CSL 022 – How to Create Facebook Ads for your Church: A Step-by-Step Guide

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:00):

Hello there, and welcome to ChurchSpring Live episode 022. I am so excited to be having Peder with me today. Peder is our special guest for the past couple of weeks and through half of November. So Peder we’re excited to still have you on the show here.

Peder Aadahl (00:00:21):

Absolutely.

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:22):

Yeah. So while we’re waiting for people to jump in, we are talking about a very hot topic today, Facebook Ads, oh, really fun stuff coming up, so while we wait for people to jump in I do want to introduce a few new members to the ChurchSpring family. Go ahead, I see we already have some people introducing themselves. They’re adding comments. That’s awesome. So if you’re tuning in now, go ahead and introduce yourself, add where you’re from, your church name, so that we can say a special hello.

Isabelle Faletti (00:00:59):

We do have a few new members to the ChurchSpring family this week. We have The Gathering Place from Ohio. If Rohn were here he would say his little thing he says about Ohio, sorry, Rohn, if you’re listening. He’s from Ohio. For all those who don’t know Rohn, he’s our co-founder of ChurchSpring here. We have a church from New York, Crosspoint Christian Church, and Hope City Church from Arizona. I actually used to live in Arizona for about three years. I love that state. I love the heat, I love the palm trees, I love the Phoenix sun, so shout out to Hope City from Arizona.

Isabelle Faletti (00:01:41):

If you are new to ChurchSpring and you just stumbled across this Facebook live today, first off, welcome to ChurchSpring. Our mission is very simple, we partner with churches to help them build intuitive, affordable, and frustration free websites. And ChurchSpring Live is an extension that we can partner with churches all over the nation. So again, my name is Isabelle, and Peder here, he’s our digital marketing guru as we talk about Facebook Ads and Google and Google analytics this fall season.

Isabelle Faletti (00:02:17):

So, it looks like we have some familiar faces and some new faces today. So, welcome Matthew from, also Ohio. Awesome. Always glad to see your face. See, because I’m imagining what your face looks like over there, Matthew. Oh, Bishop Jerry. Awesome. I know you and I talk in support ticket, so welcome. Happy to have you here. Ron Gardner, welcome back. And we have Judy from St. Paul. Awesome.

Isabelle Faletti (00:02:52):

Welcome everybody. Again, if you’re just now joining, please introduce yourself. This is a community of people, so don’t be shy. I say this frequently in our ChurchSpring Live, but I like to pretend that we’re all sitting around a table at a cute little coffee shop here in Colorado, Minnesota, South Dakota, Arizona, wherever you’re from, and we’re just having a conversation. And to have the conversation that means we’re talking with each other. So, since Peder and I are talking to you and we can’t hear the audience necessarily, that’s where the comment section comes in.

Isabelle Faletti (00:03:30):

So, yeah, comment away. If you love what we’re saying, let us know. If you have questions, use that comment section. That is the way that we can use Facebook live and the technology and the way that it is created. So, we will be answering questions about Facebook Ads, how to launch Facebook Ads, so if you have questions as we get into today’s topic, please ask. I’m not joking when I say that Peder is a Facebook ad expert you guys. People pay him for his knowledge. People pay him for what he’s going to be sharing today.

Isabelle Faletti (00:04:07):

So you just have a wonderful man right now who’s willing to just step in and help the church and share with just the knowledge that God has given him. So ask questions as they come up as we dig into today’s topic. That being said, we are going to be talking about a lot, so do not feel like you need to be writing everything down. Feel free to jot down some notes, that helps me when I’m learning about a new topic, however, we will, as always, have the replay available. It’ll be at churchspring.com/csl022. So after this episode you can go back, listen, we’ll be adding any show notes, any resources that we mention today. And that’ll be at churchspring.com/csl022.

Isabelle Faletti (00:05:03):

So, if you do know someone who is within your church or maybe a fellow church leader or communications director at your church who would benefit from this topic of Facebook Ads, how to launch Facebook Ads, go ahead and tag them right now in this Facebook live event or share it on your Facebook post. I was actually talking with our communications director at my church earlier today about a Facebook ad question. She’s very well versed in Facebook Ads and she ran into a small hiccup. So there are people within your church who can benefit from this topic. So go ahead, tag, share them, help get the word out that this is a really great free resource that we don’t want anybody to be missing out on.

