The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Running Successful Facebook Ads for Your Blog How to Get Real Results

MaxFreelancing15/12/2023

1,994 11 minutes read

Starting and growing an audience for your blog can be challenging. You produce great content and know you’re creating value for readers. But still you struggle to have your voice heard among the over 1.9 billion websites competing for attention.

This is where Facebook ads come in.

Used strategically, Facebook ads allow you to get your content in front of targeted, high-intent audiences who are primed to convert into loyal readers and community members. Whether you want to rapidly grow your email list, drive traffic to your newest content, or increase engagement across your site, Facebook ads can help.

But if you’re new to the world of Facebook advertising, it can also seem overwhelmingly complex. Terms like CPC, relevance score, and custom affinity audiences blur together into an unintelligible mess.

In this beginner’s guide, you’ll learn a simple, step-by-step approach to setting up successful Facebook ad campaigns tailored specifically for bloggers. With concrete strategies you can implement right away, this guide aims to take the complexity and confusion out of Facebook ads so you can start seeing real results.

In This Beginner’s Guide You’ll Discover:

The step-by-step basics of setting up a Facebook ad campaign optimized for your blog
5 proven ad objectives and how to choose the right one
How to create a high-converting ad in less than 10 minutes
Design principles and best practices for ad copy and visuals
Key targeting methods for reaching your ideal audience
Tools to streamline ad creation and management
Common beginner mistakes and how to avoid them
A comparison table of the 5 most impactful campaign objectives
FAQs on budgets, analytics, and optimization

And plenty more! Whether total beginner or wanting to improve your existing efforts, this guide will teach you how to engineer successful Facebook ad campaigns to grow your blog and achieve your goals.

Why Facebook Ads Work for Bloggers

With over 2.85 billion monthly active users, Facebook dominates the social media landscape. And every second, users generate 4 petabytes of data Facebook can use to target ads with scary accuracy.

As a blogger, you can take advantage of this enormous pre-primed audience by meeting them where they already spend lots of their time: in the Facebook/Instagram ecosystem.

You can also tap into powerful social proof dynamics. When users see multiple friends engaging with or reading your content, they’re more likely to check it out as well. Facebook capitalizes on this with social context modeling in their ad relevance scoring.

Finally, Facebook captures lots of demographic, interest, and behavioral data to target ads to precisely the right people wherever they are on the web through the Facebook pixel and custom audiences.

This gives bloggers a major leg up for zeroing in on highly qualified audiences for their niche without a lot of guesswork.

Let’s look at a real example.

John runs a blog helping programmers master JavaScript. He’s written 50 in-depth tutorials and wants to get them in front of his target audience.

But as a newer site, he lacks an existing audience to share posts with or budget for broader paid campaigns.

With strategic Facebook ads, John can laser target people interested in JavaScript based on:

Demographics: Location, age, gender, education level, interests, skills indicated, etc.
Behavior: Visiting programming education sites, signing up for JavaScript newsletters, attending relevant conferences
Context: What posts and pages they engage with on Facebook and Instagram

Thanks to Facebook’s data and targeting capabilities combined with strategic testing, John’s able to drive highly qualified traffic to his JavaScript tutorials, rapidly growing his audience.

The same principles apply no matter your niche. Let’s dive into the step-by-step process for engineering successful ad campaigns.

Step-By-Step Basics for Setting Up a Facebook Ad Campaign

While you can get very advanced with Facebook ads, getting started doesn’t need to be complicated. Just focus on the basics.

Here is the simple step-by-step process:

Step 1: Set Up Your Facebook Ads Manager Account

If you don’t already have one, set up a Facebook ads manager account by adding payment information under Facebook Ads in your regular Facebook profile:

You’ll need to input your credit card to fund campaigns, but you control the budget and only get charged for actions people take, like clicking your ads. No upfront costs.

Once your account is verified, you’ll be ready to start creating campaigns.

Step 2: Choose Your Ad Objective

Facebook offers 11 primary ad objectives optimized for different goals you can choose from when setting up a campaign. Common ones for bloggers include:

Traffic
Engagement
Conversions
Leads
Brand Awareness
Reach

Traffic drives people to your site. Engagement gets them interacting with your posts. Conversions encourage specific on-site behaviors. Leads collect contact information. Awareness expands recognition of your brand. And Reach gets your content and messages in front of lots of people.

We’ll explore the pros and cons of each further in the next section.

For now, choose 1 goal you want to focus your first campaign on, like increasing email subscribers.

Step 3. Set Up Your Campaign

In the Facebook Ads Manager, click Create to begin setting up your campaign.

