Secret 8: Facebook & Instagram Ads

Why does it have to be so complicated?

I speak with hundreds of church leaders every year, and they all say the same thing. It’s some version of “Ross, I know we need to do a better job with ads on social media and Google and all that…but we really don’t know how to do it.” I am glad they want to be sure it is done right, and I am always happy to help, because the world of Facebook and Instagram ads is a great way to lose money if you don’t know what you are doing.

When I speak to the social media manager at a church about paid ads, most people tell me that they boost posts for their ads. Some people have even set up some custom audiences and use the actual Facebook Business Manager tools. This is a great start! And that might be as far as you have gotten, but we are going to go deeper than that. When you are first starting out with paid ads on social media, it is intimidating. Trying to figure out the structure will take some time. The interface is not very user friendly, and the terms and layout are all new. It’s a challenge at first, to say the least, but if it were easy, then everyone would be a great marketer. If you will invest the time and energy to really learn Facebook and Instagram ads, you will not regret it. Slow down and read this article carefully, because this is the single most effective marketing tool for reaching new people that currently exists. As the owner of a christian marketing company, I promise you this; it is worth the effort of learning how to use social media ads. 

Our christian marketing agency has had years of hands-on practice figuring out what the perfect system is for paid ads for churches. We have designed thousands of church marketing funnels, so we have had the chance to experiment on many different types of ad strategies. With this experience, we have learned the exact system that produces results with Facebook and Instagram ads. Take your time, and after you are done reading this article, put it into practice right away while the information is fresh.

When our christian marketing company first started working with paid ads, it was surprising how different it was from managing the content on social media. Paid ads and creative social posts are much more different than they are alike. In our christian marketing agency, I would do everything I could to teach our social media content managers about paid ads. It was brutal. As much as they wanted to learn, paid ads use a totally different part of the brain, and it is hard to get into that mode. Eventually our content creators became great at putting together ads, it just took some stretching and learning. Now, we’ve adapted. We have separate staff members who are completely responsible for paid ads and don’t manage the creative content at all. It works so much better. It is hard for creative brains to shift over to data and analytical thinking at the same time. Most people are surprised by this contrast. It seems normal that people who specialize in Facebook and Instagram content would automatically be able to run ads on the same platform. They totally can, but it will take hard work. 

If you are ready to take the challenge, this article is for you. With a little bit of grit and the instructions laid out in this blog, you will finally understand paid ads and use them to reach new people. This chapter will give you in-depth instruction on all the tools at your disposal with Facebook and Instagram paid ads. There are likely more than you knew existed.

Use these new skills to build your funnel and reach new people like you never have before.

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Set Your Budget.

How much money should we spend on social media ads?

Most churches are not chomping at the bit to spend money on marketing. In fact, a lack of budget is the primary reason people don’t run ad campaigns. I get it. But marketing is a must, and once you start seeing steady growth with your funnel, you will realize that it was worth the investment.

But how much should you be spending? Most people aren’t thinking the right way about a marketing budget. When I have the budget talk with church leaders, most of the time they tell me a figure like, “We want to spend $700 for our VBS this year,” or something like that. They give me a flat figure for that specific event. That is a good start. Dedicating a separate marketing budget for special events is important, but that isn’t how the funnel works. The funnel is ongoing and never stops. You need to set aside a recurring monthly budget for your funnel marketing. It is not a one-time figure; it is ongoing. Your funnel budget is a dedicated amount that you spend every single month. 

Now that we’ve got that settled, how much should you spend each month? I fully understand that every church has different budget limitations, so these figures are suggestions based on the marketing campaigns we have set up for hundreds of churches of various sizes. Below is a list of suggested monthly advertising budgets broken down by church size:

$300/month: 0-100 member church

$500/month: 100-500 member church

$750/month: 500-1,000 member church

$1,500/month: 1,000-1,500 member church

$2,000/month: 1,500+ member church

Some of you just lost your mind reading those numbers. You think I’m nuts! I get that. So, for those of you who just fell out of your chairs, please stay with me. Some of you reading this book might actually be spending more than these amounts already, and you think I’m under budget. But if your ads are done according to the funnel systems laid out in this book, you will be able to stay right in this budget range and receive great results. So there, I just saved you money! But whether you think this budget is too much or not enough, here is the news that is really going to make some of you mad at me—and feel free to throw this book against the wall after you read this—this budget is only for social media ads.

