Types of Facebook Ads to grow your website

Running ads on Facebook is by far one of the best ways to achieve some business goals, and that’s why you need to know all the types of Facebook ads. Understanding the objective behind Facebook ad types is key to run successful ad campaigns.

Everything you need to do like create, edit or check your ad stats you’ll find it inside your Ads Manager.

To open your Ads Manager, click directly in the facing down arrow located at the top right on Facebook. A drop down menu will appear showing you several options, click on “Create Ad” or “Manage Ads”, both will lead you to your Ads Manager.

When you click on “Create Ad” you’ll be shown all the types of Facebook ads by objective.

Facebook shows first a list of objectives that help people to choose the correct ad type that matches a specific business or personal goals.

No matter what type of ad you choose, you’ll always be asked to set a Facebook Custom Audience.

Audience

In this part you can define who you want to see your ads setting different aspects like:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Detailed Targeting
• Connection Type

Here you can learn How to create a Facebook Custom Audience.

You’ll find on the right sidebar the “Audience Definition” panel where you can see a resume of your audience details. At the end it shows you the “Potential Reach” of your audience, which is the number of people that falls in your audience definition.

The “Estimated Daily Reach” is the amount of people that your ad will reach, approximately, according to Facebook calculations depending on your daily budget, which you can edit below.

Placements

In this section you’ll be able to set where you would like your ads to appear on Facebook and even on Instagram. Some Facebook ad types have less placements available.

You can also choose to show your ads in specific mobile devices like Android or iOS Devices.

Budget & Schedule

In this section you can define how much you would like to spend and when you would like your ads to appear.

You can set a Daily Budget or a LifeTime Budget and you can Schedule your ads to run continuously or you can set a time range setting a start and end date.

When you are done will your ad settings, click on “Continue” at the bottom right.

Type of Facebook Ads

Each of all Facebook ad types is designed to reach a specific objective. Depending on your business goals, you should test some of the types of Facebook ads available to understand which works better for you.

Objectives of Facebook Ad Types

• Clicks to Website: Drive traffic to a specific website.
• Website Conversions: Designed to increase specific conversions. You’ll need to create a conversion pixel and add it to your website to make this ad work.
• Page Post Engagement: This allows you to boost specific posts (text, pictures, video).
• Page Likes: Get targeted Facebook fans to your fanpage.
• App Installs: Get installs of an app.
• App Engagement: Increase engagement in an app.
• Offer Claims: Create offers for people to redeem in your store.
• Local Awareness: Reach people near your business.
• Event Responses: Get attendants at an event.
• Product Catalog Promotion: Show products from a product catalog based on a target audience.
• Brand Awareness: Reach people more likely to engage with a brand.
• Lead Generation: Get leads for your business.
• Video Views: Get more views to a video.

Facebook ads look slightly different depending on the objective or ad type. However, all Facebook ad types have a basic design structure that helps advertisers to reach their goals.

The Mobile News Feed Ad shows almost the same information, the text below the picture shows less words due to the width and the “Call to Action” button.

Note: There is a new guideline for the amount of text in your image, basically the more text the less exposure your ad will get.  You can check the text percentage with the Text Overlay Tool.

Let’s dig into all the types of Facebook ads to understand their function.

Clicks to Website

This ad works as a link to a specific URL. The picture and the text below are clickable even if you add a call to action button.

This ad is the best choice if you are seeking to get traffic from a target market on Facebook to a specific URL, for example your new blog post.

Website Conversions

This ad also works as a link to a specific web page, but it is designed to work together with the “Facebook Pixel” which measures the leads that your ad gets.

The “Facebook Pixel” is a code that you must add to your own website to make it work.  The Facebook pixel can be used for three main functions:

1. Building Custom Audiences from your website for remarketing.
2. Optimizing ads for conversions.
3. Tracking conversions and attributing them back to your ads.

When you track conversions you can identify specific actions done by the people that clicked on your ad and entered in your website. There are 9 specific actions called “standard events” that you can actually measure:

1. View Content
2. Search
3. Add to Cart
4. Add to wishlist
5. Initiate Checkout
6. Add payment Info
7. Make Purchase
8. Lead
9. Complete Registration

The Facebook pixel helps you to understand what actions are made by the people that clicked your ad and navigated inside your website.

You can measure how much people that entered your website from Facebook actually bought, or even started the purchase process but left it before buying.

Both types of Facebook ads, “Clicks to Website” and “Website Conversions” look the same in appearance but there are 3 different ad formats:

• Facebook Links
• Facebook Carousel
• Facebook Canvas

Design Requirements:

• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px or larger.
• Headline: Max 25 characters
• Link Description: Max 30 characters

The Facebook Carousel is useful to show a product catalog, because you can showcase from 3 to 5 images in a slideshow like this:

You can actually insert different link to each image, which will take people to the page they are interested to see.

