience which will be quite similar to your existing audience.

You must already have a custom audience before creating a lookalike audience as Facebook uses your data to find lookalike audiences for you.

What are Dynamic Facebook Ads?

Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel are a specific format of Facebook advertising which has been specifically created for travel businesses.

Dynamic ads allow your travel business to reach users across Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Audience network who are more likely to make a trip.

You can use dynamic ads to re-target users who may have started the booking process on your site but abandoned the process in between.

Dynamic ads also allow you to upload your travel catalogue along with prices after which specific deals or trips can be shown to your target audience.

You will need to implement Facebook Pixel on your site and then upload an inventory of all your trips.

Facebook allows you to add location, price, and availability of your trips which are then shown to your targeted audience.

Dynamic ads allow you to show ads to people who have shown an interest in your products and you can target them across multiple devices.

Dynamic ads are automated, which means that you’ll need to set them up only once and your campaigns are always on.

You can also show complimentary offers such as upgrades or any other related service to people who have booked a trip with you in the past.

Dynamic ads run on the right time based on your inventory and the actions taken by your potential customers as Facebook uses data collected via the Facebook Pixel and other methods to decide which time is best for showing these ads to a potential customer.

Due to several advantages over traditional Facebook campaigns, DTAs have gained popularity among the travel businesses since their launch and several travel businesses including some of the most well-known travel brands have already transitioned to Dynamic Travel Ads.

DTAs allow you to increase your ROI as your ads are only shown to an interested audience which allows you to reduce unnecessary ad spend. Travel products are known for the fluctuation in pricing and availability, which used to be a problem earlier as marketers had to update their ads on a regular basis. Dynamic ads allow you to only show up-to-date ads which are based on the data Facebook collects from your website.

Facebook’s algorithm automatically decides when to show an ad to a user based on his activity on your website or app and the data feed provided by your website.

Bidding and Optimisation

Bidding is one of the most crucial parts of any online advertising campaign and we will discuss this briefly here.

Facebook uses a three-tiered approach of an Ad Campaign, Ad Set, and an Ad as shown in the image below:

Facebook ad budgets are set at an ad set level and you will need separate budgets for different ad sets. Although, you still need to specify bids per click or impressions for each ad separately.

During the budget set up phase you’ll come across the following screen:

You can also set a lifetime budget for your ad set instead of a daily budget as shown in this image:

Facebook will divide your lifetime budget evenly across the dates chosen by you for your ad campaign.

You can also show the ad delivery optimisation method at this step according to your own needs and objectives.

Facebook offers 3 ad delivery optimisation method as shown in this image:

For most marketers Link Clicks is the perfect method for ad delivery although in some cases you may prefer to use Impressions instead of Link Clicks.

Facebook also allows you to set your own bid per click or per 1000 impressions as shown in this image:

You also get the option to set the bid manually or leave it up to Facebook by choosing the Automatic option.

Facebook will also show a suggested bid which is often in the form of a price range specifying the minimum and maximum bids for an ideal campaign.

Importance of Images and Videos

Facebook and Instagram are both visual mediums and videos and images are among the most prominent content on these 2 sites.

Facebook allows you to add videos and images to your Facebook pages and advertisements and you have plenty of options to show an attractive image to a potential customer via Facebook ads.

Visual imagery plays an even more important role for travel businesses as people are essentially looking for experiences which are best shown in visual medium.

You must also note that imagery is the best form of storytelling as the adage of “A picture is worth a thousand words” still holds true in this era of digital communication.

So, choose images and videos for your Facebook ads carefully as the success of your ad campaign will largely depend on them.

Conclusion

Facebook Advertising can be your secret weapon if done correctly.

Most travel companies nowadays realize the importance of Facebook ads and have started running their own ad campaigns.

Due to the nature of the travel industry, dynamic travel ads are better from the point of conversions and sales.

Facebook ads are one of the easiest to set up as compared to other advertising platforms and can be efficiently run with minimal investment of time and effort.

Travel businesses are a major user of Facebook ads as airlines, hotels, resorts, and travel agents are among the major spenders on Facebook.

Just follow the instructions given in this article to set up your own Facebook ad campaign using a targeted and focused approach.