I’ve messed around with Facebook ads before, but never with any real success. It’s not an intuitive process, nor does Facebook make it very easy to figure out what’s actually going on with the ads dashboard. The financial commitment itself makes all the buggersome aspects even harder to handle, so when I saw that AppSumo was offering an action video with a true Facebook ads wizard (Jennifer Sheahan from Facebook Ads Lab), I jumped at the chance. Or rather, I jumped at it with some AppSumo credit that I had on my account, which made the $49 price tag a bit easier to stomach.
The video comes in two parts at somewhere just shy of two hours total. There’s plenty of great content – Sheahan has a way of explaining incredibly complex concepts and actions in an easy-to-understand way, but she doesn’t try to hide the fact that she doesn’t know everything. Some of the processes behind Facebook ads are quite opaque, and keeping campaigns active enough for good ROI can take a lot of hands-on work. Jennifer shows us step-by-step just how to do it and not overdo it.
I wouldn’t say that this action video turned me into a Facebook ads wizard. Maybe more of an apprentice; I now actually understand the platform and some of the nuttier things that determine bidding and CTR. I am by no means ready to raise an advertising budget for Denver Seitan Company with an eye to Facebook ads, but I in a far better position to read the more detailed guides and case studies online and put them to work for me.
Brass tacks: This video gets an 8 out of 10 from the Tim Brauhn Corporation of America. It would have grabbed a 9 or 10 out of 10 but for the following. I think that there’s a bit too much talk about general Facebook page engagement strategies that could have been left out or replaced with more drilldowns on ads themselves. I’m ready to do some more testing and try to make the platform work for me, and I have this video to thank.