With slightly more than 3 billion active users a month, it is unsurprising that Facebook has become the most popular social media platform for running ads. A recent study showed that 36% of US retailers spend most of their budget on Facebook ads and report receiving the greatest return on advertising among the other social platforms. This can be attributed to Facebook’s vast possibilities to tailor your target audience, target similar public, and re-target potential customers from one place.
However, like other marketing tools, Facebook Ads have a learning path, and depending on your knowledge of paid advertising, your learning curve can be slower or faster. Running ads on Facebook that effectively reach your roofing business goal relies mainly on trial and error and your capacity to understand your ads’ performance and how to optimize it.
But fear not! The Facebook ads manager is a very visual and easy-to-use platform, and with this comprehensive guide, you’ll master Facebook ads in no time to elevate your roofing service’s online presence.
If you’re new to advertising on Facebook, the first step is to set up your account in the ads manager. This is where you will create, launch, and manage all your advertisement campaigns on Facebook (and Instagram if you choose to advertise simultaneously on both).
To create your account, you must first have a business page on Facebook. Once you have made one, you can access the ad management here by logging in to your Facebook account and clicking the blue button in the top right corner.
You can also access it by logging into your Facebook page usually and then clicking on the “Ads management” option on the left sidebar. Once logged in, you must select the roofing business pages for which you want to create ads and choose the industry sector, the timezone, and the currency in which you want Facebook to bill your campaigns.
To finish this step, you must set up a payment method.
Inside the ads manager, you will find the control panel to monitor your campaigns. If this is your first time creating ads on Facebook, the panel will be empty, but once you have launched your first campaign, you will see it here.
To create a new campaign, click the “Create” green button and choose your ad buying type. Meta offers two buying types of ads: Auction and Reservation, formerly known as Reach and Audience.
The election depends mainly on your campaign goal. Auction ads allow you to choose from all the campaign objectives Facebook offers, while Reservation ads only allow awareness and engagement. So, depending on the primary goal you want to achieve with your ads for your roofing company, you can select the buying type that best fits your needs.
This is one of the most important steps when setting up your campaign, as Facebook will use its resources to optimize your ad placement and budget depending on the results you wish to get from them. Facebook lets you choose from six predetermined objectives, which are:
A helpful way to determine the best fitting objective in Facebook ads is to determine the ultimate goal you want to reach with the campaign.
Let’s say you’re launching a new product and want your potential and acquire customers to learn more about it during the first month. In this case, you’re aiming to promote awareness of your new product among people who might be interested and can consider purchasing it later on, so you may want to select “Awareness” as the objective for your campaign.
Selecting your ultimate goal right is also useful when creating your ads, as your designs and copies should align. If you promote your product’s awareness, your call to action should be oriented towards informational and learning purposes instead of promoting purchases.
Name your campaign: You’ll be asked to name your campaign. Ensure your name is recognizable to everyone on the ads team.
Declare the ads categorie: Depending on the region you’re located in, the advertising rules on Facebook might change, especially for ads that fall under the credit, housing, employment, social issues, or politics categories. If your campaign falls into any of these categories, it is worth declaring it to Facebook when creating it to ensure it complies with their advertising guidelines.
Once you have done these, you can turn on your campaign’s A/B testing and Advantage+ budget features. The A/B testing allows you to try different images, text, placements, and audiences for your ads simultaneously to optimize their performance. If you select this option, the ads manager will take you to the A/B test setup once you’ve created your campaign to finish the test.
The Advantage+ budget is a feature that optimizes your budget by automatically finding the best opportunities to achieve the results set in your campaigns. However, this feature is only available for Auction ads and is recommended for campaigns with at least ads set.
The budget represents the maximum amount of money to spend during the campaign. It can be set per day or as a total amount.
Daily: This budget type limits the daily spending on your ads. Once the budget is reached, the ads stop running for the day and begin running again the next day. So, if you set a daily budget of $50, Facebook will find the right place and time to show your ads to your targeted audience until it spends all $50 and stops for that day.
