Who are Facebook Ads for?

Are you ready to tackle Facebook Ads? If you are overwhelmed by Facebook Ads and feel like there is no way you can handle them yourself, that’s okay. We’re here to break them down for you! Okay – let’s be honest, April is here to break them down for you and Laura is here to ask all the dumb questions because she is just as overwhelmed as you are!

Who Needs Facebook Ads?

Facebook has over 2 billion users, and their ads are some of the lowest priced you will find, making it one of the best places for paid advertising. As of today, the big guys like Walmart and Amazon aren’t showing up strong in Facebook ads. They’re still using TV advertisements, direct mail, and billboards.

What does this mean for us little guys? We can still do well with Facebook Ads! The time is now, they are going to figure it out sooner or later, and it’s going to drive costs up for the rest of us.

If you’ve been considering running Facebook ads, you gotta do the thing like yesterday. Gary Vee is big on that too. He agrees that it’s time to jump in and start using Facebook Ads. 

The Ever Confusing Facebook Pixel:

What in the world is a Facebook Pixel? We’re so glad you asked! It’s a code, very similar to the Google Analytics code. It lives in your Facebook Business Manager (that back end place you go to get up your ads). 

The pixel lives under your event manager. You will go in there and get this little code, and put it on your website, in the head code. If you’re lucky enough to use WordPress, there’re easy plugins, called header and footer, where you just type in your pixel.

Once it’s up and running, the pixel acts very similarly to Google Analytics. It will tell you who is visiting your website and capture their demographic information. This way, when you start running your ads, you can know who is interacting with them.

Your pixel also knows what people do once they view the ad. Did they just go to your ad page? Or did they start exploring through the rest of your website? If you are directing them to a landing page, did they just go to that landing page, or did they fill out your form? After they filled out the form, did they purchase, or do they get to the purchase page and fall off?

This information is super powerful. It tells you where you are losing people in your sales funnel so you can make changes to stop that from happening. 

How Many Pixels Should You Have?

Usually, you only have one pixel per ad account. You might have accidentally ended up with more than 1 pixel because maybe you boosted a post and then created an ad account, and a pixel was created both times. You want to choose one pixel and just start using that one. 

The instance where you would want two pixels is when you have two very different products. If you do this, you will want to have 2 add accounts as well. 

A common example of this is products or services that are way different in price. The people who are in our membership bundle are vastly different from the people who pay us $1000s for done for you services. We will want two different pixels for those audiences.

The biggest thing with Facebook ads is testing to see what works for you. Start with one pixel and if you end up with a HUGE range of data you’ll want to switch to two.

Starting With Facebook Ads

When you first put your pixel on your website and start collecting data, it’s cold. It doesn’t know anything about your audience yet. Start by running a 4-5 day test add. Don’t want to mess with this ad.

We often want to go in and edit it and mess with this and that to make it perfect, but when you do that, you confuse your pixel. The purpose of this ad is for your pixel to learn about your audience. Fill in all your campaign information, add your content, and just let it be. 

You might even check your analytics and see it say “learning.” It’s legit learning about your audience. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on these testing ads, $5.00 a day is plenty. This is the best way to get a good picture of who is in your audience.

When we’re talking about ads, we don’t mean a boosted post. We mean an ad that you’ve created from scratch in your ads manager account. A lot of times, when you boost a post, Facebook creates your campaign for you. You don’t want Facebook to have all that control over your ad. When you get behind the scenes in your ads manager page, it gives you all the control.

There’re a couple of different ways to access business manager from your homepage. There’s a little spot on the left side that says “ads manager.” You can also use the dropdown menu where you access different pages and groups. Once you are in there, you will want to go through every step and fill out the information on your own. 

Laura learned the hard way about not boosting posts. She boosted a post for her first-ever Pinterest challenge and ended up with about 17 Nigerian Princes signed up. NOT her ideal client, not even business owners, and she paid good $$ for those people to join. 

Are You Exhausted Yet?

Let’s take a quick mental break from talking about Facebook Ads. We know that everyone is chomping at the bit for spring to be here. Daylight savings is this weekend, and we are all ready to go out there and ride our horses. 

When April lived in Washington, spring for her meant mud. LOTS of mud! The horses would get what they call scratches, basically an awful fungus that turns into a secondary bacteria on their legs.

