Welcome to episode 296 of Hit the Mic with the Stacey Harris.
Today I’m answering, possibly one of the most common Facebook ads questions. Which is how much should I be spending? There are a lot of questions around setting a Facebook ads budget and how much you should be spending and how often you should be spending it and how long you should be running ads for. Those are the 3 questions we’re going to answer today.
We’re going to start with setting your budget and what that budget means. We’re going to talk about how often to be running the same ads and we’re going to wrap it up by talking about your overall budget. How often you’re going to be running ads from a budget of a monthly perspective or annually and sort of that perspective. Let’s jump right in.
I want to start by talking about setting your ads budget and what that budget means. There really isn’t any sort of magical number that your ads budget needs to be. You can a $50 ads budget, you could have a $50,000 ads budget. What’s really relevant is how you work with that budget and what that budget means for things like targeting and frequency and placement. Also realizing that during different times your Facebook ads budget may go a little further or maybe not quite as far as you’d hoped. Really be aware of what your budget needs.
In this section I want to talk about an ads budget for a campaign. I have a couple of things that I want you to know when you’re setting your ads budget. A, set your budget before you do anything else. Realize how much you are willing to invest in this Facebook ad. If it’s $100, great. If it’s $500, fantastic. If that’s $5,000, whohoo for you. What it needs to be though is set, it needs to be known how much you’re going to spend on this campaign. Once you’ve set that ads budget you need to stick with that ads budget.
Let’s say you have a smaller budget, maybe you have $100 or $200 to spend on a list building campaign. A webinar or driving traffic through an opt in or a piece of content or whatever but the goal is list building. You have, let’s say $200, to spend. $200 is a smaller budget, it may feel huge to you and that’s okay but it is, in the grand scheme of Facebook ads, a smaller ad budget. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, it doesn’t mean that you won’t see results but you’re likely not going to get 2,000 new people on your email listing from spending $200 on Facebook ads. Be aware of that, set your expectations.
Next, realize that with a smaller ad budget you really want to make sure that you’re being really really clear on who you’re targeting. You want that targeting to be pretty specific because you don’t want to be spending money on ads that are not sitting in front of the right people. Not getting seen by the people who you want to be clicking and signing up for your email list. Know your targeting. The smaller your budget the less room you have for creative targeting. You want to be really really targeted so you know you’re talking to the right people.
Next, you really want to make sure that you’re setting your campaign up so it is a daily budget instead of a lifetime budget. This can really impact how you’re positioned in the feed and the priority you get. I have found that daily budgets just seem to spend better, spend more consistently and get placement more consistently. I don’t have any sort of information from Facebook saying this is true. They’re really really tight lipped about what the algorithm is. I’m just saying, from testing, I’ve found that a daily budget that equals out to a lifetime budget works a lot easier.
Let’s say you have a $200 ad budget, maybe you’re spending $20 a day for 10 days or maybe you’re spending $100 a day for 2 days. However it is you want to parse that out. Setting a daily budget is going to be really important. You want to make sure you have your targeting really tight and you want to make sure your budget is set per day.
Next, I really want you to factor in your positioning. Where are you putting them? Right side bar ads on Facebook tend to be less effective. When I’m dealing with a small budget, and even when I’m dealing with a larger budget to be honest with you, I don’t tend to put ads over there because I don’t see a return on those ad dollar investments at the same level I do as a news feed ad.
On the flip side of that, I have found a lot of success with Instagram ads and so I’ll put a little more of my budget into an Instagram ad. Pay attention to where you’re seeing success and make sure you’re separating out where positioning so you can turn off parts of your ad if they’re just not working as effectively and you can move that budget around if you need to.
again, there’s not really a magical number but it is critical that you know your budget and you account for it when you are factoring in positioning, targeting and how you’re actually going to spend the budget. Again, not a magical number. There’s a lot of people saying you have to be able to spend $10,000 before you should even talk about Facebook ads and that’s crap. Total utter crap. What I want you to do instead is realize that whatever budget you have, and this is the magic of Facebook ads, whatever budget you have, you can see success with Facebook. You’re not going to see the massive success somebody with at $10,000 budget is going to see in your first campaign if you’ve got a $1,000 budget or a $100 budget but you can still totally see some success.
