Facebook Ads Crash Course Guide

In addition to this Ads Manager walkthrough below, I wanted to provide additional blog posts that will help you better understand some of the most important parts of Facebook ad creation process.

• 7 things you need to run a Facebook ad
• Choosing the best marketing objective for your Facebook ad
• Facebook ad targeting options
• Creating and installing the Facebook pixel
• Creating website custom audiences
• Facebook Special Ad categories
• How to review ad performance in your Ads Manager dashboard
• Facebook ad landing page tips
• 4 Facebook ad mistakes small business owners make

Now let’s take a walk through the Facebook Ads Manager interface and the steps you need to complete to create a Facebook ads campaign.

Facebook Ads Manager 101

When you start building your Facebook ad, you’ll be at this link: https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/ You can also access this by clicking on the Ads Manager tab on the left sidebar when viewing Facebook.com on your desktop.

Note: If you haven’t already set up your Facebook ads account and/or a Facebook Business Page, start with this post. It will help you to have all your essential Facebook ad elements in order before attempting your first ad campaign.

You are now in your Ads Manager dashboard. If you’ve never run an ad before, your screen will be pretty empty, like this.

Though after you’ve run even 1 ad, you’ll see it listed in this view. This dashboard view is also where you can access ad performance data.

Click on the green + Create button to get started building your first Facebook ad.

Facebook Ads Crash Course: Choosing a Campaign Objective

Once you click to create your first ad, you’ll be shown a pop-up that asks you to choose your Campaign Objective (also called Marketing Objective). When you hover over any of the choices, a circle with an i will show over to the right. Click on the circle with the i for more explanation about that type of Campaign Objective. The key here is selecting the campaign objective that matches the ideal action you want someone to take with the ad (e.g. If you want to send traffic to a page or blog post on your website, choose Traffic. If you want people to watch your video, choose Video Views.).

Note: For more help understanding the available Campaign Objectives and how to select the correct one for your ad campaign, refer to this post.

After choosing your Campaign Objective, Facebook will give you the option to name your Campaign, Ad Set, and Ad. No one will see any of these names except for you so name them in a way that allows you to quickly identify the campaign.

Now you’re ready to start building your first Facebook ad!

Facebook Ads Crash Course: Special Ads Categories 

At the top part of this screen is the drop-down menu to select a Special Ads Category if that applies to your ad campaign. Special Ads Categories include: Housing, Credit, Employment, and Social Issues/Politics/Elections. Click to read more about Special Ads Categories.

At the bottom of this same page, make sure the Campaign Budget Optimization toggle button is off.

Then click the blue Next button located in the bottom right hand corner.

Facebook Ads Crash Course: Audience Definition

The next page that you land on is where much of the ad details are set up. To start, I chose a Traffic campaign objective. That’s why you see Traffic in larger, bold font near the top. By default, the Website radio button is selected. Since the destination for my Facebook ad traffic is my website, that is correct.

On the right side, you’ll see the Audience Definition section. As you adjust targeting options like age, gender, location, and add or remove interests and behaviors – as well as adjust your budget – the numbers shown here will change. This can help you gauge if your audience is too broad or too specific as well as what kind of results you might expect.

Keep Dynamic Creative and Offer toggle switches in the Off position.

When setting your ad budget, you can choose between a Daily budget and a Lifetime budget, and adjust what you’d like to spend. In this same area, you can set a starting and ending date and time for your Facebook ad.

Facebook Ads Crash Course: Audience

In the Audience section of Ads Manager, you can choose previously saved audiences, or one or more custom audiences. Read more here about the Facebook pixel, custom audiences, customer email audiences, and video views audiences.

If you want to build an audience from scratch, you can click to edit each bold subsection (Location, Age, Gender, Detailed Targeting, and Language).

There are countless ways to target your ad. We have a blog post dedicated to Facebook ad audience targeting options you can refer to.

Facebook Ads Crash Course: Placements and Optimization & Delivery

Placements are all the spots on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and even places off of Facebook, where Facebook could show your ad. By default, Facebook has “All Placements (Recommended)” marked. All Placements are not recommended, however. The reason why All Placements are not recommended is because each placement has its own image size requirements and ad copy/text area. So, if you are using, for example, a square image, that isn’t going to be a great fit for Stories ads. If you are doing a Messenger ad, you need to setup a custom Messenger sequence or set questions for the ad. Additionally, Facebook does not spend your ad budget equally across all placements. Even if you opted just for two placements like Facebook Feed and Instagram Feed, you’ll likely find that the majority of the budget is spent on one of those two placements.

Click on Manual Placements to see all possible placements and make adjustments.

Click on any of the right-facing arrows to reveal the sub-menu of each.

De-select any placements you don’t want to use. For Facebook ads, I recommend Facebook News Feed. And if a video ad, I choose the News Feed as well as the Video Feed.

