Setting Up a Facebook Pixel
Go to your Ads Manager and click to open the header menu. Under Assets, look for Pixels:
Press “Create a Pixel” button. Name your Pixel as you like and Facebook will automatically generate it.
After creating it in the next step you will see Pixel code. Just press “View Pixel Code” button. All you need is a pixel ID number, which is highlighted. Copy only that number. Go to your Shopify store Admin page and paste it into Facebook Pixel section, which you can find in your Shopify account under Online Store Preferences.
Creating An Ad
When starting to advertise a new online store with a new Ad Account, Facebook doesn’t have any data for optimization. So when starting your first campaign, try any objective from Brand Awareness column except Page Likes and Reach People near your business. Just try to get as much awareness of your new brand as you can and the traffic will come.
Audience Size
According to Facebook, your audience should be around 250k – 500k to get the best results. Although it is easy to generate an audience of this size while targeting the US, it is nearly impossible when targeting smaller countries. So the size shouldn’t be your biggest concern. It is better to have a smaller, well-targeted audience, than a bigger irrelevant one.
Optimize Ad For
Bidding let’s you get the most impact even from a small audience. Make sure you consider optimization when creating conversion campaigns. When targeting a big 300k+ audience it’s good to optimize for conversion, but if you are targeting a smaller audience (10k to 200k people), you should consider optimizing for Impressions. You already narrowed your audience, so you don’t need Facebook to do it again. Of course, if you want Facebook to do a bit of optimization, you can test ‘Link Clicks to Your Website’ delivery type. For the smallest laser-targeted audiences you should choose ‘Daily Unique Reach’ optimization. This way you are telling Facebook to optimize nothing while trying to reach your audience (because you have people who are the most likely to become your customers in that audience). This optimization type is best when you are targeting <10k people in your audience.
Conversion Optimization Tip
In the beginning, choose a conversion event higher in the funnel. For example, ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘View Content’ instead of an actual purchase. Facebook needs 20 – 25 conversions per day to optimize fully, so at the start you will not have a lot of purchases (you’re lucky if you do though!), so ‘Add to Cart’ is a good bet, at least in the beginning.
Dashboards
When constructing your own Facebook Ads dashboard, think about the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) you really need to see to make the most important decision about your ads – leave them on or turn them off. You should always have a ‘Conversions’ tab, ‘Unique CTR’ (Click-Through-Rate) tab and ‘Costs’ tab. All other tabs are just additional information for you. This is what a default dashboard looks like:
Click the ‘Columns: Performance’ button in the menu and customize your own dashboard:
Tip: Always change ‘All campaigns’ tab on your left side into ‘All Ad Sets,’ this way you will see a more detailed view on your campaign’s performance.
On-Going Ad Check-Up
KPIs to keep an eye on:
Cost Per Action (CPA)
This is the most important metric you should pay attention to. Don’t be afraid if your CPA is a bit too high on the first day as you just started your campaign. Always let campaigns run for a few days (minimum of two to three days), because Facebook needs data to optimize your campaigns. Just carefully calculate how much you can afford to spend on one purchase to break even or be profitable. This is a crucial part in making your business profitable. If you are not using ‘Automatic’ bidding (which I would recommend for you) you should check your bid daily to make sure it didn’t go too low. Facebook gives you the lowest and highest bids numbers as a guideline to stay competitive.
CTR
Keep an eye on this metric, especially when your campaign is running longer than two weeks. When your CTR starts to go down this could be the indication that your audience starts to skip your ad scrolling through their News Feed. The easiest way to solve this problem is to change the image of your ad. If your CTR is lower than 1% you should start to pay attention to that ad, monitor it closely for the next day. If this ad doesn’t bring any conversions turn it off. If it’s only converting a bit, you should change image of the ad. Also, this is a good metric to measure an ad’s performance even if there is no conversion. Keep in mind that you would get much lower CTR with Right Column ads, so you can keep them running even if CTR is 0.8%. Mobile News Feed ads are getting quite the same CTR as Desktop News Feed, so the same rules apply here as on the Desktop – if your CTR get’s lower than 1% closely monitor those ads and keep those ads, which CTR is greater than 2%.
Frequency
Frequency tells you how many times your ad was shown to the same user. If your campaign’s frequency is higher than 3, you should broaden your audience or try changing your ad’s image. If the frequency keeps getting higher (because your audience is quite small) you should change the deal you are promoting. Your customers/potential customers could get frustrated because you are showing them the same ad too many times. In this graph, you can see the correlation between frequency and your cost per result:
Ad Creation Tip: Don’t use ‘Automatic Placements’ or ‘Audience Network’ placements while creating your ad set. It is still being developed so you don’t have much control when targeting ads in these placements.
Optimization
It is important that you don’t make any demographic presumptions before starting a campaign. Let the data show you what type of customers are the type to convert. After 3 – 5 days running your campaign you can start to optimize it. Just click on a “Breakdown” button in your Ads Manager dashboard and check these parameters.
KPIs to keep an eye on:
Age
Look for the best converting age group, push the entire budget to that age group, excluding others.
Gender
If you could see that either men or women are converting more on your products, exclude the other gender and leave only one.
Country/Region
This is a more time consuming and precise process. I would recommend you not to optimize regions at the beginning (e.g., U.S). If you are targeting several different countries in the same ad set it is ok to optimize if any country is dragging the performance of the ad set down.
Placement
Facebook has several placements to show your ads. It could be a News Feed (both mobile and desktop), Right-Hand side, Instagram, or Audience Network. After 3 – 5 days running ads on several placements (e.g. both Newsfeed and Right-Hand side), take a look at placement breakdown metrics and exclude the ones that aren’t converting while burning most of your budget.