It’s super uncomfortable, and the only solution was to stall them to keep them dry. That was always a total bummer when you knew nicer weather was right around the corner, but you had to wait out the wet season first. 

Just right across the state, Laura experienced very different springs when she lived in Idaho. They typically included snowstorms. One day Laura got stuck out at the horse rescue where DT lived. She never really worried about the weather, she had her Subaru, and the owner of the rescue would push her out with the tractor if she got stuck.

On that particular day, even the tractor could not push her out. The snow was over 4 feet deep. Thankfully, there was a downstairs apartment at the rescue, and Laura got a real-life view into life as a horse rescue owner. 

She got up twice in the middle of the night to check on needy horses, and clear the ice off the pond with a sledgehammer. When it comes to spring in Idaho, you want those snowstorms. When it’s warm and rainy you end up with 3 feet of mud. It will suck your boot right off.

Spring in California

Today, spring is lovely for Laura and Molly Jane in California. Despite Laura’s best efforts to convince MJ that she DOES NOT need a blanket, MJ still says she does, and she gets one. She’s used to 20 degrees and sideways snow, but as soon as it started raining and went below 50 MJ refused to leave her shelter. 

She wouldn’t come down to eat or drink, so off Laura went to the feed store to buy a blanket. As soon as she was tucked in and warm she was right back to her old self. You win MJ, that blanket is clean and dry and ready for our next rainstorm. 

King wasn’t crazy about Washington weather either, but now he’s back for the 2nd time, and on the ocean, he seems to like it better. Another thing that comes with super wet springs is thrush. You just maintain it, you can never get rid of it completely.  

If you are feeling the winter horse owner blues, hang in there! Spring is on its way, and we are as excited as you are! 

Back to Facebook Ads for Horse Businesses

There are three major elements for a Facebook ad. The first is the campaign. That’s where you set up your budget and track your conversions. Next, you have your ad set where you choose who you want to see your ad. Finally, you have your actual ad where you put in the content.

Setting up your ad set is essential, and it’s what most people struggle with the most. If you’ve ever run an ad and felt like it didn’t go to the right audience, this is probably your problem.

Your audience size should be between 200,000 – 500,000. You can choose demographics like age and gender, but if this is your first ad where your pixel is still learning, you don’t want to constrain those data points yet. 

Your pixel may be able to learn more about who’s interacting with your ideal client than you know right now. You don’t want to assume anything about your audience’s general demographics until you get that information from your first ad. Once you’ve run a few ads and received some data from your pixel, you can narrow down your demographics based on who’s interacting with the ad.

So let’s say you want to run an ad and let your pixel learn, but KNOW you don’t want to reach anybody who doesn’t own a horse. How do you get down to an audience of 500,000 people without targeting based on demographics?

You want to target your audience by people’s interests, but leave the demographics open. You can use your email list to create a lookalike audience. That tells Facebook you want to show your ad to more people who look like the people on your email list.

If you’re creating a new audience, you can select other Facebook pages that your ideal client likes and build a lookalike audience based on that. So for example, if Laura was looking for horse business owners, she could run an ad targeting people who are fans of Buck Brannaman AND Jenna Kutcher. 

If you offer a product or service that can be used anywhere, you can set up your ad to reach other English speaking countries. So you could include Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom instead of just people in the USA, Reaching other countries is sometimes cheaper than the US.

You can do it! 

Learning to run Facebook ads that work can be overwhelming, but once you start diving in there and get familiar with it, it gets so much easier. April has a Facebook ad course specifically for Equine business owners looking to learn about Pinterest Ads.

If you’re struggling with making sure you’re getting out in front of horse people, this course can help you get some clarity. It doesn’t matter if you are a local business serving local clients or an online company that has clients all over the world. Facebook ads are your friend!

The course is going live on March 16, that’s just 10 days from now. 

The course will go over:

• Campaign Setup – How to get your pixel setup and ready to go to work for you.
• How to use your pixel – the pixels even get more intricate than what we talked about here. You can track who purchased, who didn’t, and at what point you lost them.
• How to Start With Your First Ad – and use the information we get from it to retarget an audience of people who are interested in your business.

You can sign up for that right here.