Isabelle Faletti (00:05:54):

All right. So, I do have a question for everybody who’s tuning in. Obviously we’re talking about Facebook Ads, that’s not a secret here, but I would love to know what your experience is with Facebook Ads for your church. So comment below if you have any experience with a Facebook ad. So have you launched a Facebook ad for your church or maybe for some other ministry or business? So comment below right now on what your experience is with Facebook, if you’ve launched any Facebook Ads, and that would just help us know where you’re at and maybe even give us some questions.

Isabelle Faletti (00:06:35):

So I see Judy, you said that, “I’ve been playing with promotions for about four weeks.” That’s awesome. We’ll be talking into specifics about ads, so that’s good to know that you have some context. So, yeah, let me know, drop a comment. Yeah, Judy, perfect, you’ve launched quite a few.

Isabelle Faletti (00:06:58):

Well, Walter, you said, “We’ve done it for our church.”

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:02):

Walter, good to have you, by the way. Yeah, that’s awesome. Today’s episode would be good for those who are completely new to Facebook Ads. If you are very new and you just have no idea where to even start, we’ll show you actually where to start. And for those who do have some experience, who you’ve been playing around already in Facebook Ads, you probably know at this point, you’ve probably felt at this point that Facebook Ads, it can be confusing, it can be overwhelming, it’s easy to feel like you’re just stuck with ads. And if you launch something, how do you even know if it works? How do you launch the ad? Are you creating it right? There’s a lot of questions.

Isabelle Faletti (00:07:47):

Sometimes it can feel the more you get into ads the more questions you have, and that’s why we’re doing today’s topic, so that we can unveil all the mystery, we can answer all the questions that you’ve had. I see we have questions already coming in. How much does it cost? Yeah. Posts versus ads. So these are excellent questions, and we are going to be taking you from the very beginning, how you can launch your ad, we’ll be talking about creatives, everything you need to know about Facebook Ads.

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:20):

So, I do want to mention, since I just saw Jerry’s question come in today or just now about, how much does it cost? It’s a great question, Jerry. We actually talked a lot about that in last week’s episode of ChurchSpring Live where we talked about what you need to know before you launch your ad. So today is part two of, great, you’ve established your foundation, and now we’re going to build on that foundation, now we’ll actually launch an ad. So Jerry, go ahead and listen to last week’s episode.

Isabelle Faletti (00:08:55):

Sometime this week I’ll pop up the banner for that. It’s churchspring.com/csl021, and we talk about, what do you need to know for budget, what is the difference between boosted posts and a Facebook ad, and a whole lot of other incredibly helpful topics. So churchspring.com/csl021. However, Jerry, that is a good question, and you can start with a very small budget. Peder, I think you said… What did you say, $5 a day is a great starting point?

Peder Aadahl (00:09:31):

Yeah. I mean, I should say the minimum is $5 a day. So, yeah, between 5 and 10, it’s really not a bad idea to start with something like that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:09:40):

Yeah. That’s great. All right. Well, it looks like we have a lot of excitement and engagement and questions already about this topic. So, Peder, let’s just jump right in and share with these fine folks how we can launch a Facebook ad for the church to ultimately grow their church and bring in new guests.

Peder Aadahl (00:10:01):

Yes, absolutely. Well, once again, it’s great to be here. To Isabelle’s point, if you go back and listen to last week’s episode, that’s going to have a lot of context for I know some of the questions in here already, but we’ll be sure to try to answer them here as well, but there’s a lot of the context of some of the questions here that you’ve already asked today that we do answer in the previous session.

Peder Aadahl (00:10:24):

But, starting today we’re going to be going through actually setting up an ad from start to finish utilizing something called Ads Manager. That is different than boosting a post. We did talk about that last week a little bit, just slightly. Long story short, Ads Manager is just going to give you more options. And so we want to show you that view for that section.

Peder Aadahl (00:10:45):

We just want to talk a little bit about that we are going to show a very high level overview of Facebook Ads and its capabilities, as well as just walking through something in a basic sense that most, everyone here is going to probably want to try at some point in time or have a use case for in some way.