You’ll be asked to name your campaign and select the objective you want from the options you previously considered:

Set your campaign bid strategy. The easiest is paying for clicks (CPC), but you can also set overall daily/lifetime budgets caps.

Leave “delivery type” as standard and click continue.

Next, set up the ad set. This is where you define your audience, budget, schedule, placements, and creative connections.

Give your ad set a name and connect it to the campaign you created. Set your budget and schedule – many run them continuously with $5-10 daily limits when starting out.

Then comes the fun part – deciding who you want to target with your ad!

Step 4. Target Your Audience

Facebook offers flexible and powerful ways to target your ads using:

Location
Detailed demographics
Interests
Behaviors both on and off Facebook
Connections to your website and more

For example, you can target men ages 25-45 living in Australia interested in gardening, who have visited sites related to succulents, and attended relevant gardening conferences.

Or women with bachelor’s degrees who like content from sites like Buzzfeed and live in New York City.

Take time to think through your ideal reader avatar and get very specific with targeting to maximize relevance. Facebook rewards good targeting with better ad rates and performance.

When you’re happy with your audience selection, click “continue” to move on to creating your actual ad.

Step 5. Design & Create Your Ad

Time to combine powerful visuals and compelling copy to create an ad poised to engage your audience and achieve your desired conversion.

You’ll want to include:

Images or Video: Visually stunning and on brand assets catch attention

Ad Headline: Short, benefit-driven headline conveying the value offered

Body Text: 1-2 concise sentences giving just enough info to pique interest and indicate relevance

Call to Action Button: Clear prompting what you want the viewer to do

You have a variety of ad formats to choose from including single image, carousel, collection, and more advanced video options.

Best practices are to maintain strong visual coherence and reinforce your central message across all assets and text. Highlight the value offered to viewers rather than just features about you.

Once your ad is looking good, click “confirm” to wrap setting up your campaign!

Step 6. Monitor Performance and Iterate

You’ve done the hard work. Now you get to essentially sit back and let Facebook work its distribution magic using their immensely powerful algorithms and extensive data.

But that doesn’t mean set it totally and forget it!

It’s important to monitor your ads at least daily when first starting out. Facebook gives you helpful reporting on metrics like:

Reach and impressions
Clicks, click through rate
Engagements
Conversions
Amount spent

Pay attention if some ad variations you test are drastically outperforming others to guide where to invest more creative efforts.

You can also have Facebook automatically optimize towards conversions you care about whether that’s email subscribers, link clicks to blog posts, checkouts for your course, or something else entirely.

Use what you learn to refine targeting and iterate on messaging that resonates. This is where the real magic comes from in taking performance to the next level over time.

Choosing the Right Facebook Ad Objective for Your Goals

As touched on briefly already, you have a variety of campaign objectives to choose from with Facebook ads based on your specific goals. Each comes optimized for a different purpose:

Objective	Best For
Traffic	Driving visits to your website
Engagement	Getting reactions, comments, and shares of your posts
Conversions	Encouraging actions like downloads or email signups
Leads	Collecting contact information like emails or phone numbers
Brand Awareness	Broad recognition of your brand and content
Reach	Putting your posts and messages in front of many people

With so many options, it can get confusing deciphering which objective will give you the results you’re looking for. While you can always start with the standard Traffic or Engagement objectives, consider if one of the more conversion-focused objectives may better serve your needs.

Here is an in-depth look at when each objective can be the right choice:

1. Traffic

The bread and butter default. This objective optimizes for driving site traffic from Facebook.

Use when:

Your #1 goal is visits to your blog
Trying to increase awareness of new content
Don’t have other events on your site to optimize for

Metrics to track:

Link clicks
Landing page views
Quality of traffic (bounce rate, time on site, pages per session)

Tips:

Send traffic to strong evergreen content likely to hook visitors to explore further rather than just your homepage
Share new posts across multiple days. Traffic objective rewards consistent posting history

2. Engagement

Do you want more reactions, shares, and comments on your Facebook posts? This one is for you.

Use when:

Seeking to build an audience on Facebook itself
Have an existing engaged group reacting to your page posts
Want to foster social sharing to expand reach

Metrics to track:

Reactions, comments, shares
Follows
Traffic driven from social shares

Tips:

Mix text, image, and video posts
Leverage seasonal events and cultural moments
Ask questions to spark two-way engagement

3. Conversions

Want to get visitors taking action on your site? Conversions to the rescue.

Use when:

Your site has clear conversion events like downloads, sign ups, purchases etc.
Seeking more newsletter subscribers, app installs, course purchases
Optimizing for lead generation

Metrics to track:

Cost per conversion event
Conversion rate from landing page entry
Conversion volume over time

Tips:

Drive traffic to dedicated conversion landing pages, not just blog
Make conversion goal abundantly clear in messaging
Leverage Facebook’s conversion tracking pixel

4. Leads

Laser focused on getting new contacts and their information.

