Do you want to learn how to make money on Facebook ads? Excellent! Facebook has a massive reach with over 2 billion active users each month, and it’s a great place for businesses to find new customers.

But it isn’t just the number of Facebook users that make it the perfect place to advertise. It’s the fact that you can create highly targeted ads that reach your ideal customers or clients.

You can run those highly targeted Facebook ads for much less than you can run traditional forms of advertising (think radio, magazine, newspaper, TV, etc.), and your ROI with Facebook ads is significantly higher.

So the potential is there. But how do you tap into the world’s largest social media platform and learn how to make money on Facebook ads? We’re going to answer that question for you today.

You’re going to learn how to make money on Facebook ads through some real world strategies that work for a variety of small businesses.

Your Facebook ad objective

The first part of making money with Facebook ads is landing on an effective ad strategy is knowing what your objective is. Every business is different, and that’s reflected in different kinds of Facebook ad campaigns.

Here are the three different kinds of marketing objectives you can use Facebook ads for:

• Awareness: This is all about generating interest in your business.
• Consideration: You’re building more than interest – you want people to really start thinking about your business and how it can help them.
• Conversion: You’re targeting people who are likely to convert, or purchase a product or service.

Within each of those objectives, you have even more options for how you run your ads. Here’s what that looks like in Facebook:

An awareness campaign is about reaching people who are more likely to pay attention to your ads. The goal is to get people to be able to recall your business or ad a few days after seeing it.

The consideration campaign goes further with the goal of driving people off of Facebook and to your site (traffic), or getting people to interact with your ad (engagement), or to capture their email address (lead generation). Those are just a few objective options within a consideration campaign.

Conversion campaigns are all about getting people to complete a specific action. You’re trying to get people to opt-in to something, register, or make a purchase.

Which objective you choose not only depends on your business, but it also on a really important marketing concept called the funnel. Funnels are so important in making money on Facebook ads that we’re giving them an entire section.

Want to learn more about Facebook ads? Read about The Best Facebook Ads Course.

The sales funnel

If you want to learn how to make money on Facebook ads, then you have to understand what a sales funnel is.

A sales funnel is what you use to guide prospective customers down the path to becoming paying ones. It’s about finding the right audience and putting the right offers in front of them. You are warming people up to your business.

Sales funnels have three stages: awareness, engagement, and conversion.

At the top of the funnel is awareness. It’s a wider part of the funnel because you’re casting a wider net and trying to reach more people.

But not every single one of those people is going to be interested in your Facebook ads, so you can use metrics you gained after running awareness ads to create ads for engagement. This is fewer people, and the ads are tailored to people whose interests you’ve piqued.

A successful awareness campaign can do something really valuable – it can get you email addresses! You can use these to drip out email content and build lookalike audiences (another form of Facebook ads targeting).

Anyway, back to our funnel. Again, not everyone you reached with your engagement ads will be interested (this is totally normal and the point of having a sales funnel!). But, now you’re able to target people who really are interested. The relationship is getting serious, but they just need a little more hand-holding with a nice offer or a sexy landing page.

You can learn more about each stage of the funnel and see some examples at The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Sales Funnel.

Targeting your audience

The next part of learning how to make money on Facebook ads is putting your ad in front of the right people. You can make your audience as broad or well-defined as you want, and how you do that depends on the following criteria:

• Location: Show your ads to people in your city, community, state, etc.
• Demographics: Define your audience by age, gender, education, job title, etc.
• Interests: What kind of hobbies, activities, and interests your potential customers have.
• Behavior: Create ads based on how people use their devices and what kind of prior purchases they’ve made.
• Connections: This is defining your audience based on people who are connected to your Facebook page, or not.

Let’s say you’re running Facebook ads for a brand new local gym. What kind of criteria should you use?

Location would be extremely important. Think about how far people might be willing to drive to visit your gym.

Demographic information like age might be important too, especially depending on the kind of gym, but here you could also target Facebook users who are more likely to have the money to pay for a membership.

