Facebook Ads, a great place to advertise everything from products to digital services, from pages to YouTube channels.
Combined with its integration with Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, now called Meta, is a great advertising tool that when used correctly can expand your channel’s reach by as much as 10 times.
So, how do you run Ads on Facebook?
Firstly, you need to visit business.facebook.com and create an account or sign in to your existing Facebook Account. Then, follow these steps to start a successful Facebook Ads campaign.
Step 1: Choosing your Objective
Select the Campaigns tab, then click Create to get started with a new Facebook ad campaign.
Facebook offers 11 marketing objectives based on what you want your ad to accomplish. Those are:
● Brand Awareness
● Reach
● Traffic
● Engagement
● App Installs
● Video Views (on Instagram and Facebook)
● Lead Generation
● Messages
● Conversions
● Catalog sales
● Store traffic
For a YouTube channel, we’d suggest choosing between Brand Awareness, Reach, Traffic or Conversions depending on where your YouTube channel stands.
Step 2: Name your Campaign
This is where you choose a name for your ad campaign. So choose a name and hit next.
Step 3: Budget and Scheduling
Here, you decide how much money you want to spend on your Facebook ad campaign. You can choose a daily or lifetime budget. Then, set the start and end dates if you want to schedule your ad in the future, or choose to make it live right away.
Step 4: Audience Targeting
This is where you start to build the target audience for your ad. Facebook’s targeting system is extremely detailed and allows you to choose between a variety of factors such as Age, Location, Gender, Language, Interests and much more.
Choose the audience you want to target for your channel and click next.
Step 5: Choosing Facebook Ad placements
Choose where you want your Facebook ads to appear. Facebook ads appear in various places throughout Facebook like Feed, Ads between videos, Story ads and even on Instagram and messenger.
If you’re unsure about where to showcase your ads, the most simple option is to select Automatic Placements where Facebook automatically decides where to place your ads.
If you’ve just started YouTube and you’re looking to advertise your YouTube channel on Facebook in order to hit the YouTube monetization criteria, you’re better off buying a Monetized YouTube channel or 1000 subscribers and 4000 genuine watch hours.
Benefits of Using Facebook Ads for promoting a YouTube channel
There are a ton of benefits of using Facebook Ads, some of which are:
● Robust Analytics
Facebook offers one of the best analytics services that helps you track everything your advertisement is accomplishing and every interaction done with your advertisement. These analytics help you create better advertisements that specifically target the audience you want.
● Micro Targeting
As mentioned above, Facebook has an extraordinary audience targeting system with a plethora of options to choose from so you can be sure that your advertisement reaches exactly the people it’s supposed to reach. You can also create different advertisements catering to the different audiences you want to target.
● Easy to Use
One of the most important reasons why Facebook ads are so important is because of how easy it is for anyone to start a successful advertising campaign with little to no knowledge of digital advertising.
● People are almost always on Social Media
Unlike YouTube, where one only sits down to watch a video when they’re free, people scroll through Facebook and Instagram almost everywhere and that makes it very easy for your ad to reach people.
Disadvantages of Using Facebook Ads
● Media Junk
With a lot of people running facebook ads for a lot of different things, there’s a lot of competition running across facebook ads and that is what’s considered Media Junk where people would see similar ads multiple times and then would start ignoring them.
● Conversion Rates
Even though great for websites and brands, for a YouTube channel, the conversion rate from a Facebook Ad to a viewer or a subscriber is very low. A lot of people might click through to go to your channel, but the number of people who will actually watch your videos will be very low.
● All About the Money
Running Ads on Facebook is not cheap, it requires a set daily budget and thus, requires a lot of money. And considering how low the conversion rate for a YouTube channel will be, it becomes very expensive to get the increase in number of views and subscribers.
But, there’s still one thing you can do, and that is to buy genuine, retention views or subscribers.
Alternatives to Facebook Ads
Even though facebook is one of the biggest social media and advertising websites, there are still quite a few alternatives to Facebook Ads
● Instagram Ads
Owned by Facebook, now called Meta, Instagram ads are run through Facebook Ad Manager, but Instagram ads perform way better than ads on Facebook and Messenger do. So instead of running ads on Facebook and Instagram, you can choose to run ads on Instagram only.
● TikTok Ads
The chinese short video sharing app TikTok, which has now blown up worldwide and has hundreds of users scrolling through it every minute, TikTok also has an Advertising manager set up which allows you to run ads on TikTok. More about advertising on TikTok is covered in our blog How to Grow on TikTok.
● Google Ads
Google Ads are also a great way to advertise your YouTube channel and make your channel rank higher than your competition. Using Google’s Adsense is very similar to using facebook ad manager.
● YouTube Ads
What better way to advertise your YouTube channel than advertising it on YouTube itself.
We all know the pesky little ads that appear before a video. You can harness the power of those ads by creating a video ad that will run before other videos on YouTube, giving your channel a slight edge over the others.
That’s all for today! Stay tuned for more power-packed content.