Beneath the Placement area is the Optimization & Delivery area. Often, the default setting here will be what you need to go with. However, if you are running a Traffic ad and have your Facebook pixel on your site, it’s better to switch from Link Clicks to Landing Page views. The difference: Link Clicks are simply clicks on Traffic ads whereas the Landing Page view optimization is designed to find people in your audience you not only click links but also allow the website page to load…thereby “landing” on and “viewing” your website page or blog post.

Once you have everything set on this page, click on the blue Next button to move to the final page of the Facebook ad creation process.

Facebook Ads Crash Course: Creative

Now you’re ready to upload the photo or video you plan to use, type your ad copy, and include a destination link for those people who click on an ad (assuming it’s a Traffic or Conversion ad campaign). As you start adding information into the required fields, you’ll see your ad preview on the right hand side.

It is also possible to use an existing post that’s already been published on your Facebook Page for your ad.

In the Ad Creative area, click to Add Media and upload a photo or video, or select from a photo or video previously uploaded to your Facebook Page or ads account.

Crop your image as needed.

The primary text shows above your photo or video, and the headline shows in bold font beneath your photo or video, and directly to the left of your call to action button.

Copy and paste the URL you’ll be sending your ad traffic to in the Website URL field. Once you do, the red warning/error message will go away.

Select the best Call to Action button message from the list provided. At this time, you cannot customize what your button says.

Once your ad looks how you want it to, click on the green Publish button. It can take up to 24 hours for Facebook to approve your ad campaign, and another 24 hours for it to begin getting Reach. It usually goes a lot faster, though.

After your first ad is approved and begins gaining Reach, you’ll start seeing data being reported in your Facebook ads dashboard, which is the screen you land on when you first visit your Ads Manager.

Once your first Facebook campaign is complete, refer to our blog post about Facebook Ad Performance to understand all the possible data you can review.

At this time, you’ve completed your Facebook Ads Crash Course! There are so many elements and things to know about Facebook ad campaigns, but hopefully this guide helps you move along each step of the process enough so you’re able to execute your first successful Facebook ad campaign on your own.

How to Verify your Domain with Facebook

The one requirement that must be in place before you can begin the process to verify your domain with Facebook is to setup a Business Manager for your business. At the time of this writing, Facebook Help links still refer to it as “Business Manager”, but a new, updated interface and a new name – Business Suite – is starting to roll out. Assuming you already have a Business Manager setup, you can continue with the steps below.

From the Business Settings view inside Business Manager, click to expand the Brand Safety tab on the left-hand sidebar. Then choose Domains. Alternately, the direct link is: https://business.facebook.com/settings/owned-domains. Click the blue Add button to add your website domain.

Next, type your domain into the field in the pop-up that appears. You don’t need the https:// nor the www. Then click the Add Domain button to continue.

I needed to refresh my tab after clicking to add my domain. When I did, my screen refreshed to this, and gave me 3 ways to prove I own EliRose.com. 

Steps to Prove Domain Ownership

You have 3 options for proving ownership of your domain – DNS verification, HTML file upload, and Meta tag verification. The easiest option is likely to choose Meta tag verification especially if you’ve previously added code snippets like your Facebook pixel code or Google Analytics tracking code to your site.

I chose to add a meta tag to my WordPress theme.

After adding the meta tag to my website’s <head> section, I clicked the green Verify button. After a brief pause, a pop-up saying my domain was verified, showed up.

I refreshed my tab again, and now the red light shows as green, and there are 3 new tabs – Partners, Connected Assets, and Domain Access. The Domain Access tab is an important one to be sure to click over to as it explains further about why you want to control which advertisers can edit your website links for their ads.

Granting Link Editing Domain Access to other Facebook Business Pages

Facebook explains domain verification as “a way for you to claim ownership of your domain in Business Manager. This ownership allows you to control editing privileges of your links and other content to prevent misuse of your domain and to keep bad actors from spreading misinformation.” In its Domain Verification Help link, Facebook lists two of the reasons for domain verification as: A. a way to “edit Link Page Posts that link to content you own—ownership will eventually serve as a means to determine who has access to link editing”, and B. a way “to control who can edit link descriptions on ads pointing to your domain”. As you see when you step through the Domain Access tab options after verifying your domain, Facebook is focused on making sure only the people who own the content or are approved to edit the link content, can edit the meta data that accompanies that link.

You’ll be shown a list of Facebook Pages that have used a link on your website, in an ad. You can choose to leave it at the default setting – that anyone can edit link ads.

You can choose to deny specific advertisers from editing links by clicking on the second radio button, and then choosing which Pages aren’t allowed to from the list provided.

And if you click on the third radio button, you’ll choose to allow only specific advertisers the ability to edit links. Click on the Facebook Pages you will allow from the column on the left. Then click the Add Page button to move that allowed Page to the column on the right.

Once done, click the blue Apply button. Then you’ll be asked to confirm your updates via a pop-up.

At this point, you’ve verified your domain with Facebook and determined which Facebook Business Pages are allowed to edit links from your website when posted to Facebook.

For more information on the Apple iOS 14 update, how it may impact Facebook advertisers, and how best to prepare, I recommend checking out Andrea Vahl’s blog post.

How to Associate a Facebook Business Page with your Domain

From the Domains tab view, click on Add Assets. Then choose your Facebook Page from the list that pops up.

Then your Facebook Business Page will show as a Connected Assets.

How to Upgrade to GA4 Tracking in Google Analytics

Assuming you’ve already set up a Google Analytics account and simply need to upgrade the existing analytics tracking code you are already using, sign into your Google Analytics account to begin. Then click on the Admin gear icon at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. Next, in the second column called Property, click on the tab called GA4 Setup Assistant.

You’ll see a note that says you’re currently using Google’s Universal Analytics tracking, and that your Universal tracking remains unchanged. You can also read more about GA4 tracking at Google’s help link. Click the blue Get Started button to launch the GA4 wizard.

The pop-up window explains what the wizard will do. After reading, click on the blue Create Property button.

You have now successfully connected your existing Google Analytics tracking to the upgraded GA4 tracking. You can see that your status is “Connected”, your GA4 property name (i.e. your website URL) and ID, and a button to disconnect your property.

Additional GA4 Tracking Set Up Steps

To explore and continue to setup your new, upgraded GA4 tracking, click the blue See your GA4 Property button.

A new tab will open. On this page, you can configure different data settings including activating Google Signals, linking your Google Ads account, defining audiences, setting up conversions, and more.

Adding a GA4 Data Stream

Either from the GA4 configuration page or from the Property column in the Admin view, you can access the Data Streams tab. Right after upgrading to GA4 tracking, you’ll likely see that Google is reporting no data in the past 48 hours. Click the right arrow to view data stream details.

Note the new measurement ID number on the top right. Enhanced measurements will be turned on by default. You’ll see the list of interactions your upgraded GA4 tracking will begin measuring, as well.

Beneath that, you’ll see the Tagging Instructions section. You can choose between Add New On-Page Tag and Use Existing On Page tag. Click the down arrows to expand the directions.

I recommend first following the Google Analytics instructions under the Use Existing On-Page Tag section to see if you need to take further steps. Depending on what tracking code you already have on your website, you might not need to do anything more. When I followed the instructions listed there, it showed me that my newly-created measurement ID number had already been automatically added to my Google Analytics account due to following the GA4 Setup Wizard steps.

Because there is a delay in Google Analytics reporting, it took until the next day to begin seeing data in this new Web Stream. Also the next day, I could see that my Google Analytics dashboard looked a lot different.

An Upgrade to GA4 Tracking Changes your Google Analytics Dashboard

Explaining all about the new Google Analytics dashboard you get once you’ve upgraded to GA4 tracking is a blog post on its own. So here I’ll just briefly say that you have a fresh look and layout as well as some additional data points than before, and you can see how the new dashboard relates to the new events automatically being tracked thanks to the upgraded GA4 tracking.

Here are a couple glimpses of what you see.

Each section/box on your Google Analytics dashboard main page has a link to click for a more detailed look. Here’s what the new Events deeper dive looks like.

As more days pass, the more data will be collected. And the more data that’s collected means more opportunities to understand more about your site visitors thanks to the upgraded GA4 Google Analytics tracking code.

That’s what’s been happening to countless customers of at least 3 nearly-identical Shopify stores since July 2020. Thanks to 3 domain purchases through GoDaddy, multiple Shopify stores, and lots of Facebook and Instagram ads, a single scammer has stolen an unknown amount of money from its customers and continues to do so. It’s important to also note that because payment processors allow merchants to add whatever they’d like as the display name showing on bank and credit card statements (instead of requiring those merchants to use their own business name), these internet scams become even easier to sustain long(er) term. Irrelevant display names allow a scammer to use a fake business name – or even a website address – to confuse and redirect customers to other businesses instead of back to their own.

This is exactly why and how my small business has been stuck in the middle of a series of scam businesses run through Shopify stores since July 2020. My business URL is being used as a pawn in this scam, and I’m left with responding to dozens and dozens of confused and sometimes angry customers wanting to know why I’ve made multiple charges against their account and how I got their credit card information to begin with.

What I’ve learned in these past 6 months is that the recipe of Shopify + GoDaddy + Facebook Ads equals a perfect and profitable internet scam.

Shopify + GoDaddy + Facebook Ads = A Perfect Internet Scam

Here’s a brief rundown of how this particular internet scam is played. The scammer purchases a number of similar URLs through GoDaddy, then heads over to Shopify and creates an account. The scammer builds a Shopify e-commerce store with sleek, trendy images of products they don’t actually sell (in my case, these products are projectors), and puts their Facebook pixel on the site to begin collecting website traffic to use later for Facebook ads retargeting. The scammer creates a Facebook Page and begins running ads on Facebook, Instagram, or both. On their website and in their ads, the scammer shows these cool, modern projectors with prices slashed to 60-70% off, and then offers a coupon code for an additional 5-10% off. Customers see the Facebook or Instagram ads, see the cool, hip projectors, see the low price, and order one. Customers never receive their projectors, and also notice strange charges on their account (in my case, consistently in the $43-45 range). Those charges show to be from a URL instead of a business name. The customers visit the URL, see that it’s not a business they recognize, and then email or call that business asking why that business took their money.

My URL is one of the URLs being used in this Shopify scam (though I’m aware of at least 1 other as of the time of writing). And since July 2020, I’ve spent countless hours responding to calls and emails from these customers as well as speaking with attorneys, filing reports, and submitting support email after support email, with little to show for it.

Actions I Took Once the Shopify Internet Scam was Identified

Thankfully, one of the first 3 customers I heard from in July 2020 knew the URL where she ordered her projector from and also sent me two screenshots of her transactions that displayed my domain as the charging company. Because of this, I was immediately able to submit a support ticket to Shopify, look up the URL in the WhoIs database, identify GoDaddy as the domain registrar, email the Abuse@GoDaddy address provided on WhoIs, and begin searching Facebook for Pages using the projector business name.

I was able to find two Facebook Pages using that projector business name and logo. Both had dozens of negative reviews and comments stating it was fake, a scam, and that the customers never got what they ordered.

From there, I reached out to the two payment processors I had been made aware of by scammed customers who reached out to me. NetSpend did provide a way to complete a support form, which I did. But I never heard back. CashApp had no way for me to contact them outside of logging into my own CashApp account (which I don’t have), so I reached out to them on Facebook Messenger. Because I wasn’t a customer of theirs, they didn’t care to address this issue at all.

Next, I turned to Google because the original projector scam site had a physical mailing address listed in the footer. I immediately discovered that the address wasn’t real; there was no city by that name in the state, and the zip code was of a different state entirely.

The husband of a good friend of mine is an Assistant Attorney General in a different state, and he works on a lot of consumer fraud cases. My brother is an attorney, and I have a long-time social media connection who is an attorney who specializes in social media and internet law. After speaking with them, I received additional guidance on places to report this scam. All three also cautioned that internet scams like these are very hard to track down and stop.

Why Internet Scams are Easy to Run

Internet scams are easy to set up, easy to replicate, and easy to hide from since it’s easy for the scammer to hide their physical location. Add to that the fact that most people wouldn’t have any idea the scam website they ordered from was provided by an e-commerce website solution called Shopify, nor how to identify that the website they were on, was a Shopify site. I’m only aware of this because of what I do; most customers – even if they knew the URL of the site where they ordered – wouldn’t instinctively know there was a larger organization they could report this scam store to.

A WhoIs search did let me know that all 3 domains used (so far) in this series of scams were registered by someone with an address in Massachusetts, but all the rest of the registrant’s information was hidden from public view. I used this information to file a report with the Attorney General in Massachusetts. I received a letter back in the mail directing me to file at one of the same places my brother recommended (IC3.gov, a site specifically for reporting internet crimes) as well as a note about how difficult these internet crimes are to stop.

How this Shopify Internet Scam Repeats

Since this all began in July 2020, there have been 3 different URLs used with Shopify stores. A nutshell explanation of what happens is that the scammer runs this scam with one URL and one Shopify site as long as possible. I’ve been encouraging every customer who’s reached out to me, to contact Shopify, and eventually one of the scammed customers will take the extra step of filing a complaint with Shopify. Shopify then verifies their order and confirms fraud took place, and then takes down the shop as a result. Then the scammer waits a few days, uses one of their other projector URLs, creates another Shopify account, perhaps creates another couple Facebook Pages (I’ve found a total of 4 so far), starts running Facebook ads again, and repeats the same exact scam until they again get shut down.

How GoDaddy Responded to this Internet Scam

I have filed a report with GoDaddy for each of the 3 URLs. I have not gotten a response from anything sent to their Abuse@ email. After sending their Abuse email my most recent report, I got an auto-response directing me to a page on their site with a breakdown of different support-related addresses. Since nothing from the list really fit my situation, I tweeted their Help account. You can read the full thread here. While they did give me a different email address to send to (which I did, and also have not gotten a response from), I was told that it’s their policy to only address issues with sites they host. Meaning, they have chosen to ignore scam website that use a URL purchased through them.

Anyone who has even had a website or blog knows that there are 2 essential pieces to having a website live and on the internet: a domain and a host. So, GoDaddy being the domain provider means they make up half of this equation. This scammer wouldn’t be able to pull off this scam without a domain.

GoDaddy needs to do better.

How Facebook Responded to this Internet Scam

If you ever have tried getting any type of help on Facebook, you know it’s pretty much impossible short of contacting their Ads Support team. And in order to do that, you need to first choose a Facebook ads account you are needing help with. This means that the only shot at chatting with a human isn’t even really an option here.

You can report Facebook Pages, ads, and individual posts, which I have. But you almost immediately get a response that the Facebook Page, ad, or post doesn’t violate any guidelines. This is because Facebook doesn’t use real people to review reported Pages, ads, or posts. It uses AI to scan for offensive images and words. But since a real person is needed to understand what’s going on and to read the reviews and comments, reporting Facebook Pages, ads, and posts is ineffective.

In addition, Facebook advertising provides a treasure trove of targeting options to help advertisers reach the type of consumers interested in what they are selling, as well as retargeting and ad optimization techniques thanks to the Facebook pixel.

Here’s a screenshot taken of the current Shopify scam site as of December 20, 2020. You can see the pixel information on the right side viewable using the Pixel Helper. There are two Facebook pixels on this site, with one of them tracking over 90 types of activities.

Facebook needs to do better.

How Shopify Responded to this Internet Scam

Shopify Support has been more frustrating than GoDaddy in some ways, yet more helpful in others. GoDaddy refuses to even address this issue because they are involved on the domain side vs. the hosting, so in that sense, at least Shopify has a dedicated team to address more types of fraudulent activity on its platform. However, given the fact that this scam has been run on four Shopify stores now and the site is still live on the internet at the time of this writing, is incredibly frustrating. 

For Shopify to have shut down the scammer 4 times means it needed to hear from and validate the fraudulent activity direct from a projector customer each time. Meaning, fraudulent activity was proven and confirmed by Shopify, and the shop was take down as a result. Add to that: each time one of these projector Shopify stores has been created, the scammer has used the same products and images, same business name, same logo, same discounts/discount codes, even some of the same visible email addresses, and makes a couple additional (fraudulent) charges against its customers’ accounts always in the $43-45 range.

So at this point, there’s an established pattern of fraud that’s been validated by the Shopify Integrity Support Team.

It begs the question of how many cases of fraud is too many cases of fraud before Shopify starts immediately shutting down a new projector site as soon as it pops up?

Shopify needs to do better.

How this Shopify Internet Scam has Evolved & Why It’s Even More Problematic Now

On Friday, December 18, I heard from a customer who was scammed by this projector business back in the late summer/early fall. She had contacted Shopify at the time and was a reason why the second scam site was taken down. She reached out to me again because she had been hit with a new set of bogus charges (in the same $43-45 range) by the same scammer. Even worse, she had a second set of charges at that same price point but attributed to a different URL that she didn’t recognize. After sending an email to the business owner at the other URL, she got a response that exactly paralleled my story. The URL belonging to this other business was being used in the same way as mine. 

This instantly expanded the scope of this scam while also uncovering the fact that this scammer had managed to hack the payment system in a way that they were able to capture and save their customers’ bank and credit card information to reuse as they please. That also theoretically means that this scam can continue until each of those scammed customers requests new cards from their banks. 

A Warning to All Small Business Owners

The truth is, there’s nothing special about my small business that makes me any more or less susceptible to being used as a pawn in this way (it is interesting to note, though, that the other business being used in the scam in the same way, is also a female-owned online marketing firm). Most businesses of all sizes have a website these days. And unless and until payment processors make changes to their systems, and Facebook provides real, human ways to report fraud, and GoDaddy addresses scams that involve domains and not just sites they host, and Shopify takes down – and keeps down – businesses they know to be running scams, there’s little myself or any of the rest of us can do. 

What is On-Page SEO & Why On-Page SEO is Needed

Kelly Butcher of Simplification Services invited me to her blog to discuss on-page SEO tips for small business owners. In her blog interview, she asked me to distinguish between on-page and off-page SEO. That’s a great place to start to lay the foundation of what on-page SEO is and why it’s needed since part of learning how to maximize your on-page SEO is knowing what it does and doesn’t include. In short, your on-page SEO means all the things you can do on your website to help the many pages, blog posts, or product listings organically rank as well as possible. Conversely, off-page SEO means all the things you can and should do off of your website to help you rank well. Examples of off-page SEO would include: directory listings, your Google My Business listing, and your social media profiles.

11 Top Steps to Maximizing your On-Page SEO

• Unique title tag on every page – Title tags max out around 60-65 characters, and need to include your researched long-tailed keyword phrase. Title tags are critical to ranking
• Unique meta description on every page – Meta descriptions should be at least 150 characters long. There is currently no maximum character count. Meta descriptions don’t affect ranking but earn you the click-through from search results.
• Well-written, thorough, original content on every page – Google wants to provide solid, relevant answers to searchers queries, so it will reward good content with better organic rankings. Focus on well-written, original content first, then work to optimize it.
• Relevant keyword use on every page – You don’t want to seem robotic by inserting exact-match keyword phrases over and over on a page, plus Google understands natural conversational variations that describe the same thing. But it’s important that you do edit your content with keyword use in mind. 
• Good content organization across your site – Website visitors need to easily find what they are looking for and you need to make sure you aren’t talking about many different things on the same single website page (e.g. You have 8 service offerings and you write about all 8 on 1 page instead of giving each service its own dedicated website page).
• Unique ALT tags on every image – ALT tags (or alternative text) give a value to images that bots understand. ALT tags are also important for accessibility of your website. Use your chosen SEO keyword phrase for the first image on each page.
• Linking (interlinking between pages on your own site and earning backlinks from other sites)
• XML sitemap
• Mobile-optimized website 
• Technical aspects like fast page load time and having your SSL certificate
• Social media meta data – This can be set using a plugin and affects how links from your website appear when shared on social media.

Why On-Page SEO is Needed

Google and every other search engine strive to produce the best results to a searcher each time a query is made. Your on-page SEO work is how you make those search engines happy and help search engine bots to crawl, index, and understand your website. From good content and keyword use to the “behind-the-scenes” work you do as an admin of your site with SEO steps like adding title tags, meta descriptions, and ALT tags, having an SSL and sitemap, and other technical steps, you are doing everything you can on your website to give each page on your site its best chance at ranking well organically.

Getting ready to start SEO work on your small business website? Here’s a list of the 6 things you need to prepare before beginning your SEO work.

Let’s take a look at what you need to plan, decide, and have prepared ahead of beginning the SEO work on your small business website.

6 Things to Prepare Before you SEO your Small Business Website

• Solid, useful content – Before you optimize your website pages, you need to make sure you have good content on each of those pages. Google’s goal is to serve up the best quality content that will answer a searcher’s query. Because of this, you need to make sure to provide thorough explanations and information that give a website visitor the kind of useful information they need to solve their problem or answer their question. Think about what types of website pages are most useful to you. What is the content like? How much content is on the page? For example, 3 or 4 paragraphs is probably going to be more thorough and useful than 1. You want to clean up your content before you SEO those website pages.
• Good content organization – Can website visitors easily locate the specific content they seek on your site? Is the navigation clear and the content organized logically? Or do you have, say, a single website page for 15 services you offer, or a one-page, scrolling website? When you SEO your website, each page on your site gets its own unique title tag and meta description. And your on-page optimization is centered around the target keyword phrase for that specific page’s content. So, each different page on your site is a new chance to rank on a new keyword phrase. And it’s much, much easier to optimize a page that is talking about 1 topic and not 15 different topics. If your site needs some content re-organization or re-writing, do that work before you start your SEO process.
• SEO plugin(s) or capabilities – Most website platforms (CMSes to be exact, which stands for content management systems) have at least some degree of SEO capabilities built-in. Exactly what you can do SEO-wise, and if that functionality is standard or an add-on that you need to pay for, can vary. But just about every CMS offers some degree of SEO functionality. CMSes like WordPress also offer the ability to install an XML sitemap and set social media meta data information. Before you start optimizing your website, take the time to look into what you can do to SEO your small business website, and how you need to do it.
• Competitors identified – Take a look at your main competitors’ websites. Check out their navigation, content organization, depth of content, and – if you want to take it one step further – their SEO. Downloading and installing the free MozBar allows you to see the title tag and meta description of every website page on the internet. Knowing what your potential customers are also reading and experiencing on your competitors’ sites will help you plan better for your own website.
• A plan for keyword research – Keyword research is one of the hottest SEO topics and one of the things small business owners easily become mistaken about. We’ve previously answered big questions like: Do I need a keyword list, what to do and not do with your keyword research, and the fact vs fiction of keyword research. The good thing about keyword research is that you can do it easily, cheaply, and without a lot of extra, overwhelming piles of extraneous data simply by using Google.com for your keyword research.
• A strong technical setup – Purchasing your SSL certificate and a solid hosting plan are important for your organic rankings. Google takes into account website attributes like site load time and whether or not you have your SSL (yes, even if you don’t have an online checkout system) as organic ranking factors.

If you spend the time to review these 6 items above before you start optimizing your small business site, your SEO work will go faster and be completed with much better rankings results for you.

Facebook Boost Improvements

Note: I’ve previously written about the differences between Facebook ad campaigns and Boosts. For additional background, I recommend reading that post.

1. You can change the objective of your boost, and have a(n almost) full range of choices. Simply click on the grey Change button to make a different selection. Keep in mind that importance of selecting a goal (also called the marketing objective) that matches the type of action you want a user to take on your ad. If you don’t align those two things, you likely will see lackluster results from any ad or boost you do.
2. You can create a Welcome message for Boosts that you select “Message” as the goal. You can save these Welcome messages for future use and edit an existing message for future Boosts.
3. You can select a Special Ads Category if needed, and then adjust targeting based on that category. Ads placed about housing, employment, credit, and social, political, and election causes all need to be marked as a Special Ads category ad. To read more about them, you can visit our Special Ads Category post and our Getting Verified to Run Election Ads post.

Facebook Boost Improvements: What to be Careful of

One thing to be cautious of when you use the new Boost interface is that you need to select the correct Facebook ad account from a drop down menu in the top right corner (seen in the first screenshot in this post). By default, it will be set at your personal ads account. But if you are running Facebook ads for a client, make sure to switch ad accounts before submitting your boost for review.

Also, while you have the option to turn off Instagram and Messenger in the Placements section, you can’t adjust the sub-placements that fall under each platform. Meaning, for example, if you select only Facebook as the Placement for your Boost, your Boost will be placed in the Facebook News Feed as well as the other Facebook type Placements like Marketplace, Right hand column, etc.

Other than that, other Boost functionality still exists but it may be found in a different spot than it was before. For example, placements and the Facebook pixel are at the bottom of the Boost interface.

Although using Ads Manager is still preferred and for many reasons, it’s nice to see improvements made to the usefulness of the Boost button.

8 Things to Know about Facebook Business Manager

• Business Manager was created with agencies in mind. It allows an agency to “pull in”, access, and manage both its employees (e.g. agency account managers) as well as the Facebook Business Pages, Facebook Ads accounts, and Instagram Business accounts of its clients. Business Manager is best thought of as a single interface or central access point for all of these properties, and saves you from separately visiting each client’s Facebook Business Page, Ads account, and Instagram account….you simply visit your Business Manager and choose what Facebook or Instagram property you need to work on from there. Also as an agency executive, you can assign your account managers to your clients’ Pages and Ads account from your Business Manager.
• Business Manager provides a way for a business owner to claim ownership over their Business Page and Ads account. This can provide some protection against losing access to a Page or Ads account when, for example, an employee quits working for your company.
• Business Manager use is required for Facebook Ads accounts that want to upload a customer email list to advertise to, and to verify your domain with Facebook.
• For many small businesses, Business Manager is overkill, and can feel confusing and overwhelming to use. At this time, Business Manager is not required for all Business Pages nor Ads accounts.
• When adding accounts to Business Manager, there is an important difference between requesting access to a Page or Ads Account, and claiming ownership of one. If you are setting up your own Business Manager for your own business, then you want to claim ownership of you Business Page and your Facebook Ads account. If you are working with a client, you want to request access instead. That way you don’t unintentionally claim ownership of another business’ online property.
• Users, Business Pages, Facebook Ads accounts, and Instagram Profiles can all be added to Business Manager. After you set up your Business Manager, you need to go through the steps to add each to your new Business Manager. Users also have to be granted access to each account they are to manage…simply inviting them to work in your Business Manager is not enough.
• You can remove a Facebook Page and Instagram account from Business Manager, even if you’ve claimed ownership of it. You cannot, however, remove a Facebook Ads account from Business Manager if you’ve claimed ownership of it; you can only remove it if you’ve requested access to it.
• If you are working with a client, there are 3 types of Business Manager relationships you can have. You can have a Business Manager to Business Manager relationship, you can be invited to work in a client’s Business Manager on your own (a Business Manager to Person relationship), or if you have a Business Manager and your client does not, you can simply request access to their Facebook Page, Instagram account, or Ads account from within your Business Manager.  

Let’s take a closer look at what you need to know about running political or election ads on Facebook, and the process to become authorized to run those political or elections ads.

Getting Authorized to Run Political or Elections Ads on Facebook

When viewing the Special Ad Categories section while creating a new Facebook ad campaign, you’ll be shown a drop down menu of the 4 Special Ad Category choices after clicking on the checkbox. Facebook describes the Social Issues, Elections or Politics ad category as: “Ads about social issues (such as the economy, or civil and social rights), elections, or political figures or campaigns.”

Facebook provides more details on what ads qualify as social issues, politics, or elections: 

Ads about social issues, elections or politics are:

• Made by, on behalf of, or about a candidate for public office, a political figure, a political party or advocates for the outcome of an election to public office; or
• About any election, referendum, or ballot initiative, including “go out and vote” or election campaigns; or
• About social issues in any place where the ad is being placed; or
• Regulated as political advertising.

