How to get in Facebook’s good books and stay there.

Nothing’s more frustrating than putting together an awesome campaign that you can’t wait to get off the ground and watching as Facebook rejects your ads one … by … one. And all you can do is sit and watch in horror as your campaign crumbles around you.

I’ve created this handy guide for setting yourself up to be safe from that frustration once and for all!

Step 1: Get to know the rules.

Invest time in researching what you can and can’t get away with in Facebook advertising to prevent frustration down the line. Check the policies for what you can say in your copy. Find out about the visual requirements to ensure your assets comply.

Also, make sure your landing page is compliant! The biggest pitfall I see on ad accounts I audit is people not realising that Facebook also checks these when approving ads.

One thing they’re massive about cracking down on at the moment is the kind of MLM, get rich quick claims that a lot of us love to use. Even if you can make your clients a million dollars in three days, you have to figure out a way to keep those claims to a minimum because Facebook flags these the most.

A workaround is to avoid including the exact amount of income and the time frame. Usually, figuring out a way to say the same things without saying exactly “that” gets past Facebook’s filters, but it’s a tough area.

Do the same check for your landing page. Maybe you left those claims out of your ad, but the second somebody goes to your page they’re flooded with “Get rich quick!” ads. Facebook will not let it float.

Remember, this doesn’t mean you can’t include this kind of information. If you’re doing well enough to make a claim like that and back it up, you should be shouting that from the rooftops. You just have to keep it out of the top of your funnel. Figure out a way to work it into the journey — maybe creating a “Client Success Stories” page will do the trick. It’s your time to get creative!

Step 2: Eradicate “spammy” ads from your campaign.

After you’ve covered the groundwork, do a check to ensure your ads are high quality. Facebook cares about the quality of the content in its newsfeed and tends to look down on ads that are purely about the conversions.

Even if you have a great offer, Facebook won’t see it as one unless it contributes to a sense of building community rather than cold, hard sales.

Incorporate a range of campaigns into your advertising budget. Build journeys that give value to your clients and build trust.

We call these “Pre-Targeting” ads. Give customers things to engage with. Tell your story. Use your funnels to start a conversation so it feels more like a relationship than a business agreement.

The easiest way to do this is with video campaigns. Video views are great because the more you get, the more Facebook sends it on to people who wouldn’t have engaged with your post previously. Suddenly, you’re racking up all this amazing social proof you were missing out on previously.

When you’re using videos in ads, make sure you include ‘Suggested Videos’ as a placement. It may be worthwhile to turn off the other placements and just have it going to your newsfeed and suggested video. With these placement settings, you’re guaranteed to get a higher number of views!

You can turn on this feature by going thrown your ad set level to ‘Placements’ and selecting ‘Suggested Videos’. This is a great way to get success building audiences and engagement.

By utilising pre-targeting strategies, you show Facebook you’re not all about conversions — you want to put information out there and connect with people.

As I said before, videos are an excellent way to do this because then you can actually capture those who watch the video and retarget them with a specialised offer.

When you retarget, use a high intent audience. Don’t just go for those who watched the first three seconds of your video — they don’t really care.

Instead, create an audience of those who really connected with your product, who watched at least 50%. These people are far more likely to turn into conversions because they’re already showed some sort of commitment to what you’re offering.

In the same way, the act of carrying out pre-targeting campaigns shows Facebook that you care about improving the quality of the platform.

When it comes to budgeting for your pre-targeting campaigns, I recommend allocating about 10% of your overall budget. After that, I suggest 60% goes to the conversion part of your campaign — getting people to opt in for your offer. Then, with the 30% that remains, you can retarget those who have opted in to take the next step.

Make sure you don’t fall into the pitfall of spending your retargeting money on another conversion campaign — this drastically narrows your audience. Because you want to keep the bottom of the funnel as wide as possible, branch out a little with your retargeting.

Send it to other segments of your audience too. Test out different campaign objectives (for example a traffic campaign, page post engagement campaign, reach campaign or even video campaign) to see which ones generate results.

At this point, when you’re fiddling around in your Ads Manager, make sure to customize your columns. This way, when you create a conversion campaign, you’ll see the results are optimized for the conversion event you’ve selected.

Say you’re trying to get people to schedule something.

That’s the new standard event, and the one that I recommend if you don’t have any other standard events set up (such as lead generation or complete registration). If you’ve got it set up for targeting other audiences, select the ‘Schedule’ standard event for your ‘Book A Call’. Then, when you set up your conversion campaign Facebook will just say, “Results: Schedule call.” and it’ll show you the exact number of scheduled calls.

If you’re running a traffic campaign, it’ll show link clicks for your page post engagement and the results column will read, ‘Post Engagements’. You might look at that and think your other campaigns aren’t getting any results. You can fix this by ensuring you customize your columns so that you can see the right results in your report.

If you don’t have your report customized correctly, it’s easy to mistake a flourishing campaign for one in the dumps so make sure you set that up properly!

Once you can see things clearly, it’s a lot easier to look at your campaigns and assess what’s working and what isn’t.

Run tests on conversions, traffic, page post engagement, etc. to see what’s bringing in the results you want. Then, use the same post ID from a campaign that worked in a page post engagement campaign so the bottom of the funnel is beautiful and wide, it hasn’t been narrowed in and you got the best chance of getting more booked calls.

I hope you found this useful! If you’re reading it and find yourself overwhelmed by all of the intricacies, head over to Social Charlie to find out about the benefits of having an in-house strategist. Honestly, the load they take off is unbelievable and it’s amazing what can happen to a campaign with a bit of fresh energy and focus.

Until next time!

Jody