This does not include Google Ads. Google Ads are a part of the top of the funnel strategy, and we will be diving more into that in a different post.

Once you have accepted the monthly budget, you need to make sure that you spread it correctly between the top and middle of the funnel. The top of your funnel should receive 80% of your budget. The remaining 20% is dedicated for retargeting ads in the middle of the funnel. You don’t need to spend nearly as much on the middle of your funnel, because there will be significantly fewer people in your middle of the funnel audience. Your top of the funnel audience will have over 200,000 people, and the middle will have fewer than 5,000 people. Fewer people in the middle means less ad spend for that audience.

Remember that the middle of your funnel is only for retargeting ads for people who have already engaged with you at the top of the funnel level. 

It gets real once you start spending dollars! Don’t worry though, it’s all going to be worth it!

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10 Terms You Have to Know

How am I ever going to learn what all these settings mean?

Before you can dive deep into your first ad, you first have to learn the terms. There are so many more terms and options with Facebook ads that we could explore, but the ones we discuss here are the most important ones to know. We will do a brief overview of these terms, then we will explore them more in depth when we go through the process step by step.

1. Boosted Posts vs. Traditional Ads

When people tell our christian marketing agency that they run Facebook or Instagram ads for their church, 90% of the time that means that they just hit “boost post” on one of their posts. I’m always a supporter of running ads, but this is not how you should do it anymore. The “boost post” feature has very limited options compared to traditional ads. When you learn to set up your ads funnel within Facebook Business Manager, you will be able to have way more control over your ads, such as custom audiences and ad placement, all of which we will discuss more later. This control will allow you to spend your marketing dollars more wisely, so traditional ads are the way to go.

Pro Tip – From now on, when you run ads on Instagram or Facebook you should only use Facebook Business Manager. This will give you much more control of your ads, and you can also give multiple team members access to your ads for collaboration purposes.

2. Facebook Business Manager

Most organizations have multiple people who need to access your page, and Facebook Business Manager is a centralized place for your whole team to administrate your marketing activity. It is a place for businesses to run all aspects of their professional Instagram and Facebook pages. If you have not yet opened a Facebook Business Manager account, you will need to do so before proceeding with this article. Otherwise the rest of this article won’t make sense. Each step-by-step instruction that I give you in this article references the process for managing ads on Facebook Business Manager. 

Pro Tip – To set up your Facebook Business Manager account for the first time, go to business.facebook.com and connect your account there. Take a few moments and familiarize yourself with the different buttons and settings on the dashboard. If this is your first time, it will seem like a whole new world, but don’t get stressed and pull your hair out. You will get used to it very quickly. This dashboard is where you will do all of your ad management, conversions, tracking…everything happens through Facebook Business Manager.

3. Campaigns and Ad Sets

Now that you have set up your Business Manager account, it’s time to create your first ad! Nice work!

Soon I’ll walk you through the step-by-step process for launching a new ad. For now, let’s start by learning about campaigns and ad sets. Facebook (and every other pay per click medium that I know of) operates by having you organize your ads within campaigns and ad sets. It is way easier to manage multiple ad versions when they are grouped this way. 

You can imagine a campaign being like a folder on your computer. Inside that folder you will have at least one or two additional folders. Maybe on your desktop you have a folder called “Photos.” And inside that folder you have a folder that says “Family Pics,” and then another one that says “Vacation Pics,” etc. This is how it works with Facebook ads. Your main folder is the campaign, and inside the campaign are subfolders that are called ad sets. Inside each of those ad set folders are your actual ads. 

Here is a great example. Pretend that you are running an ad to invite people to an upcoming worship event at your church. You might call this campaign “Worship Night Promotion.” Inside of this Worship Night Promotion campaign, you have two different ad sets. Multiple ad sets allow you to have a different group of ads for different locations. In our example, one ad set is called “Instagram Worship Night Ads” and the other is called “Facebook Worship Night Ads.” Inside each of those ad sets are the different ads for your event. It really is just an organization system. Ad sets are simply what they sound like—a “set” or group of ads. 

Pro Tip – Arranging your audience, budget, and schedule are usually done in the ad set settings. 

4. Campaign Objectives

Once you have wrapped your mind around campaigns and ad sets, it’s time to set your campaign objective. Selecting the right campaign objective is one of the most important parts of the Instagram and Facebook ad creation process. Essentially, the campaign objective is the goal for the ad. Is the goal to get more Likes on Facebook? Is the goal of the ad to get people to watch a certain video? How about getting people to visit your website, is that the goal? These are all options for types of campaign objectives. 