Peder Aadahl (00:11:04):

Now, there is some things with Facebook Ads we just want to talk a little bit about briefly before we hop into Ads Manager to showcase this that probably you’re going to maybe eventually hear about or have some questions about. The first thing is something called the Facebook pixel. All that simply means is it’s a piece of code that Facebook gives us that’s associated with your ads account that can be placed on your website. So the first session we did about Google Analytics, for example, we pasted a code in the back end of ChurchSpring, similar concept, you’d be pasting a Facebook pixel code into the backend of ChurchSpring or on your website.

Peder Aadahl (00:11:49):

And what that does is it just helps Facebook understand traffic that’s coming to your website, and actually help with ads as well. It is a little bit more of an advanced level for sure, but we also just want to make sure that you’re aware of that. It does allow for other targeting options in some capacity as well, but needless to say, you don’t necessarily have to have that in place to do Facebook Ads. We just want to make sure that you are aware that that exists.

Isabelle Faletti (00:12:15):

Yeah. I’m glad that you pointed that out, Peder, because that will pop up in Facebook when people are starting to launch an ad. So I’m glad that you mentioned that so that people won’t have just questions about, is this important, do I have to have this set up?

Isabelle Faletti (00:12:31):

And I know for all of those who are new you may be thinking, I have 20 other questions about this pixel, and that’s okay. That is okay. I will link some helpful resources that Facebook provides in our show notes. And then, Peder is a Facebook Ads marketing specialist. And so if you do have any specific questions about how can you launch ads for your church after today’s episode, Peder actually is offering a 30 minute free digital consult call where you can ask these questions.

Isabelle Faletti (00:13:10):

Again, he helps churches throughout the entire nation with Facebook Ads, with Google Ads. So for the Facebook pixel specifically with the more advanced options that we just don’t have time to dig into today, Peder really is the next best step of taking that next level. So just wanted to throw that out there for anybody who’s listening and just thinking, I have questions, I want to dig into this more. Right now the goal is to actually walk through Ads Manager, but Peder’s your guy for the next steps.

Peder Aadahl (00:13:43):

And I’ll just give a shout out, take advantage of that if that seems like something that can be helpful to you. Some people have already taken advantage of that from last week, so it’s been great talking with them. But yes. All right. Going on here, the next thing is when we talk about the Ads Manager, so once again, I’ll just bring up the fact that someone brought up a boosted post versus using something called the Ads Manager. Last week we really dived into the difference between the two of them on that.

Peder Aadahl (00:14:12):

Many of you are going to be familiar with the concept of boosting a post. On your church website or your Facebook page underneath your posts, if you’re an admin on that page or somehow connected to that page, you’re going to see a little box that says boost post. And there are some capabilities there that Facebook gives you. But the concept with that is that it’s just so wide open, but Ads Manager is just going to give you more specific targeting. And that’s what we’re going to show you today, how to create an ad in that.

Peder Aadahl (00:14:40):

But when you’re creating in Ads Manager or usually in Ads Manager, when you’re going to Ads Manager, let’s say, from the boosted posts section, you’re probably going to your own personal account. And we just want to note the fact that sometimes when it comes to churches you can have multiple people working on the Facebook page, maybe even working within Facebook Ads potentially. There’s something called business manager, and what that is is it’s just a way that allows you so that there is one overarching account that has an ads account, let’s say, for the church specifically, and that way other people can access that and take advantage of that and use it for promoting things from the church.

Peder Aadahl (00:15:25):

So, I know that can be a little confusing right there, but we also just want to note that that is something that exists. So if you ever heard the term Ads Manager and then somebody says business manager, they’re essentially a similar concept, it’s just one is more of a conglomerate that a lot of people can be attached to and one is… for many of you, when you look in Ads Manager it’s probably going to be tied to your personal profile, your personal account within Facebook. So, just want to make sure to get that out as well.

Isabelle Faletti (00:15:56):

Yeah. And so, Peder, you will walk through the beginning level of starting ads, and that’s with the Ads Manager. So, again, if you’re listening and you have questions about the advanced options for business, the business ad manager, that’s when Peder will be happy to hop on a consult call with you. I’m popping up the URL there. We’ll talk more about that afterwards, but it’s digitaloutreach.church/cs. So, don’t want anybody to feel like we’re just throwing you information and then just running away.