Design Requirements:

• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 600 x 600 px or larger.
• Headline: Max 40 characters
• Link Description: Max 20 characters

Page per Post Engagement

Basically, when you post something in your timeline like a photo, a video or text and you want more people reach your post, you can boost your post and reach not only your Facebook followers, you can actually reach a specific audience outside your Fanpage in order to get more organic page likes.

Design Requirements:

• Recommended Text for photos and video: 90 characters
• Recommended only for Text posts: 500 characters
• Recommended News Feed Image Size: 1200 x 900 px or larger.
• Recommended News Feed Image Size: 254 x 133 px or larger.

Page Likes

When you want to increase your Facebook followers, running Page Likes Ads is by far the best way to do it. ¿Why? Because you choose who to show your ad and you pay for every fan you get, instead of waiting to be followed for people you don’t know anything about them. Here’s a deep guide on How to get likes on Facebook Page.

Design Requirements:

• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 444 px or larger.
• Headline: Max 25 characters

The Page Likes Ad looks like this:

App Installs

With App Installs you can promote an image or a video of your app in order to get more installs. This is by far the best way to promote your app because you can get the people you want to install your app fast. When someone taps your ad, they’ll go right to your app store landing page.

Mobile and Desktop App Installs Design Requirements:

• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

The Mobile App Installs Ad looks like this:

App Engagement

App Engagement Ads works as a way to promote your app with your app users or people that have installed your app in the past. This way you can show them new releases within your app and take them to specific areas of your app when they click your ad. If some of your users don’t have your app installed, they’ll be asked to install the app.

You can choose from different Call to action buttons to match your goal. e.g Use App, Open Link, Shop Now, etc.

Mobile and Desktop App Engagement Design Requirements:

• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

Note: There is a new guideline for the amount of text in your image, basically the more text the less exposure your ad will get.  You can check the text percentage with the Text Overlay Tool.

The App Engagement Mobile version looks like this:

Offer Claims

With Offer Claims a brand or business can offer their customer special discounts or offers. It is an ad designed to catch your fans attention by offering a good deal directly on

Facebook.  You’ll be able to run your offer as long as you want or how many people can claim it. Remember that you are always able to reach the people you want when you target your ads to a specific Facebook Custom Audience. This ad is very useful for local businesses that show their nearby customer special offers.

Design Requirements:

• Offer title: 25 characters
• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

Local Awareness

This is among all the types of Facebook ads the one that is designed for Local Businesses. With Local Awareness you can reach people near your business. This is great if you want to reach people living nearby or people that visits the area where your business is located. When you create an ad, you’ll be asked to give your business address and the distance around your business which defines the area you want to reach. You can even add a “Get Directions” button to help people find your business.

Design Requirements:

• Headline: 25 characters
• Text: Max 90 characters
• Newsfeed Description: 30 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

Local Awareness ads are shown like this:

Event Responses

The Event Responses Ad is a great way to reach more people and get them to respond your event. Sometimes people doesn’t know about an event that they would have been interested to go, this way you can select the location, age, gender, and interests of people that you think they’ll be interested to assist. When someone clicks your ad, it will automatically add your event to their Facebook Calendar which is great because it has reminders of incoming events.

Design Requirements:

• Headline: 25 characters
• Text: Max 90 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

The Event Responses Ad looks like this:

Brand Awareness

A Brand Awareness Ad is a new way to show your brand to the people you want to be connected with. The objective of this ad is to make people aware of your brand showing them an ad with a catchy image with a link to your website and a “Call to Action Button” to like your page and to learn more about your website.

This is one of the Facebook ad types that allows you to show an image, a video or even a carousel.

Design Requirements:

• Headline: 25 characters
• Text: Max 90 characters
• Link Description: 30 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

Brand Awareness Ads are shown this way:

Lead Generation

A Lead Ad is an ad that when someone clicks on it, it is shown a form within Facebook. This forms encourage people to sign up for newsletters, offers, events, etc.

It helps advertisers to reach their goals faster because when someone clicks on a Lead Ad, it opens a form that is automatically filled with the contact information that the user already provided on Facebook.  This way, the sign up process is very fast for those who are willing to sign up.

You can customize your form as you want asking for different information like gender, address, phone number, date of birth and much more options.

Design Requirements:

• Headline: 25 characters
• Text: Max 90 characters
• Link Description: 30 characters
• Recommended Image Size: 1200 x 628 px

A Lead Ad looks like this:

Video Views

The Video Views Ad is the best way to promote a video of your business or brand. This ad is linked to your fanpage, that’s why a “Call to Action” button to like your page shows at the top right of your ad.

You’ll be able to select the thumbnail of your video for your ad.

You can check the video requirements here.

The Video Views Ad will be shown like this:

Conclusions

A few years ago there were just a couple type of Facebook ads but nowadays you can create a lot of ad sets based on different objectives and different ad sizes. It’s up to you to test which ads convert better or lead to better results.