If you want to drive paid traffic to a blog post or landing page you should use Facebook ads because they are very affordable. As this chart clearly indicates it costs only $0.25 to reach a 1000 people, cheaper than any other paid advertising method.

But to get the highest ROI for your investment you need to optimize the ad for clicks and you need to optimize your site for conversions. Many people fail with ads because they do not get the basics rights first.

Therefore, to help you get the most out of your ad, I have created this checklist on the 4 things you should do before running a Facebook ad…

Install the pixel:

A simple step you should perform before you run your ad is install the Facebook pixel on your website. The pixel is a code provided by Facebook. When you add it to your website it tracks visitors sent by an ad and shows you when a visit converted.

The pixel can also help you create custom audiences. Custom audience lets you display ads to all the people who visited your website or those who visited certain pages.

This data can be used to create high converting ads as you can target people who are familiar with your work. When you track individual pages you can increase conversions even further as you can serve highly targeted ads. Here’s a great guide from Jon Loomer on how to add the pixel.

Optimize site for sharing:

One way to get free traffic from an ad is by optimizing your website for sharing. People who visit your website from Facebook are already logged in. Hence, they only require the slightest of nudges to share your website.

The simplest way to go about this is by adding share buttons as a study by BrightEdge found that pages with the tweet button get 7 times more shares than those without. Hence, to get more shares on Facebook, you just need to add the Facebook share button.

Another thing you want to do is optimize the thumbnail image that is shared along with the link.

When a link is shared, an image is automatically picked as the thumbnail. If an image that is at least 560 X 292 pixels is set as the thumbnail, then the large thumbnail will appear. If it isn’t of these dimensions, then a small thumbnail (or no thumbnail) will appear.

If the large thumbnail appears your image will look better when shared and will drive back more free traffic.

A page well optimized for sharing is the article The Beginners Guide to Facebook Advertising by Adomas Baltagalvis.

The first thing they got right is the share buttons. They added plenty of them including Facebook share at the top.

And when you click on the Facebook share button the post is shared along with the large thumbnail. It also has a good headline and description as you can see above. This ensures that when a visitor from an ad shares it, it will drive back plenty of free traffic.

They also added an optin form to the side bar and at the end of the post to ensure traffic converts.

So make sure you optimize all your pages for sharing before sending traffic with the ads.

Check text percentage on ad:

Facebook used to have a strict rule that limited the amount of text on ad images to 20%. Ads were rejected when they had more text. They have discarded the rule, but now they limit the amount of reach the ad generates when the image has more than 20% text. If you add too much text you won’t get your money’s worth.

Therefore, always limit your text to less than 20%.

You can easily check the amount of text your ad image contains by using this Grid tool. All you need to do is upload your image and it places a grid in front of it. If text is present in more than 5 boxes it has more than 20% text and you need to delete some of it.

Run a test:

Before you dedicate high budgets for your ad, you need to test it out by only spending a few dollars on it or just running it for a day.

The best option for testing out ads is by targeting custom audiences created from your list or website traffic. You can then upgrade to look alike audiences and continue your testing before moving on to general targeting.

If you meticulously follow a testing process you should be able to get the highest ROI for your ads. Testing should be extremely easy to do now as Facebook lets you conduct split tests.

Testing will also help your ad gather some likes and comments which will increase social proof.

These are the 4 things you should before you run a Facebook ad. Start by optimizing the landing page by adding the pixel and share buttons. Also add a good Facebook thumbnail that is automatically picked when someone shares the webpage.

After that move onto the ad image and analyze the amount of text present on it. Finally, you can test the ad to see how well it converts before going live.

Do you follow a checklist to get the most out of your Facebook ads? What steps do you take before you run your ads? Please leave a comment below.