Lifetime: This budget sets the maximum you’ll spend during the time your campaign is running. If you run a campaign with a lifetime budget of $200, Facebook will distribute the ad spending according to their performance until the limit it’s reached. If you select a end date for your campaign, Facebook will distribute the money to last for the entire period you selected.
Here, you can also set your campaign’s start and end dates and the day times your ads should appear according to your market research.
Recently, changes in Meta resulted in only three targeting options to tailor your audience: age, location, and language, which can be helpful for campaigns focusing on increasing reach and awareness. These options are grouped under the new Meta Advantage+ audience feature that will find the best-fitting users to show your ads based on the parameters you select.
However, you can also customize your audience manually and personalized based on interest, self-reported job titles and other demographic information collected by Facebook.
A great way to accurately choose the audience for your ads is to answer three main questions:
By figuring out these questions, and defining other aspects such as location, and whether you want to promote residential or commercial roofing solutions, you can tailor your audience, the ads and copies that will resonate the most with them.
Facebook Ads Manager lets you gather more information about the people who follow your page and your potential customers. By accessing your Audience Insights, you will see a detailed breakdown of your audience activity: the times they are most active, how many of your followers interact with your content, and their age, gender, and location.
You can also discover the top categories and pages they follow, their job titles, and how likely they are to comment, like, and click on your ads. For example, if you run a shoe store, you can see if they follow other shoe store pages on Facebook and see what’s working for your competitors.
By navigating the insights in your audience, you can discover new interests, locations, and age groups to tailor your ads and expand your reach. Let’s say you start running your ads at 2 PM every weekday, but in your audience insights, you discover your audience is more active at 5 PM on the weekdays. With this new information, you can optimize your campaign on Facebook if you notice the ads are not performing well.
Creating the ads may be the most time-consuming part of this process, as it involves several steps and disciplines.
First, you must craft the graphic designs and copies for each ad. While you can do these yourself, you may consider working with marketing professionals who will analyze the roofing audience, establish campaign goals, and create compelling advertisements that resonate with your target public and the specific solutions they are looking for (roof inspections, repair, maintenance, etc.).
Once the creatives are ready, select the places you want your ads to appear. Your ads can appear on all Facebook and Instagram platforms, including:
By default, the Advantage+ placement feature is selected when you create an ad. This feature will use Facebook data to maximize your reach, showing the ads in the best placements according to your audience, objective, and budget. However, you can also select the placement manually by turning off the feature.
The ad format refers to your ad’s structure when displayed on Facebook. Currently, Facebook offers three ad formats to select from, which are:
Single image: These ads display a clear picture and an attractive caption. This format is easy and quick to create since you only need to upload one image and write one text, and it’s great when you’re looking to increase your website traffic or get people to know more about your solutions and services.
Video: These ads display a video in your audience’s feed, stories, and even in the middle of other videos they’re watching, similar to a YouTube ad. This format is visually more appealing than a single-image ad and can catch people’s attention faster and longer. Because of that, this ad format suits best campaigns aiming to increase brand awareness and start forming a purchase intention.
Carousel: This format allows you to show up to 10 different images or videos with a unique link and text in one ad. It is great for telling stories about your roofing business, such as its funding story, exhibiting several services and solutions at once (roof repair, roof replacements, maintenance, and inspections), and diving into details about a service (for example, the best materials, or the steps of roof repair process from initial inspections to final restoration).
Collections: This format displays your ads as a group of photos or videos. If a person clicks on the announcement to get more information, the whole collection of roofing solutions is automatically displayed in full-screen mode. It will lead your customers to your website to finish the purchase. Collections ads best suit campaigns looking to increase sales or conversions in-app or in-site, as they shorten the journey between your brand discovery and the purchase.
It’s time to choose the creative assets you’ve designed for your campaign and upload them into the manager. If the ad manager has selected an image or video from your previous posts, you can manually upload the new media by clicking on the “Edit” drop-down menu.
Then, it’s time to write your headline and main text. Remember that Facebook headlines can be up to 255 characters and should capture your audience’s attention.
Once done, select the call to action button to encourage people to take the desired action. The call to action also depends on the campaign goal: if you want to create brand awareness, an excellent call to action button could be “More info” to invite people to explore and learn about your roofing solutions, experience and expertise.
In this step, you’ll choose where Facebook will send your potential roofing customers once they click on your ad. For now, you have three options:
Facebook’s Instant Experience: This a landing page or form you can create with a Facebook template that will load inside the app. This means your customers will not be redirected to a site outside Facebook. This option can increase your customer experience, when you need them to focus on a single roofing solution and not your entire business.
Your website: One of the most common options is to send people directly to your website and add the Meta Pixel to track the visits stemming from your ads.
Messaging apps: You can send potential clients to your Messenger, Instagram, or Whatsapp inbox.
How do you choose the right destination? Once again, this depends on your campaign goal and your objectives.
Suppose you wish to increase your website traffic. In that case, sending customers directly to the web page is your best option, but if you aim to collect potential customers’ information, directing them to a form can work better to ensure they fill out the form without inconveniences or distractions.
At this point, you only need to click on the “Publish” button at the bottom right corner of your page. This will launch your campaign and submit your ads for review.
By policy, Facebook reviews all the ads before running them on the platform to ensure they comply with their community guidelines. You can expect your ads to be reviewed and approved within 24 hours. You will receive an email confirmation when your ads start running.
As any other marketing effort, once you have launched your campaign on Facebook Ads, you will want to monitor the results and take actions to improve them if necessary. With Facebook Ads Manager, you can review and adjust your ads in real-time to optimize their performance and your budget. All you need to do is log into your ad manager, click on “Campaigns” and select the campaign you want to review.
In marketing, we work with KPIs or key performance indicators. These are indicators set to measure the performance of the campaigns according to the goal established, whether you want to have more traffic to your website, or if you want the audience to better know your roofing solutions, or to generate trust and authority.
If your ads are aiming to increase your page engagement, you can keep an eye on the clicks, the likes, and the comments that your ads have got. If you are aiming for awareness, the reach and impressions metrics are your key indicators. For example, if you want to increase your reach in your awareness campaign, and you notice it is lower than expected then you can try expanding your targeted audience to reach more people with interest in roofing solutions.
By defining key indicators for your campaigns, you can monitor its performance, correct ads that are underperforming and optimize your budget to increase your return on investment. As any other bussines owner, you don’t want to spend more than what you are earning with your ads.
Calculating the ideal ROI you should be getting from your campaign depends on several factors such as the quality of your roofing solutions, trust, reliability, the number of actions needed for a customer to purchase, the season, etc. Although several studies have shown that an ideal return on investment for Facebook ads ranges from 2:1 to 5:1. That means that for every dollar you spend in paid advertising on Facebook, you can get 2 to 5 dollars in revenue.
However, the Facebook Ads manager is so complete that it will show you the return on advertising (ROAS) and the cost per results for every campaign you have active on Facebook so you can analize it and see if your campaign is getting the expected financial results.
As mentioned at the beginning, Facebook Ads is a powerful tool for roofing companies to start paid advertising on social media, but it does have a learning curve that you may or may not be willing to travel. While it can be satisfactory to launch your first campaign on Facebook Ads and start gaining results, it can also turn into a frustrating experience setting up a campaign and not getting your desired results.
If you find that advertising on Facebook is not your cup of tea, don’t stress yourself out, not everyone is born a marketer. But at Xperience Marketing, we are. With more than 20 years of experience in marketing and advertising for roofing companies, you can trust our team of specialists to create, manage, and optimize your Facebook campaigns.
Leave your paid advertising in professional hands and start seeing results in your campaigns!