Pro Tip – Why does this matter so much? It’s because the settings and options for your ad are totally different depending on what your campaign objective is. The best campaign objective to use for the top of the funnel is called “Engagement,” because it promotes interaction with your content. The best campaign objective to use for your middle of the funnel is “Conversion,” because it allows you to track when someone takes action on your website or ads.

5. Custom Audiences

The people to whom your ads are shown are called your audience. Once you create an audience for your ads, you can save it to your list of custom audiences. This is an important step because you want to always focus on the right people with your ads, and saving a custom audience saves you work in the long run.

You can set up an audience based on people’s location, age, gender, and online behaviors. If we are honest, it can get downright creepy how much data Facebook has on people. You can even select your audience by their income, or how old their kids are, or what kind of music they listen to. The options are endless. 

Pro Tip – When setting up a top of the funnel audience, you may not want to select too many options in the Detailed Targeting section. If you add too many audience filters, you will eliminate thousands of people from seeing your ads.

6. Placements

There are over thirty different options for where your ads can be shown. You can run an ad to be shown on the side of the Facebook page or as a normal post in your feed. You could even place it as an ad in the Instagram stories. This setting is called the placement setting. By default, Facebook has the placement set to “Automatic Placements,” which I strongly do not recommend using. Never use the Automatic Placements setting for an ad. It will show your ad in all the wrong places. 

Pro Tip – Have one ad set dedicated only to Facebook news feed and story placements, and have a separate ad set dedicated to Instagram news feed and story placements. Don’t let there be any placements other than news feed or stories. And always separate the Facebook ads from the Instagram ads. This way you can tailor the image size and copy to fit Facebook or Instagram better. 

7. Dark Post Ads

When people boost a post, they are simply taking one of the posts on their feed and making more people see it. But what happens when you want to run an ad, but you don’t want it to be on your main Instagram or Facebook feed? For this, we use dark posts. These are ads that people in the target audience see like they would any other post but they don’t actually appear on the main feed of the church’s Facebook or Instagram page. The majority of the ads that our christian marketing agency runs for churches are not actually posts on the main feed, but they are just dark post ads. 

Pro Tip – Most of the ads that you run in phase two of your funnel should be dark posts, because they are clear calls to action. With the funnel, you want to only send your ask ads to specific people who have already engaged with the top of the funnel ads. That’s why it is important to use dark posts, so only the right people see those ads.

8. Pixel

The way that Facebook ads track when someone visits your website is with a tool called the Facebook pixel. This is a short snippet of web code that you install into your website, which notes when someone has visited your site from your social media. 

Pro Tip – Why do we need to set up this pixel? For the funnel to work, we need to show middle of the funnel ads to people who first checked out your website. If someone visits your website with the pixel code installed, they will instantly be added to your retargeting audience. They could literally be on your church’s website, and then see your middle of the funnel ads within minutes. That’s why this is important.

9. Conversions

When your Facebook or Instagram funnel works, you get a conversion. Remember, we’re not talking about someone finding Jesus. It is a marketing term for when someone takes an action on your website. If I was selling T-shirts on my website, a conversion would be when someone completes a purchase online. You set up your conversions in Business Manager for whatever actions you are wanting people to take at the completion of your funnel.

Pro Tip – How does this work for your church? It’s all about the Plan Your Visit page in your funnel. Set it up so people are redirected to a Thank You page when they fill out the Plan Your Visit form on your site. Make that Thank You page a conversion event on Facebook Ads Manager. Now when you run a middle of the funnel retargeting ad and someone completes the process, you will see that you have had a conversion. It really isn’t that complicated once you set it up for the first time, and you will have real numbers to work with to see how your ads are preforming.

10. Impressions, Reach, and Frequency

If you are a data junky like me, you will love to analyze your ads, and Facebook Business Manager shows you incredible data on their performances. Once an ad has been running for a while, open your Ads Manager and check out the stats. Here you can analyze the behavior and results of each of your ads. The following terms are important to know when analyzing your ads:

Impressions refers to how many times your ad has been shown to anyone. Even if one person sees your ad five times in one day, that still counts as five impressions. 

Reach refers to how many people have seen your ad. So if one person sees your ad five times in one day, that only counts as one person reached. 

Frequency is the average number of times that one person is seeing your ad. So if your ad is being shown to a person frequently, you will see a frequency of five or six or even higher. If your ad is not being shown very often, you will have a frequency around one. 