Peder Aadahl (00:16:31):

I should know. One of the reasons why we did want to make sure to talk about that is because some of you’ve already talked about the fact when we talk about Google Analytics, for example, that somebody else has access to it, that you don’t have access to it for the church. This is a good example of that. Somebody else was running Facebook Ads for the church or something of that nature and they left or something happened, whatever it may be, the church no longer has access to that. That’s why you would have something like business manager, something that stays essentially with the church no matter what.

Isabelle Faletti (00:17:04):

Yeah. All right. So hopefully that set the ground. Those are terms that you will see when you start digging into Ads Manager. So, Peder, I’ll go ahead and share your screen here and we can start jumping into the good stuff here.

Peder Aadahl (00:17:22):

All right. Okay. And maybe just to review here quickly, before you get to something that looks something like this, okay, or this, and these are all different ads we’ve run here for different things to help churches here at Digital Outreach, but before you get to something like that you’re going to need to utilize what we call, once again, the Ads Manager. And this is what it looks like in the backend.

Peder Aadahl (00:17:52):

So, we are going to take time right now to go through creating an ad so you can visually see this, the walkthrough, everything of that nature. I would say you don’t necessarily have to take notes, you’re just going to have to visually look at this and probably come back to the recording probably if you want to do this yourself, or pull up a screen and do it with me. There you go.

Peder Aadahl (00:18:13):

So, this is a test account I have, but this honestly is going to look something like a lot of you… This is going to look like what you have in the back end, especially in your personal profile. This actually is, for the most part, a personal profile view of Ads Manager. All right. So, creating a campaign, let’s just start from the beginning. When you click create to create an ad Facebook is going to give you objectives to figure out what you want.

Peder Aadahl (00:18:43):

When it comes to the Facebook pixel there’s something called conversions that are very helpful for that. That’d be something like you are trying to have people submit information or submit a form maybe on your website. Once again, that’s more the advanced type stuff. The main thing that most of you are going to take advantage of in some capacity is traffic to your website. You’re working to try to bring people over to come check out the church or a church event that you have on your website in some capacity. And so we’re going to use that use case scenario for today.

Peder Aadahl (00:19:15):

So, some of these other ones just quickly, engagement just means engagement with the ad. The problem with that is that it doesn’t mean it’s really got a directive outside of people liking and loving and maybe sharing it. Some people might come to the website, some might not. The thing is since Facebook has a big algorithm in the back backend that helps determine what you’re looking for, if you’re looking to drive traffic, that’s what it’s focused on doing. If you’re looking for people to like and love your post, that’s what it’s going to do underneath something like that.

Peder Aadahl (00:19:46):

So that doesn’t mean you won’t get some likes and loves maybe underneath a traffic campaign, it’s just, that’s not the main objective. But we are going to go with that because, once again, we’re trying to… In our case we’re going to be highlighting a Christmas Eve service that we’re going to walk through here. So, we’re going to click continue. And then it’s going to pop out here with a overview of the campaign level. It’s also going to create something called the ad set level as well as the ad level.

Peder Aadahl (00:20:18):

And when you’re boosting a post all you’re essentially doing is boosting a post that you put on your Facebook page, and that is essentially the ad level. But when you’re working inside of Ads Manager, the campaign level, like you said at the beginning there, we chose the objective of driving traffic.

Peder Aadahl (00:20:35):

And then below that you might have, in this case, what they call ad sets. We have an ad set for the Christmas Eve service. We might have an ad set for a Thanksgiving giveaway of some sort. We might have something of that nature where we have multiple things that all are still focused on driving traffic to the website, but it’s separate in some capacity, or we’re targeting a different location maybe of some sort. So, we are going to call this Christmas Eve ad set.

Isabelle Faletti (00:21:08):

Yeah. And Peder, to your point, Facebook takes you through each of these steps. So, as Peder here is taking us through each step he is essentially following Facebook’s prompting. So if that was a bit confusing about the three different levels, that’s okay, just trust Facebook in this sense, and fill out the budget and schedule, and audience, and click next. And Facebook, they want you to launch an ad, so they do prompt you next steps that you need to take.

