Andrea Marban | Feb 20, 2014

Effective Tips for Creating Successful Facebook Ads

Whether you’re a beginner to Facebook Advertising and you’ve never created an ad before, or you’ve mastered the platform, but you aren’t sure if your campaigns are performing as well as they could, there are always ways to improve your advertisements and their efficiency.

As is the case with all advertisements, the success of your Facebook ads depends largely on multiple ad components, each including its own unique challenges and opportunities. The main components of a Facebook ad are the headline, photo and message. Sometimes, the difference between an overlooked, unclicked Facebook ad and an ad that generates more conversions than you can imagine is a simple tweak of text, pop of color or headline change.

Here is our list of simple tips for creating your most effective Facebook advertisements yet!

1. Make sure your ad image is the proper size.
Regardless of whether you are placing your ads in Facebook’s right column or News Feed or both, it is critical that your ads are sized appropriately.  Even the greatest ad is ineffective if a section of its image is missing because it is sized incorrectly.  Facebook states that for most ads, generally the best size image to upload is 1200 by 627 pixels.  Additionally, for ads appearing in the Facebook News Feed the ideal image size is 600 by 225 pixels.  Be sure to design your ad images accordingly!

2. Choose a photo that stands out, but relates to your brand and product/service.
The image of your ad is arguably the most powerful factor in determining the success of your advertisement.  It is important that when choosing the images for your Facebook ads you find photos that complement your ad, but are also interesting and attention-grabbing.It is crucial that your image is high quality, uncluttered, reflective of your brand and relevant to the ad message.  For more information on selecting an ad image, click here to read tips directly from Facebook Help.

3. Maintain consistency with all of your ad’s elements.
The best Facebook ads are those with components that work together and maintain consistency within their headline, image and message.  The Facebook advertisement below is the perfect example of an ad that achieves this.
Within the ad 7-Eleven states and restates their deal of $1 medium coffee on Wednesdays not once, but three times.  The ad headline announces their deal and business, the ad message restates the deal, gives more information and includes a call-to-action and their ad image includes an image that is relevant to the promotion and includes 7-Eleven’s logo and branding.

4. Include a deal, discount or key benefit.
The 7-Eleven ad above and the HootSuite ad below both include awesome incentive for catching the attention of Facebook users and persuading them to take action.
Experimenting with a deal, discount or special offer within your ads can lead to greater clicks and conversions.  Additionally, if you would rather avoid managing a deal or discount, mentioning a key benefit of your product or service is also a great way to encourage viewers to click on your ad.

5. Mention your business name and include its logo where possible.
While your business name does not have to be included in every element of your Facebook ad, it is important to include it where possible and mention it at least once.  GrubHub executes this practice perfectly.  Even in a busy Facebook homepage, if the ad below was quickly glanced at the viewer would definitely be able to recall who the advertiser was.

6. Keep it light and fun!Developing ads that are confident and fun is more important than it may seem.  In the process of promoting your business and developing its ads, it is easy to forget that the majority of your audience is not on Facebook to shop or read about your business.  Most users are on Facebook to have fun and connect with friends.  If your ads annoyingly interrupt that process, there will be an instant disconnect and not many clicks or conversions.  However, a fun, amusing ad that catches the attention of your audience will receive a different reaction entirely – a positive one!
The funny, laidback tone in the clothing brand’s ad above is especially relatable for the company’s young, nonchalant target audience.

7. Test variations in copy and images to find out what works best.With the tool “Create Similar Ad,” Facebook allows you to start creating an ad by starting from an existing ad that you have previously used. Using this tool is a great way to create multiple variations of your ads to test different headlines and ad messages, to find the ad that is most successful with your business’s target audience.
Additionally, Facebook allows advertisers to include up to 6 different images with an ad. Selecting various images for a single ad provides insight into which colors, photos and elements work best with your audience. For each image that you include with your ad, Facebook creates an individual ad with that image and provides reporting and metrics for each so that you can review which images are performing better with your ad than others. On top of that, Facebook automatically uses your campaign budget toward the ad that is performing better than the others, since your ad budget is set up at a campaign level. No matter your Facebook marketing objectives may be, when you are running Facebook advertisements their success depends on many of the choices made during the ad creation process.
The next time you create an ad, keep these tips in mind to ensure that it generates the attention and conversions that it deserves.  Let us know how it goes!

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