Pro Tip – When it comes to retargeting ads in the middle of your funnel, you want people to see your ads no more than seven times total. After they have seen it more than seven times, it starts to lose its effectiveness. However, people usually don’t respond to an ad until they have seen it at least five to seven times, so this is the sweet spot you want to reach for.

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Step-By-Step Training

Can someone please walk me through this the first time?

Of course I’ll walk you through it! In this section, I’m going to take you on a step-by-step journey to set up your ad campaigns. For this to make sense, you are going to need to be in front of your desktop computer.

If you aren’t ready for this, go ahead and skip this section and come back to it later.

Utilizing your Facebook and Instagram marketing funnel isn’t hard, except when setting it up for the first time. But once you get the hang of it, and you understand the terms and structure, you will feel much more comfortable with the process. Eventually you will be able to set up an ad campaign in just thirty minutes or less.

But like anything new, sometimes the first few run-throughs can be a bit intimidating. No worries though, because I am going to walk you through every step of the process. If you really want to understand this, follow along and actually set up an ad campaign as you read. This way you will really learn it. 

In this training, I am going to assume that you have already set up your Facebook Business Manager account, including setting up your ad account. All of these instructions are referencing the process within Facebook Business Manager, not through a personal ads manager. Also keep in mind that the exact names of buttons and links may have changed slightly by the time you read this article. Use your best judgment along the way.

Here we go!

Step 1 – Set up your Top of the Funnel Campaign.

Setting up your campaign for the top of the funnel is where you should start. In Facebook Business Manager, click over to Ads Manager. Once you are there, hit the button that says Create, or Create Ad. If given the option, choose to create a Complete Campaign and not a Campaign Shell. This opens the window where you choose what your Campaign Objective is. If you don’t see an image that looks like the image below, please switch to Guided Creation.

Within the Consideration column, select Engagement. Then scroll down on that same page and make sure the Post Engagement tab is selected. Make sure the toggle button for Create Split Test or A/B Test is toggled to off. Then turn on the toggle button for Campaign Budget Optimization. Campaign budget optimization means that you choose the total budget for this campaign, instead of choosing the budget separately for each ad set.

It is just easier this way. 

Go ahead and enter your budget. You will have the option to set it as a Daily Budget or a Lifetime Budget. For this ad, let’s do a Daily Budget. This means that there is no start/end date to the campaign. It is just an ongoing campaign that spends your budget each day. Don’t worry, you can turn the campaign off later or change the budget amounts if you ever want to. Enter the amount that you want to spend each day, depending on what your marketing budget is.

Remember, this is the top of the funnel campaign. Our suggestion is to spend 80% of your marketing budget on this campaign. Once you have entered your budget, keep the Campaign Bid Strategy set to Lowest Cost. Set the Campaign Name to “Top of the Funnel Outreach Ads” and then hit Continue. 

Step 2 – Create your Ad Set.

The Ad Set page is where we set up our audiences and placements. Now that you are on the Ad Set page, step one is to name this first Ad Set. You are going to be setting up two different Ad Sets. One is only for Facebook ads, and the other is just for Instagram. For now let’s go through the process for the Facebook Ad Sets.

Later you can go back to set up the Instagram Ad Group by following the same steps, only changing it to Instagram. 

On the Ad Sets page, put in the title “Facebook Top of the Funnel Ads.” Then the first section is where you set up your Audience. Select Create New Audience, and we will set up your main top of the funnel audience. 

In the Locations section, click Edit and change the option from “Everyone in this location” to “People living in this location.” Deselect all preset location options, and an interactive map will appear. Above the map, type in the physical address of your church. Change the radius to be a ten-mile radius. Remember, the purpose of this tutorial is for you to learn the steps. Later you can go tweak these settings to best fit your church.

In the Age section, change it to 18 – 55. Based on our experience, this age range has proven most effective in the top of the funnel. Select All for the genders, and set English as your primary language. You may have to click More Options in order to select your language. Again, you can go back and change these to fit your church later. 

Leave the Detailed Targeting section blank. In the top of the funnel, we don’t want to filter people based on their interests or demographics. We want to reach everyone in our area. Under the Connections section, change the drop down from “Add Connection Type” to be “Friends of people who like your Page.” Go ahead and set it to your church’s Facebook page. This is our audience that focuses in on people who are already friends of someone who Likes your page on Facebook. This is an awesome audience for the top of the funnel, because the people are already connected to the church through a friend.