More information about Facebook’s Social, Political, and Election ads can be found here.

The authorization process varies by country. For a full list of authorization steps by country, visit this link. This post will focus on the process for authorization to run social issue, political, and election ads in the US.

Steps for Authorization to Run Facebook Ads for Politics or Elections

Here’s a look at the authorization checklist:

Ad authorization checklist

Before you begin the ad authorization process, you’ll need to:

• Be the Page admin or advertiser on the Page from which you’re running ads about social issues, elections or politics. If you’re not a Page admin or advertiser, you should ask an admin on the Page to add you as an admin or share this content with the Page admin and have them complete the ad authorization. A Page must have at least one Page admin with confirmed identity. This person doesn’t have to be the one that created a specific disclaimer in order to use it. Only the Page admin can create or edit disclaimers for the country the ads will run in. Advertisers can create ads with disclaimers without Page admin permissions, as long as they aren’t creating or editing disclaimers.
• Have two-factor authentication enabled.

• Have the following unexpired materials and information available:

  • A US passport, driver’s license or ID card
  • A US-based residential mailing address

When you click on check box next to Social Issues, Politics, and Elections in the Special Ads Category drop down, you’ll see that you need to confirm your identity as well as create a disclaimer that will be run with the ads. Start by click on the blue Confirm ID button.

You’ll have to re-enter your Facebook password, and then will be redirected to the Identity Confirmation tab within your Profile’s Account Settings.

Click the Start Identity Confirmation button and choose Social Issues, Politics, and Elections.

Next, choose your country from the drop down menu and re-enter your password.

Get started setting your primary location. If two-factor authentication is not already turned on, you’ll need to do so.

The 2 pieces of information Facebook needs to confirm your primary country location is:

 

Personal ID

This ID must be a US passport, driver’s license or state ID. We might also ask you some questions to help ensure the ID belongs to you.

 

Next, you’ll need to enter your mailing address for Facebook to mail you a letter with a link and confirmation code to enter.

 

Last, you’ll need to choose what form of identification to take a picture of and upload.

After uploading the photos of your chosen type of ID, it takes Facebook a few minutes to analyze the images. Once that’s completed, you’ll see the Thanks for Submitting screen.

The last step to finish this process is when you receive the letter in the mail. It has a PIN code you need to enter at Facebook.com/ID.

You’ll see that both steps are completed once you’d entered your PIN.

Even though my license photo uploads were initially approved, I needed to re-upload them. After doing so, there were a few additional questions I had to answer.

Eventually, you’ll land on this screen and your entire Facebook ads verification process will be complete.

Here are a couple other Facebook Help links related to running political or elections ads:

• Roles and permissions for running ads for social issues, politics, or elections.
• How disclaimers works for ads about social, political, or elections issues.

Why you Need an Online Marketing Strategy for your Small Business

• As we touched on above, social media is only part of your online marketing Along with your social media profiles, your online marketing will also include content you create (videos, photos), blog posts, email marketing, your SEO strategy, social and search ads, reputation management and directory listings, your website, etc. As you can see, there are a lot of other components to your small business’ online marketing.
• An online marketing strategy leads to more consistency Everything works better when there’s a plan in place! From keeping you and your employees on track, to making sure content is not just being posted but created on a steady schedule, to incorporating your small business’ promotions and events, offline you might be doing, to ensuring that days, weeks, and months don’t pass by without your online marketing tasks getting done…developing an online marketing strategy will keep your work and online presence consistent.
• An online marketing strategy increases effectiveness Your online marketing strategy will incorporate all of your online marketing profiles and tools, so nothing will be missed or forgotten when you have a master plan. And when you have all of the tools in your online marketing toolbox working together? That’s when the magic happens.
• An online marketing strategy prevents you from recreating the wheel If you are writing a new blog post, for example, that should be part of your social media postings, social ads, email marketing, SEO strategy, etc. Having an online marketing strategy for your small business will help you make the most of each piece of content you create while helping you populate your online profiles, too. This will save you time as well because you don’t need to create completely original content for each social profile or marketing tactic you are using.
• An online marketing strategy creates a unified message across all of your marketing This would include any offline advertising or in-store promotions and events along with everything you plan to do online. People who follow you on Facebook, might not follow you on Twitter. People who subscribe to your email might not follow you on social media at all. You need to make sure the same message is going out on all channels you are using, and for anyone who is connected to you in more than one way, think of it as increased exposure to the same message. Remember: online marketing moves fast, but customers still need to move through the same (slow) process of Know, Like, and Trust before buying. Single-exposure to any given marketing message has never been the way to go.

Need help putting together your online marketing strategy? We’ve got you covered! Learn more about our online marketing strategy services.