The Ultimate Guide: The 3 Key Stages To Run Facebook Ads Like A Pro

Are your Facebook ads giving you more headaches than patients?

You’re not alone.

Many dentists struggle to make sense of Facebook marketing, and it’s not because they’re bad at it.

It’s just that it’s too much stuff to figure out.

How do you target the right people?

How do you figure out if your ads are even working?

Don’t worry. This guide will give you a high-level overview and break down the 3 stages you must go through when running Facebook ads.

No jargon, no fluff.

Just practical tips to make Facebook ads work for your dental practice.

What you’ll learn:

• How to launch your first campaign and what to expect
• When and how to scale up your ads for the best results
• What to do after you have winning ads that you've scaled

Stage 1: Setting Up Your First Facebook Ads Campaign

What should your first campaign look like and what should you expect out of it?

Part of what makes Facebook ads powerful is the Facebook pixel.

The more data that this thing gathers, the better it will get at finding people interested in what you have to offer.

The problem with your very first campaign is that you likely haven’t gathered any data with your Facebook pixel unless you had it installed ahead of time on your website and had it gathering data from your website visitors.

If your Facebook pixel doesn’t have much data, then it will need to gather that data before it starts performing really well.

For your very first campaign, you shouldn’t get discouraged if things aren’t working straight away.

The first stage is really all about testing.

You want to test different audience targeting and ads. The idea is that you’re looking for what works, and you can only do this by testing.

How much you can test at once and how long it takes to test all depends on what kind of budget you’re working with.

My recommendation is that you should budget for at least $2 per ad per day. Therefore if you have a budget of $10 per day, then you should at most have 5 ads in your campaign.

At the start you’ll have 1 campaign, and you should set the campaign objective to “Conversions”.

Not all target audiences are created equal. If you set your campaign objective to something like “Traffic” thinking you’ll get more clicks therefore it will perform better, what will happen in reality is that Facebook will find people that simply click your ad and then likely leave...

It's giving you what you asked for which is traffic, but what you actually want is people that convert into booked appointments.

When you have a campaign objective of “Conversions”, then Facebook will look for people that actually convert.

1 person who is likely to convert is better than 100 that will only be traffic on your website.

Then for the ad sets themselves, I’ve found that the new audience+ targeting performs far better than only using interest targeting.

I’d recommend using the audience+ targeting, selecting the region that you’re targeting, and having 1 interest, behaviour or demographic that you’re targeting with the ad set to give the ad set some guidance at the beginning.

I like to set a minimum spend for my ad sets that is 90% of your campaign budget divided by the number of ad sets you’re running.

This means, if you for example have a budget of $30 per day for your campaign and you run 3 ad sets, then you can take 90% of $30 which is $27, and divide it by the number of ad sets you’re running which in this case is 3. This will give you a minimum spend of $9 per ad set. This is a nice way to get an even spend between all of your ad sets.

Then after that you get to the ads, and this is where a lot of the testing happens.

There’s a lot of things to test, and how much you can test really comes down to your budget.

If you’re working with only $10 per day as your budget, then you’ll face a decision of either testing different ads or different targeting.

If you’re testing different ads with a $10 budget, then you can have 1 ad set with 5 ads that you’re split testing.

Maybe your ad set might be targeting prospects interested in “Motherhood”. Then your ads might all be the exact same except for the image itself, this way you can split test which image performs the best.

For example, ad 1 might have an image of a child patient smiling. Then ad 2 might have an image of your local area with your practice seen in the background. Ad 3 might have an image of a dentist and child smiling together. Ad 4 might have an image of a mother and her child smiling together. And ad 5 might have an image of a dentist and mother smiling together.

Then you run this and see which ad image works best.

When testing, you have to resist making any changes to your ads for at least 72 hours. It’s important to not touch ads when testing since any time you make a change it can screw things up.

How long it takes to get a good picture of what’s working and what isn’t again really depends on your budget. With a large budget might take a day or two, with a small budget might be a week or two, or maybe even a month.

Then you have the option of also testing different targeting. If again you have a budget of $10 per day, then you can have 5 ad sets each with 1 ad. This way you can test out a different targeting option for each ad set.

How long you spend in this initial stage depends on your budget and whether you’ve found some winning ads or not.

You’ll want to have your conversion event fire off at least 200 times before you consider moving from this first stage into the second stage.

If you go to your events manager on your Facebook Business Manager account, you’ll be able to see accurate information for this.

Stage 2: Scaling Up Your Winners

After you’ve gotten your conversion event to fire at least 200 times (which will be your event that fires when someone books an appointment), then you can move into this next stage.

This will be where you can start to incorporate lookalike audiences into your targeting.

When your Facebook pixel has enough data, then you can set up audiences that look like the people that have taken certain actions in your business, and that is the lookalike audience.

This means you can take the 200 or more people that booked an appointment, and have Facebook find people similar to them. They can either be very similar to them which would be your 1% lookalike audience, or they can be far less similar which would be your 10% lookalike audience (which is the limit).

For the 1%, this will be a smaller pool of prospects, but they’ll more accurately represent the people you’re trying to reach. The 10% will less accurately represent the people you’re trying to reach, but will be a larger pool of prospects which means it will take longer for this audience to be exhausted.

My recommendation is to test 1%, 5% and 10% lookalike audiences:

• These can be set up for people that have visited your website in the past 180 days.
• The top 25% of people that have spent the most time on your website in the past 180 days.
• People who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram ad in the past 180 days.
• People who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page in the past 180 days.
• And those who have fired your conversion event in the past 180 days, this might be the standard Facebook pixel event of "Lead", "Submit application", "Schedule", etc.