See the image below and make sure your settings look the same.

There is a button below the Connections section that says Save This Audience. Hit that button, and title the audience “Friends of Friends Top of Funnel.” The next time you come back to set up a new Facebook ad set, you will not have to recreate this audience, because it will now be an option as a Saved Audience. When you are setting up your Instagram ad set, skip the step where you add the connections type. Some people don’t even have a Facebook page, and for Instagram ads you can simply target everyone in that ten-mile radius.

Now that you have set up your top of the funnel audience, the next step is to set your placements. Remember that we are setting up your Facebook ad set, so we only want these ads to be shown in Facebook. Under the Placements section, it will by default be selected to Automatic Placements, and it will even say that this is the recommended setting. That is a terrible recommendation, because this is the worst thing you could do for your ads.

Change this setting to Manual Placements. A new drop-down menu will appear with additional placement options. The first option you have is Devices, which you should keep set at All Devices. This is where you can select if your ads are to be shown on a desktop only or a mobile phone only.

For this campaign, let’s keep them at both. 

The next section is Platforms. All the platforms will already be selected by default, but you need to change that. Remove all of the selections except for Facebook. Scroll a little lower, and you will see even more options for the placements within Facebook. There are a lot of options, and by default all of the ones related to Facebook will be selected. Remove every selection except for Facebook News Feed. No other options or categories should be selected. This is the only placement that will show your ad in a user’s news feed and allow them to interact with it like they would any other post.

See the below image and make sure your settings are the same.

Great job! You have now successfully set up your first ad set. Scroll down on this page and you will see additional settings for specific operating systems and Ad Delivery Optimization. You can just leave these on their default settings. On the bottom of the page go ahead and hit Continue.

Step 3 – Setting up the Ad

This next page is where you set up your ad. The words, button, and image(s) for the ad are all set up here. In the future, you will add a new ad version every week or two right here in this same ad set. You don’t have to re-create the campaign or the ad sets each time. 

The first thing to do on this page is title your ad. This first one will be a very basic but proven and effective ad. Title this ad “We Love Local People.” This title will make more sense in a moment, so just hang with me. Below the title area, it will ask you to select your Facebook page, so select your church’s page. If your Facebook page is not listed as an option here, then you need to go back to your Facebook Business Manager and add your church’s Facebook page to your account.

As long as you are an admin, you can add it automatically.

Next we get to make the ad. You will see options to Use Existing Post, Create Ad, or Use Mockup. We are going to do this post as a dark post, so choose the option that says Create Ad. Remember, posts that are only ads and not shown on your main feed are known as “dark posts.”

Next you will see options for what kind of image or video layout you want to use. Select the option for just a Single Image or Video. Then there is a button that says Add Media, and this is where you are going to upload a photo to use in this ad. For this ad, we are wanting to feature a really beautiful photo of your local area. Even better would be to find a photo of a really happy person in a recognizable location in your local area. Keep in mind that you will need to make sure you have adequate permissions to use any photos, or go take your own if you want. 

Another rule you need to know is that Facebook does not like it when there is text in the videos or photos that you use in ads. If you are going to use a photo that has text on it, it has to be very small or Facebook will tell you that the ad will not work. 

Once you have found a photo that is beautiful and has some sort of local landmark in it, use the Add Media button and upload it directly to Facebook. The ideal image size for Facebook is 1,200 x 630 pixels, although this changes frequently with Facebook. A simple Google search for “perfect Facebook image size” will tell you exactly what size of image to use.

When you get to your Instagram version of this ad, you will want to use an image that is 1080 x 1080 pixels. Using these exact image sizes will help make your ad seem organic in the feed for users, and you will get much higher engagement. 

When you have uploaded your image, you will see a text box that says Primary Text. This is where you write the main copy (words) for your ad. For this ad, type this copy in: 

“We love the people of (enter your city name here) so much! We are thankful for being a part of this great community. Love you all!” 

This type of verbiage probably seems odd to write as an ad. But remember the strategy here. This is a top of the funnel ad. A first impression. Our only goal in the top of the funnel is to build a positive association with the church brand. The middle of the funnel ad will be a more traditional ad that invites people to visit your church, but only after they have seen an ad like the one in this example.

Now that you have added the copy and the image, the next step is to add the call to action. By default, the call to action will be set to No Button. Change this option to Learn More, and type in your church’s URL.

Check out this image and make sure yours looks similar.