Plan your Facebook Ads like a pro: Free Facebook campaign planning worksheet for social media managers

We’ve talked before about the things that you need to consider before you start a Facebook ad campaign. This worksheet is going to take what you have (campaign goals, budgets, creative, etc.) and help you plan your execution.

Before we dive in, go ahead and grab a copy of the free Facebook Ad campaign planning worksheet. Shoutout to Krystal Hobbs of Reflective Marketing for collaborating on this worksheet and sharing her expert tips and tricks!

Okay, have the worksheet ready? Let's get started!

What is a Facebook Ad campaign planning worksheet?

You can use this as a guide, a roadmap to plan your campaigns, and as a checklist to ensure that you’ve considered everything before you get started. These are things that someone experienced with Facebook Ads may be able to do in their heads but it doesn’t hurt to have it laid out visually in front of you, especially if you’re just getting started.

Make the most of your Facebook Ad campaign planning worksheet

As always, we're breaking this thing down step by step.

1. Map out your campaign

The campaign level is the foundation on which everything else is built, so it’s important that you have a clear vision and goal for what you want to achieve with your ad campaign. Facebook wants your campaigns to do as well as possible, so they’ll optimize your campaigns in order to help you achieve your goals.

For example, if you want to drive traffic to your website but also drive leads for your business, you’ll want to make two separate campaigns.

Once you’ve decided on your advertising budget, you have to decide how to allocate it. You can choose for Facebook to charge you based on the overall amount you spend or the cost of each result you get from the ads.

Facebook allows you to set limits so that you don’t exceed your budget while still giving them the freedom to place your ads as strategically as possible.

2. Map out your ad sets

Your ad sets are where you define your audience; geographic location, demographics, interests, behaviours. You can create two different sets of ads and deliver them to two completely unique audiences under the same campaign in order to track and compare how your audiences respond. You can use this information to change how you spend your ad budget and target your ads in the future.

As we’ve talked about previously, you may have one product or service that may appeal to different audiences for different reasons. Whether you’re selling cars or kitchen supplies, different things appeal to different people for different reasons. You may want to target the same product at a woman to buy for herself or at a husband to buy for his wife. Different ads, different audiences, different creative, but the same campaign.

3. Map out your ad creatives

You can cycle ad sets and gauge long-term cost per acquisition (CPA) and conversion rates. You can show the same audience different variations of the same ad and assess which provides the best conversion rates and lowest costs. Think of it like A/B testing. After some time passes, you can assess which ads are doing well and you can reallocate your budget to push those.

4. Make sure your sales funnel flows

Users who have no previous interaction with your brand are considered a “cold” audience. Once they convert (click, download, or buy) from one of your previous ads, they become a “warm” or “custom” audience, and you can use ads to target them using different campaigns and creative. They won’t see the same ads as they did before and you can instead start to target ads to get them to convert again with some other offer, service, or product.

For example, if a user downloads a free ebook that you’re promoting, you can serve them follow-up ads where the messaging is relevant to the first action they took.

Just as before, you have two options when doing this. You can create multiple campaigns consisting of a single promotion each, or you can create an umbrella campaign and show a variety of promotions to each audience.

Summary

Everyone hates asking for directions but sometimes having a little guidance will mean not wasting time or other resources. We developed this Facebook Campaign Planning Worksheet (with our friends at Reflective Marketing) to serve as a guide to help you plan out your campaigns before you get started down the wrong path.

For a bit more info on this worksheet, and a comprehensive look at Facebook Ads in general, check out our TWO webinars with Krystal Hobbs of Reflective Marketing. These webinars are oldies but goodies:

• ‍Webinar 1: August 28, 2019
• ‍Webinar 2: October 30, 2019

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