Use when:

Building an email list is #1 priority
Want user phone/contact information like for consult calls
Offering lead magnets in exchange for emails

Metrics to track:

Lead volume
Cost per lead
Email open & clickthrough rates
Downstream conversions from leads

Tips:

Send traffic to optimized lead capture landing pages
Clearly convey value exchanged for their information
Require emails to access gated assets

5. Brand Awareness

Expand recognition and discovery of your brand to new audiences.

Use when:

Have minimal existing following or early on in launch
Content alone isn’t driving meaningful reach yet
Seeking ambient passive growth

Metrics to track:

Impressions
Reach into new demographics
Traffic, engagement, conversions from wider audience

Tips:

Showcase visual assets like logo, popular images
Share mission, values, and purpose creatively
Partner creatively with complementary brands

6. Reach

Do you have an important update or message to blast out? This delivers at massive scale.

Use when:

Want high volumes to see announcement/new offering
Major changes to product, service offerings
Got big news that demands attention!

Metrics to track:

Impressions
Post reach
Message resonance and sentiment

Tips:

Keep messaging super simple and clear
Drive to dedicated landing pages for more details
Be prepared for spike in traffic and inquiries

Assessing where you currently stand and having clarity in what your priorities are will indicate which route is best. From there, just follow the step-by-step process to start seeing results!

Now that we’ve covered objectives at a high level, let’s get into the tactical weeds on crafting ads optimized for each goal.

Designing High-Converting Ads in 5 Simple Steps

You put together a slick campaign targeting all the right people. But then your ad falls flat, blending into the scrolling feeds with little attention. What gives?

Unfortunately, most Facebook ads don’t work.

But yours can absolutely be a success story. The key? Standing out while conveying relevance in under 3 seconds.

If something intrigues people quickly amid endless competing posts and inventory ads, you have a shot. Hence the importance of refined, strategic ad creative.

Here is a 5 step formula for creating high-converting Facebook ads for your blog fast:

Step 1. Identify the Outcome You Want

Get clear on what action you want people to take when they see or click your ad. Do you want them:

Visiting a specific blog post?
Opting in to your email list?
Checking out your most popular product?
Following your Facebook page?

Whatever it is, defining this call-to-action is essential. It informs messaging and design choices that speak directly to that end goal.

Step 2. Lead With the Benefit

Remember, it’s not about you. No one cares about you or even what you do at first. They care what’s in it for them.

So lead headlines and copy with the transforming benefit offered:

✅ “How to Write 5 Blog Posts per Week Without Burnout”

❌ “I Wrote 300 Blog Posts Last Year”

And make sure images reinforce that same benefit!

Step 3. Speak Directly to Their Reality

You have mere seconds to connect the benefit offered to something your audience actively worries about, wants, or needs related to that problem area.

Evoke their frustration around burning hours trying to eek out a post or two per week and barely making progress. The anxiety each time they open that blank word document.

Then position your solution as the antidote to that pain.

Step 4. Use Specific, Vivid Language

Generic overtures fall flat. Anyone can say they’ll help you get more blog traffic or write better content.

Separate yourself with concrete specifics and vivid terminology:

“Double your monthly blog traffic with our 5-day content sprint training”

Step 5. Include a Clear CTA

Don’t assume they’ll naturally take whatever next step you want. Spoon feed it explicitly.

Click here to download the traffic sprint bundle
Register below for early access
Learn more on our site

Visually design your CTA button to draw attention as the obvious next move after consuming your compelling messaging.

That’s it! Now combine these storytelling elements with strong visuals and succinct copy and you have an ad bound to connect with its intended viewers.

Choosing the Right Targeting Strategies

You could have the most beautifully crafted ad ever conceived by man. But if you blast it out to broadly to vague audiences, crickets will be the only response you hear.

Targeting is critical for success with Facebook ads. Otherwise you bleed money showing your ads to droves of people who have little interest while missing your core audience.

Here are 5 proven targeting strategies for dialing in on those likely to actually convert:

1. Layer In Multiple Interests

Don’t rely on a single broad interest like “marketing” to reflect your audience. People are complex!

Instead, combine 3-5 layered interests like:

Content writing
Blogging
Email marketing
Business coaching

This captures readers passionate about writing to grow their biz via content and email. Much more qualifying than “marketing” alone.

2. Include Behaviors

Looking at what people actually do yields stronger signals of interest compared to stated preferences alone. Facebook captures tons of behavioral data you can leverage: