How to Make Money With Facebook Ads for Beginners
If you’re dealing with Facebook ads as a beginner, the experience can be pretty daunting. But instead of getting disheartened, understand that perseverance will pay off. In this video, we dive into Facebook ads for beginners. We’ll go through how to find the right products, create ads that will convert, and more.
Video transcript: Facebook ads can be scary, and that’s especially true when you’re just a beginner. The prospect of spending hundreds of dollars only to get no sales doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence. But getting that first sale with Facebook ads is so important. It proves that you can make money, and it gives you the confidence that you need to scale your initial success.
So in this video, I’m going to talk about Facebook ads for beginners. Specifically, I’ll tell you how to find products that Facebook audiences love, how to create high-converting ads on the cheap, what countries to avoid targeting your ads to, and how to calculate the right budget for your product. You want to make money online, so we have no time to waste. Let’s get started on Facebook ads for beginners.
Facebook Ads for Beginners Tips
Hey, everyone, it’s Jessica from Oberlo. Today, I’m gonna go over some tips for making money with Facebook ads.
To make money with Facebook ads, you need to get four things right, you need to sell the right product, you need to create the right ads, you need to target the right audience and you need to set the right budget. I’ll go over each of these topics in-depth, but I wanna start by talking about products.
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Sell Products With a Track Record
There are certain search hacks on Facebook Ads for beginners that you need to know about to make money with Facebook ads and let me be real with you, you can sell almost anything on Facebook and make money. If your goal, however, is to make money on Facebook then you’ve got to be a bit more strategic with the products that you’re selling. Stop asking yourself, “What do I want to sell?”, and start asking yourself, “What are people buying on Facebook?”.
That’s why this first strategy that I suggest is selling products that are already making money with Facebook ads. This is different from, say selling products with high order counts on AliExpress. If your goal is to make money with Facebook ads, you need to sell something that’s been validated on Facebook. But how do you know what products are making money with Facebook ads? It’s simple. I’ll show you how.
On Facebook, you want to begin by searching a niche that is a product category that you’re interested in and I recommend you decide on something that maybe you already have experience in buying from. So for example, if you have a dog, maybe you’re used to buying dog accessories. Type that in the search bar, “dog accessories”, but now you wanna go one step further by adding a phrase that dropshippers and entrepreneurs typically include in their ads for dog accessories products. So that could be for example, “50 percent off”, but it could also be “free shipping” or “limited time only”. Once you’ve got that in the search bar, hit enter.
Now, you want to click videos to filter your results by videos. Video ads are by far the most effective way to advertise on Facebook, especially as a beginner. You get a list here of what are essentially popular dog accessories products and what you’re looking for in this list is views. The higher the views and the more recent the video, the more promising the product that’s in the video is as a high potential product to sell on Facebook. Remember as a beginner in Facebook Ads you want to get the best bang for your bucks and this Facebook ad hack can do just that.
Now, this isn’t an exact science, because, for example, you might find something with over a million views that was advertised at the end of 2018, which would be about a year from this date, or you might find something more recent with 10,000 views. Aim for something with over 10,000 views to be sure. But the more views, the better. So, on this list, I see a lot of potential winners. For example, the dog bed, and this nail trimmer both were published fairly recently, this in fact, in the past month, and already has over a million views. The reason you want to pay attention to views is because that number tells you if a product is getting sales. So Facebook Ads for beginners hack two is the number of views to a video is a good representation of if the ad is getting sales.
All ads on Facebook cost money to run. If someone is paying to run an ad for long enough that it gets over a million views, it’s because that person is seeing a return on their investment in the form of sales, and if they’re getting sales selling that product, you can too. Now, some people advise against selling products that are already selling well. They protest that these products are too saturated. But I’ve interviewed multi-millionaire dropshippers that are buying their second Lamborghini with money they made selling dog beds and bikinis. They took common products and marketed them in a fresh and creative way to new audiences. That is the whole art and science of ecommerce. This world is full of money and you can get a slice of that pie.
Okay, let’s get back to these video ads. Write down the products that you see in these ads that are performing well and make sure you search a lot of different terms. Even though this yielded some great product ideas, I would also search, “dog accessories”, “free shipping”, and I might search other interests that I have such as, I don’t know, “make-up application”, “free shipping”, and take note of those products as well. I want to cast a wide net here.
Just to note though that this isn’t the only search you can do to surface product ideas, I highly recommend that you also check out popular sites that share viral content. One example of that is What’s Trending and another example that I really like is Cheddar. Now Cheddar has a lot of viral content, certainly not just product-focused Bio content, but the product focus content that it does have are really promising winning products. For example, I saw this electric loofah on Cheddar and I think this is definitely a high potential product.
Also, check out popular pages within your niche. For example, if you’re in the kitchen or cooking niche, Tasty is a page that you’re probably already following. I saw this article on Tasty lately and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant source of product inspiration. “Worth it, check. Cheap, check. 28 useful products under $10 our readers actually swear by.” This already has tons of comments and shares and so I would click on that link and start noting down more product ideas.
Real talk, break. Researching your product on Facebook is a great way to see if it’s actually being sold. However, you want to make sure that when you sell that product, your pricing and product pages are strong, because there’s no point in validating a product on Facebook, running ads to it only to have web traffic to that page read broken English descriptions from your AliExpress supplier. That won’t get you sales. Your product needs to be priced well, and your product page needs to be able to convert traffic.
Now, I won’t go over product pages and pricing, but I’ll give you a product pricing formula and a product page template in Oberlo 101. Now that you know how to find the right products to make money on Facebook, you need to know how to create the right ads. I’m going to show you how to make high-converting Facebook advertisements in three simple steps.
Create Facebook Ads That Present a Problem and a Solution
Most Facebook ad beginners only do step three, and that’s why their ads fail. Now for this to be effective, you still have to be able to put in some work, you have to order a sample of the product you’re selling and you’ve got to whip out your phone, and take a few product videos, possibly with the help of some friends, and you have to be willing to learn some simple video editing techniques. Nothing scary. And this is all doable with no special skills and a lot of times without even spending a lot more money.
The key here is to film three critical shots for your Facebook video ads because these three shots get Facebook audiences to stop scrolling and start buying. The first shot has to tell your audience about the problem that your product solves. Show them that the problem exists and how it might affect their lives. For ideas, go back to high-performing ads on Facebook that you were researching in the first place. I’m gonna choose that dog nail trimmer example.
As an example of a Facebook ad for beginners this is great. From the very beginning of this ad, it goes into the problem. It shows a dog’s nails being cut too short and causing the dog pain in this video right here you see the dog pulling away. That is some perfect problem situationing there. And what’s amazing about this, I’ll play it again, is that it really gets emotional seeing the dog wince and pull away that hits you. No one wants to cause their pet that much pain. So right away, this video shows you the problem with clipping nails the normal way. I also wanna pay attention to the language appearing on screen, because I want to use text like that, both in my videos and in the captions for my Facebook ads.
So for example, “Are you trimming your dog’s nails right?” Okay, right, and wrong is good language to use. “Traditional way can be dangerous, plus it’s so frustrating.” Words like “dangerous” and “frustrating” are capitalized, just to show you how urgent it is that you solve this problem. Once you’ve captured the problem in your ad, the second step is to show the value of your product.
In other words, now that you’ve got the audience worried about their problem, provide them with some sweet relief. Show them that your product solves their problem. Let’s go back to the dog nail trimmer ad, and see how that ad portrays the product solving the problem.
Alright, so now we know there’s a right way and a wrong way to trim nails, the wrong way is dangerous, frustrating and painful for the dog. So now we wanna know, “What does this trimmer do?” It “keeps dogs calm”, the opposite of frustrating and it “makes the cutting process safe”, the opposite of dangerous. That is exactly how you point out how the product solves the problem because not only does it show the product in action, but it also uses the opposite language of the problem language “calm and safe” are the solution to “dangerous, frustrating problems.”
Now you’ve got a shot that shows the problem and a shot that shows your product as the solution the third shot, you need and this is the one that everyone includes but they don’t include it, right? Is to describe your product. In other words, tell your audience about its features and other benefits that come along with it. Again, we can look to this dog nail trimmer for inspiration. Right after the ad shows how this dog nail trimmer is a solution to the problem it gets into features. “The muted sound is perfect for anxious dogs”, “there’s no expensive trip”, so this saves you money and “it’s USB rechargeable and battery-free”. This ad ends with a call to action which is perfect for getting people to share the ad so that you don’t have to pay for extra eyeballs to see this ad.
This last bit is the easiest to film and for most entrepreneurs, it’s the only thing they’ll film. Think about how many ads you see that just shows you a product and tells you that it’s reusable or battery-free or hypo-allergenic or whatever the case might be, what those ads don’t do is get you emotionally with that first hook that describes a problem and then hits you with that second shot that describes how the product solves that problem. That’s why you need those first two shots and the third to get a great ad that Facebook audiences will click on.
Target Audience With Facebook Audience Insights
Now you’ve got the right product and the right ad to make money with Facebook ads. But if you don’t target those ads at the right audience you’re going to lose out on revenue. Lucky for you, Facebook wants you to make sales. Facebook is a business and it knows that if you make sales you’ll keep paying to run ads on their platform.
Facebook also knows that it can be hard to put your ad in front of the right audience online, especially if you are new to Facebook advertising and don't know too much about the platform. Unlike brick-and-mortar retail stores, your customers aren’t just walking past your store. So Facebook has created a tool called Facebook Audience Insights. Facebook Audience Insights allows you to create an audience of people who will be most likely to buy your product, and then you can serve your ad directly to that audience. I want to show you a few things that you can do differently in Facebook Audience Insights to find the optimal audience for your ad. Using the dog nail trimmers, let’s create a Facebook ad audience that will make us money.
Here we are in Facebook Audience Insights, you can manage the demographics of your potential audience on the left and then you see all kinds of data about that audience on the right.