When moving into this second stage, you’ll want to set up a new campaign which again will have the campaign objective of “Conversions”, and you’ll set up your ad sets using these lookalike audiences and place your winning ads within these ad sets.

From there, you’ll want to scale up the ad sets that are performing well, and turn off the ad sets that aren’t performing well.

When scaling up winning ad sets, a good rule of thumb is to increase the budget of the ad set by 20% every 48 hours.

You don’t want to increase the budget more frequently than 48 hours since when you make updates too often to the ad sets, you mess with the learning phase of the ad set.

Then the other thing you’ll want to incorporate at this stage is re-targeting ads.

You need to have enough data come in to make re-targeting ads worthwhile, and if you’ve had at least 200 conversion events fire off, then you probably have enough overall data to start using this.

These will be the ads that target the people who’ve clicked on your ad, but have not converted (booked an appointment).

These ads will be driving these prospects back to your landing page and trying to get them to convert.

A lot of the people that didn’t convert, chances are they got distracted by something and didn’t finish the process of booking an appointment. Therefore we want to be bringing them back and getting them to complete the appointment booking process.

For re-targeting ads, you’ll want to set up a new campaign just for this, and at this stage this campaign should only have 1 ad set.

This ad set can re-target people who have:

• Visited your website in the past 180 days.
• The top 25% of people that have spent the most time on your website in the past 180 days.
• People who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram ad in the past 180 days.
• And people who have engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page in the past 180 days.

You’ll also want to exclude the audiences that have fired off a conversion event in the past 180 days, because we don’t want to waste ad dollars on someone that has already converted.

The whole idea is that we’re targeting people that have interacted with our business in some way, but haven’t yet converted. That is what these ads are for.

Stage 3: Finding More Winners

Eventually after scaling enough, we’ll hit the final stage.

You will need at least 500 to 1000 of your conversion events to fire off before considering moving into this final stage.

Here you will use 2 or more campaigns that again have an objective of “Conversions”.

The targeting in this stage will be very broad, you’ll literally be targeting anyone within a geographic area.

The goal at this stage is to have tons of variety going out in terms of creatives and to try and find new winning creatives.

This is the stage where a lot of the competition happens for fighting to acquire customers/clients/patients.

At this stage, we’re no longer focusing on testing audiences and figuring out what works, but rather simply putting out as many different creatives as possible and trying to find new winning creatives that we can use.

The Facebook pixel at this stage will have so much data that it will very easily find the prospects we’re looking for even if we have our targeting very broad.

This means that all we have to do now is put out as many different creatives in front of our ideal prospects and find something new that sticks.

At this stage you will also have enough data where you can further segment your re-targeting campaign.

You can create 7 re-targeting campaigns at this stage. 4 campaigns will be warm traffic campaigns (targeting Facebook and Instagram page and ad engagers), and 3 campaigns will be hot traffic campaigns (targeting website visitors and the 25% of visitors that spent the most time on your website).

For the warm re-targeting campaigns:

• 1 will be for targeting the warm traffic over the past 4 days.
• 1 will be for targeting the warm traffic over the past 30 days.
• 1 will be for targeting the warm traffic over the past 180 days.
• And 1 will be for targeting the warm traffic over the past 365 days.

Then for the hot re-targeting campaigns:

• 1 will be for targeting the hot traffic over the past 4 days.
• 1 will be for targeting the hot traffic over the past 30 days.
• And 1 will be for targeting the hot traffic over the past 180 days.

For the hot traffic which is your website visitors and the 25% of visitors that spent the most time on your website, Facebook only allows you to capture this traffic up to 180 days which is why we don’t go past this.

These re-targeting campaigns will be trying to push someone further and further down your funnel.

For the warm re-targeting campaigns, you’ll want to exclude people that are part of the hot traffic, and for the hot re-targeting campaigns, you’ll want to exclude people that have converted. This is how we can push them further and further down until they convert.

The final things you can also do at this stage is run a campaign that does nothing other than run video testimonials.

Each ad set in this campaign would have 3 copies of the same video testimonial, and this is because Facebook sometimes won’t push an ad if it doesn’t perform well right away, and that’s why we put 3 here.

These kinds of campaigns work great if you use lead generation offers and have a list of leads and “Lead” events that have fired off.

Then with this campaign, you can target your lead audiences and exclude those that haven’t taken the final conversion action you want (booking an appointment which might be the “Schedule” or “Submit application” standard Facebook pixel event).

We also want to exclude anyone that’s watched 3 seconds of the testimonials video, because they’ve either watched the entire thing and so we don’t want to show it to them again, or they’ve watch it and didn’t enjoy it, and whatever the case we don’t want to show them the same testimonial video again.

Instead we want to make sure we keep hitting them with a different testimonial video each time, this will create the illusion of many other people talking positively about your business online.

There you have it, these are the 3 stages you’ll go through when running Facebook ads.

This should give you more clarity on what to expect and what you should be doing at each stage.

Having a high-level overview and a clear path helps a lot when thinking about putting together your first Facebook ads campaign, and so I hope this has been helpful.

Anyway, that is everything for this one. Hope you enjoyed the letter and have a fantastic rest of your day.

- Bryan

P.S.

If you want Facebook ad campaigns that perform well, then you’ll need to have strategies in place that can make that happen.

Your ads are really only the first thing someone will see and then click on.

What do you show people in the ad?

What do you offer them?

What are the next steps after clicking the ad?

This is where the right strategy comes into play.

If you want a detailed breakdown of strategies that you can use to flood your dental practice with patients, then I have good news!

I’ve put together a resource that goes over 23 powerful strategies that you can use to get patients through the door with your marketing.

You can find this resource on the right column of this page (or down below if you’re on a mobile device), or you can click the “resources” button in the navigation menu at the top of the page to get your hands on it if this interests you.