Interest is extremely important, and you can target people who have used Facebook to demonstrate interest in healthy living, nutrition, running, fitness, etc.

Some of the targeting is trial and error. You might find you need to broaden your reach, or you might find that you’re too wide already. Either way, you gain valuable insights into what does and doesn’t work as you go along.

Read more at The Magic of Facebook Ads for Local Businesses.

The Facebook ad

We’re finally to the ad itself, and a lot of people forget about all of the other stuff that goes into making money on Facebook ads. It’s clearly way more than an ad.

A successful Facebook ad has a couple of key components, and this is true no matter the objective.

• High-quality images: Original photos typically do better – show people the real business, not a stock image of one.
• Compelling copy: Your ad copy needs to be engaging. Maybe ask people a question, tell them to do something. Give them a reason to interact with your ad.

Here’s a nice example of an ad that hits us in all the right spots:

The picture of the mug grabs your attention, and such a simple copy. Yes, I am a girl boss! And I need that mug!  This ad can do a lot of work when it’s shown in front of the right audience. This ad is obviously targeted by demographics, and probably interests too.

This ad also has some simple and effective copy at the bottom of the ad. There is a 10% discount code. And if you click on that “Shop Now” button – this is called the CTA (call-to-action) – you head right to the website.

It’s a complete package of what a good Facebook ad should look like.

Learn more about creating Facebook ads that make money in the following articles:

• How to Create and Use Facebook Ad Templates
• Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Ad Specs
• What’s the Perfect Facebook Ad Size

Using offers in your Facebook ads

People see ads all day long, and you want to give someone a reason to pick your ad to click on. That’s why creating a compelling offer is a really effective strategy if your Facebook ads objective is engagement or conversion.

Your offer will depend on the kind of business you’re running ads for, and it can be a discount code, a recipe, a new workout, a pdf printable, a guide, a free email course, and more.

But whatever your offer is, make sure it’s a high-quality offer! The goal is to give people a taste of what they can expect from you.

You saw an example of a discount code offered with the mug, and here’s another example from a local grocery store.

This Jasper’s ad is offering up a free recipe, and you better believe that fig tart tastes amazing. When a Facebook user clicks on that ad, they are taken off-site to get the offer, and the hope is that they stay on the store’s website and click around a little more. Maybe the user will even put their email address in an opt-in form.

The end result is a potential customer who’s excited to step into Jasper’s Market. That’s a win!

Your next steps

You’ve just gained a basic understanding of how to make money on Facebook ads. This is information you can use to run Facebook ads for your own business, or you can make money running Facebook ads for other local businesses.

If you want more, we have two awesome Facebook ads courses to tell you about:

• The Facebook Side Hustle Course: This course teaches you how to start and run your own mini Facebook ad agency where you can make $1,000-$2,000/month per client in just 2-3 hours a week. It’s a comprehensive course that teaches you everything you need to know about running Facebook ads and how to find and secure clients who need your services. Click on that link for more information.
• Facebook Ads for Bloggers: This course is geared towards business owners. But don’t let the name fool you — online business owners, freelancers, bloggers, podcasters, and any business with a website can use this course to run Facebook ads for their own business. Learn more by clicking on that link!

Both of those courses dig way deeper into what you’ve learned today, plus really valuable ones we didn’t cover, like your ad spend, lead and landing pages, the Facebook Pixel, and more. Basically everything you need to know to make money on Facebook ads.

But if you’re not interested in a course right now, no problem. We have a lot of great free content on this site that will explain more about Facebook ads, including:

• Learn How to Create Facebook Real Estate Ads
• Facebook Ad Certification: Worth It or Worthless?
• The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads for Entrepreneurs
• Your 7-Step Facebook Ad Manager Training Guide
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Facebook Messenger Ads

The final word on how to make money with Facebook ads

Facebook is ready for you. Its ad platform has all the tools, bells and whistles you could ever need to create a highly effective ad campaign. All types of businesses use Facebook to advertise and find new customers.

Now it’s your turn. Take advantage of what Facebook has to offer and start making money today.