How to create a traffic ad

Hi. I'm going to walk you through how to set up a simple traffic campaign within your Facebook Business manager. Traffic is a great objective to use if you're interested in driving volume of visitors to a page on your website. So. So for my example today I'm going to create an ad that drives people to our Best Post blog here. This is a live blog. It gets updated every week with Best Post finds from across the uk. We talk about what's great about the post and we give you some insight on how you might replicate that for your own social media. We also talk about our free webinar which runs every Wednesday at 10, where all of these Best Post finds are discussed and there's an opportunity to ask questions and learn. So that's the post I'm going. That's the blog that I'm going to drive people to. So I'm going to jump into my ads manager here and make sure you're here on your business.facebook.com URL to ensure that you're in Business Manager. The interface is being adapted right now, so be concerned if you see a slightly different screen when you come into your business manager. Just go to the burger and find your Ads manager within your shortcuts or in your list and click in to get started. So we are on the odax view. This is the new interface. We are on it here at maybe and you get into this sort of summary screen initially and you want to go here to the grid to click into the more familiar view of your ads manager. So we're going to get started just by clicking on the green button here and we're going to look for our traffic objective. Click continue. So that opens up into our sort of two areas here and on the left hand side we've just been shown the hierarchy. So it just helps you sort of stay in touch with where you're at in building out your campaign. Here at the top level is where we set our objective. Here at the mid level we're setting our audiences who we want to target our campaign at. And here at the low level, this is where we are going to build out the actual ad. So this is the screen in which I'm going to work to build out all the elements. So let's give this campaign a name. So I'm just going to call that campaign Blogs and I'm going to scroll past special ad categories. Do give that a quick read. If it applies to you, you'll need to follow the steps accordingly and then check you've got your Campaign objective on traffic that's looking good. I'm not going to introduce any a B testing for this campaign. I'm just going to toggle on our advantage campaign budget here. So this is where you decide you want to apply your campaign, your budget at campaign level or, or if you leave that toggled off, you'll have an opportunity to set it at your ad set level. By toggling it on here, you're going to give complete control to Facebook to push the spend within your ad, however many ad sets you create and however many ads you create. So in this example today I'm only actually going to create one ad set and one ad. But if you had multiple and you wanted to get as best results as quick as you can and you wanted to trust the AI of Facebook, which is pretty powerful these days, it has to be said, then you can just toggle that on and let Facebook find the best performance within your campaign as a whole to drive your results. So I'm going to give it a ten pound daily budget. You can choose lifetime budget if you would prefer. If you only have a set budget, you want to spend over a certain amount of time. And I'm going to click next and move on down to our ad set level here where we're going to define our audiences. So I'm going to use my look alike audiences, engagers. So I'll explain that a little bit more in a minute. I want to toggle on website as my conversion location. You do have these other options here, but for this example we want to drive people to our website to our blog URL. So toggle that on and I'm going to get down here to our audience level and this is where I'm going to look for my lookalike audiences. So when you connect up your ads manager to maybe you get four audiences created for you, two of those are based off of your existing engagers on your Facebook and Instagram page and you get an additional two based off of those. So the lookalikes essentially extrapolate the data points of what they're seeing as your typical engager and fishing in the wider sea to find more people like that. So typically the size of your look alike audience, I can see it here, is going to be around a half a million and obviously the strength of that lookalike is going to be increased by the the size of your custom audience. So the bigger your Instagram and Facebook audience, the more likely Facebook's going to have found a good match within your lookalike audiences. And let's just bring in our Facebook lookalike as well. So this is cold, you know, this is going to be running out completely cold. I haven't included my existing engages in this example. And you can see the estimated audience sizes is between 700, 900,000. So that's a decent size. You want to keep an eye on this. If it's showing you zero, you know you've got something wrong. Or if it's showing 45 million, likewise, that indicates you haven't defined your audience quite right. But at that level, that's a nice size to run out for this campaign. So I'm going to just scroll, define my age a little bit more, but otherwise I'm going to leave it for the whole of the uk. I'm not going to define any particular interests. I'm going to let the lookalike aspect drive that targeting for me. So we then are asked to define our placements. So what we mean by that is all the different placements that Facebook has to hand. So that might be your Facebook page, Instagram pages, in your feed, in the