Facebook is far more than a leisure platform. Seeing it that way, today, is limiting. It is a real advertising channel that offers countless opportunities but also many traps.
 
On the opportunity side:
 
 • Audience size: over 21 million people use Facebook in Italy and the number is set to grow;
 
• Time spent: it is estimated that each person spends at least 35 minutes on the platform every day, sometimes even hours;
 
• User knowledge: the targeting options the platform offers advertisers are countless: gender, age, interests and even behavior.
 
But the trap everyone knows, and many fall into, is that Facebook itself wants you to believe it’s easy, that it’s a math problem, that anyone can get a return on ad spend in terms of new customers or higher sales.
Facebook is one of the most powerful advertising platforms, and even if it is democratic in that it lets anyone advertise, to develop Facebook Ads you need specific skills to avoid turning a strategic investment for your business into a useless waste of time and money—your money.
With that necessary premise, here are some useful tips to get more from social ads:

Even if extremely tempting, avoid the “over-simplified path” that Facebook itself suggests, like when you publish a new post and the “boost post” button appears, precisely because it’s too simplified and overlooks setup aspects that, if applied, let you get more while spending less. 
There is only one place where you can manage Facebook ads end-to-end, and that is Facebook Business Manager.

Times change too fast, as do consumers’ needs, and not setting aside part of the budget to understand what performs best is a limitation you pay dearly for in the long run.

Ad spend is an investment that must generate a return, and to increase the chances of that happening it’s recommended to allocate about 20% of the budget to “exploratory campaigns” to understand whether image A or B works better, whether a longer text is better than a more concise one, whether one audience is better than another.

Every industry, business, campaign, and even time period, is its own world: without testing to learn what works best for your Facebook Ads, each time you risk paying much more than what you could achieve with the remaining 80% of the ad budget.

The Facebook pixel is a piece of code you add to your website, invisible to the user, that lets you measure ad effectiveness by enabling you to understand what actions people take on the website.
 
It’s a very important tool because it allows Facebook to “track” its users’ behavior even when they are not on its platforms.  So, besides helping you understand the effectiveness of your ad campaigns, and letting you optimize by making informed decisions based on solid data, it also enables you to create much more specific—and above all efficient—retargeting campaigns.

Finally, by not using the Pixel and not understanding the data it provides, you have no way to determine the only metric worth considering, which certainly isn’t likes, comments, or followers but ROAS, an English acronym that indicates the mathematical calculation of return on ad spend, which without the pixel—and therefore without conversion tracking—cannot be determined.

It’s limiting to bet everything on the ad campaign.
This is a common mistake because it neglects a broader strategic view.
Except in rare cases, most people don’t buy immediately just because they came into contact with, or interacted with, your ad.
 
In fact it’s exactly the opposite: after the user has seen the ad, they need more details, to get to know your company better as well as your product, read reviews, and look for answers to doubts or questions they have about it and then, finally, decide to buy.

The advice is to think about everything that could help the user reach the purchase and provide it. Spend time defining a purchase journey that makes what you sell known, sparks interest, and leads to info requests and purchase, to get the maximum result from the ad investment.

In other words, create a “funnel”, an English term for a consumer-centered marketing model that illustrates the customer’s theoretical path toward buying a good or service, also using other strategies and tools, not betting everything only on social: success in digital is the sum of all the actions that make up your marketing strategy.

Strategically, this is where the ad investment is undermined, because by ignoring your Buyer Personas you presume you can communicate the same message, with the same communication lever, to people with different levels of awareness who may know your brand but not your product, or know who you are but buy from your competitor, or simply don’t know you exist.

Social lets you talk to anyone, but also be ignored by everyone.
To prevent the ad from going unnoticed—being shown to everyone but then no one taking the requested action—it’s essential to spend time before launch describing in detail the profile of your target audience, creating a realistic avatar, a projection of an imaginary person that reflects the characteristics of the different types of potential customers.

Only then can you tailor the message to the user who is listening, making it relevant to them to bring them to purchase, click after click, not only through ads, but also in synergy with the content you publish on your business profile.
Moreover, by knowing your Buyer Personas it won’t be hard to define the Custom Audiences that Facebook allows you to create.

These are audiences created from people who, in some way, have already come into contact with your brand or have shown interest in your products or services. They may have interacted with your Facebook Fan Page, follow you on Instagram, browsed your website, or be new newsletter subscribers and therefore are plausibly closer and more interested than others in completing the purchase.

Finally, Custom Audiences allow you to acquire leads and customers at lower costs compared to using so-called Core Audiences, i.e., those created through the various targeting options Facebook provides (age, gender, location, interests, behaviors, etc…).