Facebook Marketing Checklist

Set Your Goal – Before you begin, make sure you know the goal of your campaign so you can choose the right objective from the outset. It may be that you want to increase awareness, draw traffic to your website, generate leads or make sales. Whichever it is, make sure you have defined your goal before you begin.

Install the Facebook Pixel – A Facebook pixel is a small piece of code that you can install on every page of your website. The pixel collects data that helps you track conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads, build targeted audiences for future ads. As well as remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website. It is an essential step in measuring the success of your ad campaigns.

Define Your Audience – It is important to have an idea of your ideal customer in your mind. Think about how old they are, where they live, what they like to do, what other brands they would be into. Defining these demographics will help Facebook to target the people who are most likely to be interested in your business.

Create Custom Audiences – Custom Audiences allow you to bet back in touch with people who have already engaged with your business, online or off. The easiest way is to create a custom audience based on people who have visited your website. That way, you know those individuals are familiar with your business so you can show them the next ad in your sequence.

Create Lookalike Audiences – Lookalike audiences allow you to reach new people who are similar to your current customers. Once you have at least 1000 people in your custom audience, you can use this as the source of your lookalike audience to find thousands of people similar to your existing customer base.

Check your landing page – Before you spend a penny on ads, make sure the page you are sending traffic to has been optimised. That means it should load quickly, be easy to use on a mobile and include content that clearly relates to the content of your ad. Your bounce rate will tell you what percentage of people are leaving straight away and will give a clear indication of how effective your landing page is.

Scale with CBO – Facebook introduced an option called Campaign Budget Optimisation which gives hands the decision making process of where best to allocate your budget over to Facebook based on the criteria you have set. It can be a very effective option to tick and will soon become mandatory.

Watch traffic in real time – Once you have Google analytics set up on your website (it’s free so why wouldn’t you) then you can watch how your visitors click through your website in real time. You can also use analytics to work out how many people are leaving your website straight away (the bounce rate) which will give you a good indication of how effective your targeting is.

Setup Retargeting – Retargeting allows you take the people who are interested in your business on a journey. For instance, by knowing that an individual has already been to a certain page of your website, you can then show that person a new advert to build on the story and guide them along the journey towards becoming a customer.

Naming Convention – Naming your ads in an organised, consistent and logical way will allow you easily find any campaign and to use Facebook’s filters to isolate what works and what doesn’t. Filters are an essential part of measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns so define how you name your ads from the outset.

Customise your columns – Facebook provides a huge amount of data for every campaign you run which can be incredibly useful but also a bit overwhelming. Fear not, you can customise the columns so that only the data you need is displayed.

Split Test – Split testing is a feature of Facebook ads that allows you to compare different versions of your ads so you can see what works best and improve future campaigns. For best results, only test one variable at a time for example testing two different images.