Get Started
To find the Facebook Ads section, click the rather appropriately named Ads link in the left sidebar. You’ll be see several options, but before you can move forward you’ll need to connect your Facebook account so that Weebly Promote can manage your ads.
You’ll also need to enter payment information, even though you won’t be charged anything until your Facebook ads start delivering. Facebook ads cost money (Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t be able to afford a closet full of that one fancy grey t-shirt he wears if he was giving ads away for free) so you’ll, of course, have to pay for them. Weebly Promote doesn’t charge anything extra on top of what you’re paying Facebook, though. And you’ll have the option when creating your ad to set budget as low as $5.
After Facebook is connected, you’ll be presented with four recommended ads, as well as the option to Create New custom ads.
You likely won’t need to go beyond the Suggested Ads — at least not at first — so let’s focus on those.
Suggested Ads
- Promote Best Sellers — This automatically selects the best selling products from your site and creates ads linking new customers directly to them!
- Brand Awareness — This allows you to promote your website or Facebook business page to a new audience with the goal of driving engagement and gaining new followers.
- Abandoned Cart — This runs an ad targeted to anyone who added something to their cart and left without buying it, reminding them of the purchase that is still waiting for them back at your site.
- Retarget Site Visitors — This runs ads directly to people who’ve previously visited your site to encourage them to come back and buy more. This may sound unnecessary since they’ve already been to your site, but it often a great way to close the deal and turn potential customers into actual ones.
The set up process for each ad is fairly similar, but let’s use two as examples: Brand Awareness and Retarget Site Visitors.
Brand Awareness — Setup
Launching the Ad is a three-step process: Crafting your ad’s message alongside some images, selecting the audience you’d like to target and choosing a budget / timeframe for the ad.
Create Ad
You’ll need a short description (what your ad is about), a headline (to get attention) and a subtitle (to continue getting that attention), plus you’ll need to upload an image or two, place a link to the site or page where you want visitors to go, and choose from a small selection of different call-to-action buttons they can click. Take a look at this post if you need some inspiration about what to write.
This is all fairly straightforward and not particularly noteworthy. The most important parts are found in the next step.
Review and Submit
The title doesn’t imply that you’ll be doing much here other than reviewing and submitting, but that is not accurate. There are two very key parts to creating your ad in this section. The first is choosing your targeted audience. This is where Facebook is truly powerful (and vaguely creepy). They know everything we’ve all told them over the years: our neighborhoods, our favorite movies, events we’ve enjoyed. Utilizing Facebook’s in-depth database of mostly trivial information can ensure your ad ends up in front of people who’ll find it interesting.
Let’s say you run a comic book shop in Spokane, Washington. You can limit ads so that they run for people in the Spokane area, between the ages of 16 and 45, who are interested in Black Panther, Spider-Man and Star Wars. This will get you a far more engaged audience than an ad that goes to everyone in Spokane, some of whom you may be surprised to learn don’t even know who Stan Lee is.
Once you’ve chosen your audience, you then select the duration you’d like for the ad to run and the amount of money you want to spend per day. Obviously, the higher your spend, the more results you’ll see from the ad. But it’s a good idea to test things out with a lower budget first, just to make sure the ad works. Then you can increase your spend on the next go-round (or make some changes and try again if it didn’t do as well as you’d hoped).
When you’re done, submit the ad for Facebook’s approval. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. Facebook will notify you when the ad is approved and Weebly Promote has no say in the process.
Once the ad begins running, you’ll see the number of people you’ve reached and the cost of each engagement. The lower the cost per engagement, of course, the better your ad is doing.
Retarget Site Visitors — Setup
Thanks to the direct connection between Weebly Promote and your Weebly site, this ad campaign can automatically show visitors previous products and pages that they’ve viewed while on your site, which are the exact things that might convince them to come back and spend money. There is nothing else you need to do aside from set a budget and duration for the ad run.
And considering retargeted ads bring in anywhere from a 2x to 10x return on investment (and sometimes more) it’d be a waste to not at least test this kind of ad out.
The average person spends around 35 minutes a day on Facebook, with most of that time devoted to avoiding work. Give them an even better reason to avoid work by advertising products they’ll enjoy.