feeds of those apps, or it might be a messenger, it might be WhatsApp. There's so many different placements that they can roll your ad out to. By leaving it toggled on Advantage Placements, you're basically giving that control to Facebook to roll it out where it's seeing the best performance. And Facebook is pretty good at this. So more often than not I recommend just leaving that toggled on. But if you do want to take control of say, rolling it to Instagram versus Facebook, you can toggle that on and you can start to tick off or on, depending on the definition of where you want it to be seen. But for beginner level advertising, I recommend just leaving it on Advantage placements and you can start to see where it's getting the best results over time. At which point you might want to start define it to those placements more specifically as you evolve with your advertising. So let's leave it there Advantage Placements for now. And here you have an optimization request. So it's basically saying, how do you want us to optimize? Do you want to go for clicks, maximum clicks, or do you want to go for actual landings on your web page? And that's what I, I want to go for. So there is always a slight erosion from click to website visit. You can imagine people are kind of flicking through, they don't have huge patience. So if there's any delay from click to page, you could be Losing people. But I want to ask Facebook to optimize for people who are patient enough to actually get to the page and have a good look. So let's click on through to our ad level. So here I'm going to best post log 2022 so I know which ad it is when I look back in the future in my reporting. And you can see that that's toggled off to the wrong page. So always if you're attached to multiple pages, you really want to double check here because it frequently happens that it toggles onto the wrong page if you've got multiple pages that you have access to. So check that's on the right one. We've got maybe set there now. So that's looking good. And here I'm going to actually, instead of creating an ad from scratch, I'm going to use an existing post from our feed. So by toggling existing post, it's going to bring in an example here. It'll probably be one of your most recent posts. But to change the post and to find the one that I want to use, I'm going to click on this and you've got Facebook and Instagram here. So choose where, which channel you've got the post on. First I'm going to click into Instagram and I'm going to scroll through to find a recent post that was talking about our best post blog. Here we go. Each week we round up our best social media posts. So it's already got a few likes, so it's showing a little bit of traction just naturally on the organic pages. So let's click continue and that will now bring that ad in. It sometimes takes a little while. It's a bit laggy if it's a video, but it will bring it in eventually. Just. So let's just leave that doing its thing while I set these other attributes. So here I need to put the URL in. So let's go back to our blog URL and copy that and drop that in here. And then we want to grab a button that's going to make sense. I'm going to find learn more. And that's now going to bring that in. You see how there are all those flashy error messages coming up. Just ignore those. Because until you actually put all your attributes into the ad and then it sort of cleans it up and says, okay, I'm happy now. And you can see that it's got my button there, it's got a little video image that will run. I've got all the copy showing that's looking good and it's and it's adapted itself for all the different placements. So we want to make sure you've got the right pixel showing, so it's tracking toggle on website events and then make sure you've got the right pixel. So if that's something you're not sure about, then we have videos on our hub all about how to create a pixel and get it installed on your website. If you're running a traffic campaign, you certainly want to have the pixel on your website so we can track the effectiveness of how many people actually land there from your ad. So I've got maybe's pixel toggled on, so that's looking good and we're good to go. So that's just an. A good demonstration of how you can lift a post off your feed and turn it into an ad in this way by adding a button and the URL to the actual page that you want to send people to. And then I'm going to click Publish and that's going to go away and be put into review. Review can take up to 24 hours. So if there's any time sensitivity of getting an ad live, make sure you've given yourself a little window of time for it to go through review. And then I'm going to be able to see that is taking a little while. This happens sometimes with me. I'm just going to click refresh and it'll reload. And I'll just check again that it's got everything showing correctly. Yep, that's all looking good. And I'm literally going to click Publish again and hey presto, watch this. It will go through quickly. There you go. So now if I go back into my Ads Manager view, we'll be able to see that that's it's not actually showing, but it sometimes takes a little while to come through as an ad that's in review, but it will be showing in list very shortly. So that's just a quick run through of how to set up a traffic campaign to a page on your website. Any questions that you have against what I've walked you through today, then please contact us on the blue button in the maybe platform or come along to one of our live training sessions on a Thursday morning at 10 where we host some training for beginners. And on a Friday at 10, we roll through some slightly more advanced techniques within Facebook advertising. So join us.