Quite frankly, if you’re just getting started with Facebook ads, you’ve never ever ever run one and your DIYing it, don’t go spending $10,000 because likely a lot of the return on your first Facebook ad investment will be learning, will be education, will be paid training. You will learn a lot about your ads, your audience and your goals in the future, in that first campaign. Don’t come out of the gate wanting to spend 10 grand. It’s not an effective use of that 10 grand.
Number 2, how long should ads be running for? This is one of those questions I get a lot and I want to bring this up because there’s 2 factors. A, it’s going to go back to what your budget is and how much you can spend. Also, think about the people on the receiving end. If you are somebody who’s got a really tight target, a really niched area, likely they’re going to see your ads over and over and over again. If you have 1 ad you run for 3 months and yes, I have seen this happen from some major players by the way, you’re going to get reported as spam, you’re going to get hidden and that’s because people are sick of seeing the same post. You do want to make sure you’re changing it up, no matter what your budget is.
I generally let ads run no more than 7 days and then I may run an ad to the exact same people with the exact same goal but the copy and or the graphic, generally speaking the graphic, is definitely changed but often I’ll change the copy as well. It’s different and that’s because sometimes that 2nd, that follow up ad if you will, will be more effective because I’ve kind of [inaudible 00:08:16] them with that first ad. Sometimes I’ll get people to sign up again because they don’t realize it’s the same thing which is weird by the way. That happens occasionally with webinars or they’ll have forgotten they signed up, it’s a whole thing.
I try and change it up, no more than 7 days. Also realize that, from a budget perspective, if you’re talking about running a new ad every week to your evergreen opt in, maybe you run a challenge or you’ve got a free eBook, you need to be setting a secondary budget. You need to be setting not just a campaign budget but you also need to be aware, for yourself, of what your monthly ad budget is. This is something that doesn’t get talked about enough when it comes to talking about budgets. It’s not just that campaign budget that you need to worry about. We talk about, okay, well I’m running this ad campaign for 14 days and I’m going to spend $1,000. Fantastic. I also boosted this post for $20 and this post for $20 and this post for $20, oh, and these other 2 posts.
Now I’ve spent $1,100 this month and you know what, I actually want to run a 2nd campaign the 2nd 2 weeks of the month that is targeting people who clicked but didn’t buy, a retargeting campaign. I’m going to give that ad campaign another $500. Now you’ve spent $1,600, not the $1,000 that you initially intended to spend. Realize, when you go out to set your budget, that you need to have a line in your monthly budget that says, this is what I spent on Facebook ads. This is the maximum that I spent on Facebook ads.
You can actually go in and set a limit on your account of how much you can spend on Facebook if you want to make sure. Maybe you have somebody helping or maybe you don’t very good self control when it comes to hitting that boost button which I have actually heard from clients. You can actually set a cap so it won’t spend any more than that cap. You can actually set that, I should say. Figure out what your monthly budget is, as well as your campaign budget, and that’s going to impact the length of time or how many different kinds of ads you create.
It really comes down to knowing how much you’re going to spend, sticking to it, knowing your audience and knowing your goals. That’s how you’re going to maximize any ad budget. Whether it’s $100, $1,000, $100,000. It really is going to be maximized by knowing the strategic stuff first and then also factoring in that your ad alone is not the savior or the fault point if your ad campaign is not successful. It may be what came after, it may be the landing page, it may be the funnel they’re going into, it may be the follow up that’s happening. There are a lot of moving pieces so make sure you are aware of all of them, don’t just say Facebook ads don’t work because you ran a Facebook ad campaign and no one signed up.
Pay attention. Especially if you’re seeing a lot of clicks to a landing page and the landing page isn’t working, that is not the fault of the ad. That’s the fault of the landing page.
If you have any questions when it comes to Facebook ads, head over to TheStaceyHarris.com. That is where you can get a Facebook ads checklist, so all the things you need to be going through before you build your Facebook ads and also, a guide to staying on Facebook’s good side. This is a totally free bundle but check it out. Also, if you go to the show notes page for this episode you’ll see a link at the bottom of the show notes to sign up for that as well. If you really are ready to take this to the next level, be sure to join us in Hit the Mic Backstage because inside Hit the Mic Backstage we have an entire Facebook program which has an entire module around Facebook ads and how to build them. We’ve also got a couple of additional Facebook ads trainings. Plus, there’s a Facebook group where you can ask me questions about your Facebook ads which is killer.
I will see you guys Friday. Bye.
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