The first thing a lot of dropshippers will do is determine what country they want to target. Now, a lot of people will choose the United States and the US is a huge ecommerce market, with a lot of shoppers. But because of that, there’s a lot of competition that will drive up the price to market to the US, so I actually recommend for other countries to start with, especially if you wanna save some money while still making sales those countries are Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom. So another hack for Facebook ads for beginners is choose a country that isn't too competitive in your particular niche so your cost per click isn't too expensive.
For the sake of this example, I’m going to look at Australia, I’ll type in Australia first and I’ll leave the rest broad. I don’t wanna make any assumptions about my audience because I want Facebook to figure out for me, who in a broad audience is most likely to buy my dog nail clippers. I do want to type in a relevant interest. And I think anyone interested in dog nail clippers is probably interested in dog grooming to some extent. So I’ll go ahead and click that. Now, from there, what I want to actually do is go to page likes. I want to find out what pages and audience that is interested in dog grooming in Australia, tends to like.
Once I click on the “page likes” tabs I’ll scroll down here and what I’m looking for is the affinity score. There’s no exact number I’m looking for. But the higher the better and something over 700X is usually pretty good. The affinity score indicates how much this audience is likely to like this page compared to others on Facebook. And I want people who are super fans of these pages because I want to target them when I’m creating my ad. Let me show you how I’ll use those pages in the ads creator.
So here in the ads creator. First, I will choose to target Australia. I’ll make sure not everyone in this location, but people who live in this location. I’ll keep the other parameters broad, but for interests, this is where I wanna type the pages that I surfaced in the Audience Insights tool.
So I’ll start with “PETstock” and just make sure to spell it as it is here, so no space between “pet” and “stock”. Perfect. Now, I’m targeting 100,000 people, that’s just a little bit less than I would prefer for Australia. For Australia, I wanna target between 500,000 and a million people for a completely new Facebook ad. So I want to add another interest. I wanna tell Facebook to target people who like pet stock or another interest and I’ll get that other interest from Audience Insights. So, “Pet Circle” and maybe “Custom Pet Collars”.
So I typed in “Pet Circle” and I see that actually there are no results, this isn’t unusual. Some pages are listed as interests as a targeting option and some aren’t and that’s why it’s great to have this long list of page likes over here in the Audience Insights tool. So instead, I’ll try “Petbarn” one word. There we go, and I’m almost there, but I might add, one more. How about… How about “Dr. Chris Brown”? If you’re not sure what some of these pages are and you wanna make sure to target relevant pages you can click into them and see what they lead to.
So here I see Dr. Chris Brown is a popular wildlife rescuer. Now I’m at 830,000 people and this is great, but I actually want to add an interest to make sure I’m only targeting voracious shoppers. And that will help increase the chances of me getting conversions from this fresh Facebook ad. So I want to narrow the audience so someone can like any of these pages. But they must also match either “online shopping” or “engaged shopper”. If I choose either of these. I’m essentially narrowing my interests to people who really, really love to buy online and that is exactly who I want to target.
This gets me to two 10,000, a little low. So let me try “online shopping”. “Online shopping”. Here I see online shopping and I wanna make sure to choose “interests”, not “employers”, so “interests” there. And now we’re at 770,000, which is within the 500k to 1 million audience size that we’re going for.
This would be a great audience to try targeting those dog nail trimmers too. Of course, before I launch that ad, I want to figure out one really important thing in advance. How much am I willing to spend?
Set Budget Using Your Product Price
In other words, how do I set the right budget for a Facebook ad so that I make sales without losing too much money in the process? And I’m gonna be real with you. When you’re running Facebook ads, your ultimate goal is to make sales. I’ve tried to tell you everything I know about how to get Facebook sales ASAP. But if you’re new to dropshipping, you might not get sales on your first try.
This stuff takes patience. On the one hand, it’s okay if you don’t get immediate sales, you’ll still get data about how your ad performed and what you can do to optimize it. But on the other hand, don’t spend money on a losing ad, one key difference between beginner, and experienced/six-figure dropshippers is that the six-figure dropshippers know when to kill an ad and try another audience, video ad, or even another product.
After speaking to successful dropshippers I found a rule that helps you determine when to stop spending money on Facebook ads: Take the price of your product, that is the price that you’re selling it at and multiply it by three. That should be the cap for testing your product on Facebook.
For example, let’s say I sell the dog nail trimmer for $19.99. If I multiply that by three then I have $60 that I should budget to advertise it on Facebook. If I still haven’t made a sale after I spent $60, something probably has to change; either my ad, my audience, or the product just isn’t optimized to make money on Facebook. And that’s not a failure that happens to pro entrepreneurs every single day. That’s just data. And you’ve got to make the decision to learn from it and move on quickly. If you follow the tactics in this Facebook ads for beginners tutorial, and you make a sale, then congratulations, you’ve proven that you could make money on Facebook and you could be on your way to a winning product.
Now, I’d love to hear from you, what are your tips for making money with Facebook ads? Do you disagree with any of my tactics for Facebook ads for beginners? Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion. Until next time, learn often, market better and sell more.