You’ve confirmed your sponsors, secured a venue, and nailed down your entertainment. Now it’s time to promote your event.

With two billion users, Facebook is the place you need to advertise. But whether you are an experienced social media marketer or brand new to the business, Facebook advertising can be tricky.

You don’t have to go it alone. Use these tips to boost your skills and learn the basics of Facebook advertising in just two weeks (without working weekends!).

Learn the basics of Facebook advertising in just two weeks (without working weekends!).

Day 1: Get to know relevance scores

Facebook surfaces content into users’ newsfeeds using through its platform’s algorithm. As part of that algorithm, Facebook uses something called the relevance score to determine how interesting your ad is for your audience.

When you run an ad, Facebook quickly analyzes how well the audience is responding to it by measuring clicks, likes, shares, and comments. Facebook then uses this data as an indicator of how relevant your ad is to your audience, giving it a score of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.

That score determines how much Facebook will charge you to run your ad. The higher the score, the less expensive your ad will be.

Tip: To check an ad’s relevance score, go to the Facebook Ad Manager and click on “Campaigns.” Then, click on “Ads” and choose “Relevance Score.” Improve your score by testing your ad design with A/B variables like copy and images.

Day 2: Learn about Facebook pixels

The Facebook pixel is a little bit of code that is placed on a website to “cookie” (or track) people that visit the site. The pixel allows you to:

  • Target people who have visited your website with ads (“retargeting”)
  • Measure the success of your ads by recording the actions people take on your website after they’ve clicked on your ad

For example, using a pixel lets you see exactly which campaigns or ads are driving ticket sales at a high ROI (return on investment) — and which ads are wasting your money.

How to set up a Facebook pixel

First, create a pixel within Ads Manager, then install it on your website (see Facebook’s instructions). If you use Eventbrite, you can integrate the pixel directly with your account so it will sit on all your event pages and tell you how well your ads are driving ticket sales on Eventbrite.

Day 3: Structure your campaigns

Once you have your pixel in place, the next step is to structure your campaigns. Facebook breaks up the elements of a campaign into three tiers: Campaign, Ad Set, and Ads.

Campaign

The campaign is the overarching element where you set your objective. For example, if your aim is to drive ticket sales, you’d select “Conversions” as the object, and set a ticket purchase as your conversion event.

Ad Set

Here’s where you set up your targeting and select the audience you’d like to target, as well as where you’d like your ads to be shown (desktop or mobile). It’s also where you can control scheduling and your budget.

Ads

This is where you design and create the actual content that will be shown in your audience’s feeds. This is also where you can A/B test your ad design. You can test questions like “Does this copy resonate with my audience?” or “Does image A work better than image B?”

Day 4: Break down audiences: Saved Audiences

There are three types of “audiences” of Facebook users who you want to reach with your campaigns. Saved Audience is the default targeting option Facebook provides and is built using Facebook’s native targeting criteria (interests, behaviors, demographics, and location).

For example, if you wanted to run a technology conference in Sydney, you might use criteria like: “Sydney +50km” for location, “all” for gender, “22-60” for age, and in the Detailed Targeting section, “listed their employer as Technology in their Facebook profile” or “have expressed an interest in or like pages related to Startup company.”

And if you want to make your event “Facebook official,” you’ll be able to target (and retarget) as based on who is interested in your Facebook Event.

Day 5: Break down audiences: Custom Audiences & Retargeting

Custom Audiences make it possible to retarget people who have visited your site but haven’t bought tickets yet. Often, your target audience will come to your event website and they won’t convert on the first interaction. Retargeting those people gives you another chance.

To create a Custom Audience, head over to your Ad Manager and:

  1. Select audiences from the menu in the top left
  2. Choose “Create Audience” and “Custom Audience”
  3. In the menu that appears, select “Website traffic”
  4. Set criteria for your audience

How target your Custom Audience with ads:

  1. Set up your Campaign with the goal of “increase website conversions”
  2. At the Ad Stage, type in the name of your Custom Audience
  3. Layer in additional targeting criteria to further refine your audience

Day 6: Break down audiences: Lookalike Audiences

A Lookalike Audience is an audience generated by Facebook of users who are demographically and behaviorally similar to one of your Custom Audiences. This means you can create a Custom Audience of website visitors, then create an audience of people very similar in interests.

How to create a Lookalike Audience:

  1. Head to Audiences in your Ads Manager
  2. Select checkbox of the Custom Audience you want to create a Lookalike from
  3. Select “Actions” and “Create Lookalike”
  4. Select how wide a match you’d like (the smaller the range, the closer the match)
  5. Click “Create Audience”

Day 7: Build your funnel

People don’t come to Facebook to make purchases — they use it to stay in touch with old friends and connect with like-minded strangers. This is part of Facebook’s strength, but it also means that Facebook advertising requires more touch points to sell out your event.

Here’s how to create initial interest and turn that into conversion:

  1. Drive targeted traffic to your site using a Saved Audience
  2. Use the Facebook pixel to add everyone who visits your site to a Custom Audience
  3. Retarget using the Custom Audience and convert them

Day 8: Learn how to measure

Don’t just sit back and relax after your ads start running. Everything you do prior to campaign launch (creating audiences, writing ads) is based off assumptions. Everything that happens post-launch is about testing those assumptions.

Here are three tips to help your team continually and vigilantly optimize:

  1. Creating several variations of your targeting and ad design
  2. Measure how different ad sets and ads perform against each other
  3. Switch off ad sets and ads that are performing badly and driving up your costs

Day 9: Build your first campaign and measure impact

First thing’s first: Define your goals. Do you want to drive awareness of your event with a “launch moment” when your lineup is announced? Or drive consideration by highlighting premium experiences to past attendees? Or are you retargeting to drive ticket purchases with your ads?

Once you’ve set your goal, choose who to surface the ad to. If you have a Facebook Event, these are options within that event:

  • People who’ve responded to your event
  • Friends of people who responded to your event
  • People who viewed or responded to any previous event
  • Not people who’ve already responded to your event

Build out variations of your ads so you can test which ones perform better. Then measure how the ads perform, tracking cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), and Relevance Score. Optimize your campaign with your learnings so you can focus on what’s performing well.

Lastly? Create variations of the successful ads and start the process all over again!

Day 10: Plan for the future

So what’s the difference between measuring your campaign on day one versus the end, and how can it help you plan for the future? Let’s say you start a campaign with a budget of $1,000 and two different Ad Sets — one targeted at people in Perth, one at people in Adelaide.

You spend $100 a day over 10 days and at the end of the campaign you take a look in Ad Manager. The data tells you that each Ad Set spent $500 (so $1,000 in total), but that Ad Set 1 generated conversions at $5 per conversion, whereas Ad Set 2 generated conversions at $2.50.

In total, you ended up with 300 ticket sales from $1,000 spent, about $3.33 per ticket. But what if you had seen this difference in performance on day 1 or 2 of the campaign? You probably would’ve turned Ad Set 1 off, and put the remaining $400 budget from Ad Set 1 on Ad Set 2 — which would have meant you sold 80 more tickets, or seen a 27% increase in sales.

Get in touch to chat to an expert team member on how to maximise marketing impact for your next event. info@topspeed.media