Experience with Facebook Advertising

Facebook ads are by far one of the skills that took the most time to learn and understand.

It’s what taught me how to have more patience. Sitting in the classroom for years was all that I knew and suddenly switching trying to learn a real-world technical skill that I never learned in high-school taught me a lot. I remember sitting in my room trying to create my first ad and it took me almost a day. This was a shock because for once I wasn’t getting graded on something I was doing, but something I was creating for myself. This is one of my first experiences showing me the real-world side of business rather than being lectured on it.

I would spend hours and hours of time researching and watching videos every day on how to run Facebook Ads because I’ve always enjoyed trying to learn new technical skills. It took a lot of patience because I was getting frustrated all of the time because I couldn’t figure it out and there was always that one technical aspect that got in the way.

As I kept trying new ways of running ads and failing, I learned little skills I didn’t think I needed to know which down the line came to be very important.

Understanding Data Analytics

Running ads for my first couple of websites really interested me because I had the ability to see the data on everybody. I would always be looking into all the data like where people were from, age, gender, how many people added to cart, purchases, return on ad spend, etc. At first, I thought it was cool looking at the data and didn’t really do much with it, but as I kept running ads I started to get a full understanding of how well each campaign was doing and started to use the data to change and create new campaigns. As I was able to play around with the data and create new ad sets and see all the add to carts, customers initiating check, video views, and purchases. It became clearer to me how it worked and how each ad would optimize. Once I was able to see results from my ad campaigns getting me sales on my personal kitchen store selling can openers and package re-sealers, I got more confident and started to spend more money. I was always so nervous to spend money on ads because I didn’t want to waste my hard-earned money.

At the time, I didn’t realize it but instead of having a big budget and going through a lot of money trying to get results, it taught me how to work with a small budget. This was great for me because it really made me pay attention to all the small details that I may not have learned if I had more money thinking a higher budget would have got me results and then maybe getting discouraged.

Being Responsible and Organized

As I started to spend more money, I got more data from Facebook. It taught me very quickly that I needed to create a better solution to be organized because spending more money on ads was generating more revenue, which translated to having to fulfill more orders and answer many customer support emails. I created a new custom columns to look at my data every day as if I were someone clicking on my add and going through the process to purchase:

1. Budget I was spending
2. Link Clicks
3. How many video/content views
4. Number of add to carts
5. Number of checkouts initiated
6. Number of purchases
7. ROAS(Return on Ad Spend)
8. Cost per purchase

Creating this process allowed me to see my data every day in a set row which saved me time from having to search for it and try to memorize what the numbers were. This made me feel more confident in my ability to run ads because I was able to see more data and end campaigns that were spending too much not getting me enough results.

Facebook’s advertising platform was one of my first glimpses into real-world work experience. By jumping into Facebook ads it taught me more skills other than Facebook. It showed me how to analyze many different parts of data and with that came organization. It made me think of different ways to create a system for myself that created a better workflow and that’s why I created my own eight custom rows as I have listed above. It wasn’t something I thought I would have to do when I first started but is a great example of what other skills you learn when jumping into real-world business experiences.