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If you have ran a Facebook Ad campaign before, you know they can be touchy. One ad goes down the drain, while another sky rockets. Or perhaps you've had just the mediocre ads, where you gain fans, but at a Cost-Per-Fan that hardly seems worth it. Here's some advice from my own experience:

1. Target Your Audience - If you are targeting a specific group of people with your ad make sure those targeting settings are selected. If you are a local restaurant you will most likely want to target just those in your local area, as opposed to the whole state or multiple states. Of course, you can run various ads to test. If you are targeting those interested in 'antiques' you may want to directly target those interested in antiques as opposed to a broad 'shopping' category. If you are a tour operator, you may want to specifically target travel agents, other operators, those interested in adventure travel and related fields. Of course you can always opt for the broad 'traveling' category. Keep age, location, and other various demographics and interests of your target audience in mind when setting up your ad. See Examples below (click on images to enlarge):

Antique Interest Precise Targeting:

Tour Operator Precise and Broad Targeting:

2. Shock Your Audience - OK, so by 'shock' your audience I mean to use wording or imagery that will jump out, stand out, and yes in some occasions shock. Use a funny image, abstract, unusual, etc. Anything that can relate back to your business someway, and create an almost immediate click through from a user wanting to see/read more. EX: Groupon uses an intriguing image, perhaps you've seen their image of an upside down house. This image is so odd that it works, whatever their message may be "Shake things up with Groupon", etc. Also, don't forget a strong call to action within your ad, see the example below:

3. Relevant Landing Page - Be sure that the ad matches the landing page, this is very important in retaining users attention. If your ad is promoting certain merchandise, a contest, promotion, etc, make sure your landing page contains that information. If you make users hunt for the information they clicked on the ad for in the first place, they will move on.

4. Try CPC/CPM - Determine what works best for your ad. In my experience CPC has worked best, but every business and ad is different. If you find your ad is receiving a lot of clicks, but not conversions, try switching to CPM (cost per impression). Same is true for the opposite, if your ad is receiving a large amount of impressions but not as many clicks, try switching to CPC for a lower overall cost. Of course if your ad is not doing as well as you would like, evaluate your text, image, and landing page.

5. Run Multiple Ads -It's best to create multiple ads to compare and contrast to see what works best. By running only one ad per campaign, you're cutting yourself short by not finding the full potential of your ads.

Use these 5 tips and test, test, test! Testing various ads is the best ad advice I can give, and the most effective! A good way to test your ads is to set up multiple ads within a campaign, say 3 - 4, and run them for the same length of time and compare the results. This will give you an idea of the best performing ad, which you can then tweak for even more improvement. Of course, if you have an ad that is working wonderfully, keep that ad running! If it works well keep it going, you don't want to make a change to that ad, instead create an identical ad with a slight change (text, targeting, image) to see if you can improve that ad even further.

If you have any other suggestions for effective Facebook ads and best practices please feel free to comment below.