Peder Aadahl (00:21:42):

Right. Facebook does want you to succeed. I want to make that clear. I should also say that, probably might be helpful, is the ad set level is where you set up the targeting typically of where you’re going to… the locations of where you’re going to be targeting and who you’re going to be reaching out to. So just to showcase this, because this is brand new and this is going to be just like this for you guys as well, Facebook is in default YouTube targeting everybody within Facebook, everybody 18 to 65 and above. And so you can see here on the right-hand side it says, would you like to target 230 million people?

Isabelle Faletti (00:22:23):

$5 a day for targeting-

Peder Aadahl (00:22:26):

In one sense…

Isabelle Faletti (00:22:27):

… that many people, you’re not going to get very far.

Peder Aadahl (00:22:28):

Right. In one sense on a ministry level it’s like, that would be awesome, but we’re just not going to reach that many people with $5 a day. So, for your church specifically, once again, using that idea of an event like a Christmas Eve service here, and you should know, you can set up a date to start in the future if you’d like as well or end at a certain time. The daily budget here we’re going to… I’m just going to go off where we started in the beginning of, you can set $5 to $10 a day, that’s what we recommend to begin with so you can see how things perform. So we’re going to do that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:23:01):

Yeah. And setting an end date is really helpful so that… In the Christmas Eve example here-

Peder Aadahl (00:23:07):

Yeah, it’s mutual.

Isabelle Faletti (00:23:08):

… we don’t have to manually go in and end an ad. It also helps you prevent from overspending. Let’s say if the Christmas Eve service ends on December 24th, you can set an end date of 11:59 PM on December 24th. So that’s just helpful, just another tip that you can manage your budget well without you having to spend a ton of time on Facebook Ads.

Peder Aadahl (00:23:38):

Yes. So, that’s a great, great example. So I’m going to set it to be essentially a week prior to promoting it and ending on the 24th Christmas Eve at noon, because the service will be after that in our case. All right. Then down here comes to actually targeting specific people. And this is where we get into the actual location targeting. That is very important for you guys to make sure to look over.

Peder Aadahl (00:24:09):

Custom audiences, this is a little bit more of an advanced thing. This would maybe involve sometimes the Facebook pixel, maybe the list that you have for the church maybe on an email provider, you can upload that and target people that way as well. But more specifically in this case, since we’re trying to reach the community potentially, we’re going to go do this.

Peder Aadahl (00:24:33):

And you’ll notice this drop down here, for a lot of you this is where, especially since it’s probably going to be very local to your area, you might want to talk to people who’ve been recently in this location, that might potentially be a scenario, but for a lot of you it’s going to be people who live in the location that you’re actually targeting. I’m just going to select that. And we’re going to use the use case, again, that we did last week of Colorado Springs.

Isabelle Faletti (00:25:06):

Colorado Springs. Represent. That’s where I’m from, from everybody who’s listening. It’s where I’m live streaming out of right now, Colorado Springs.

Peder Aadahl (00:25:15):

There we go.

Isabelle Faletti (00:25:17):

Very proud of my state.

Peder Aadahl (00:25:19):

Very proud. And as you can see here, it automatically defaults to a radius of 25 miles. Your church might not want to reach out that far. Obviously if you’re a rural church you might have people come from all… I mean, you could go even farther if you want, up to 50 miles. But the smallest you can do is 10 miles. So for a lot of you, especially in an urban area where you have a centric location, that doesn’t mean you can’t reach beyond that [inaudible 00:25:45], but doing a 10 mile radius is probably going to be just fine for what you’re trying to do.

Isabelle Faletti (00:25:51):

Yeah. And with that, the radius, even just thinking through, when you hear of new guests coming into your church, where are they typically from? Are they typically from your surrounding neighborhoods?

Peder Aadahl (00:26:03):

That’s true.

Isabelle Faletti (00:26:04):

Are they driving 30 minutes? And like Peder said, it does depend on your location, yeah, if you’re more in a farm town and people are used to driving an hour. I lived in Iowa, and me and my family drove an hour to South Dakota, actually Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for church. So it really does depend on where you’re from, whereas in Colorado Springs, typically, people are not as keen to be driving an hour for churches, just because we have more options literally in my neighborhood. So really think through where you’re at and where your church body is coming from and when you’re selecting that radius right there.

Peder Aadahl (00:26:53):

Yes. So, to piggyback off what Isabelle was just saying there, you’ll notice that when we targeted Colorado Springs, the 10 mile radius, we dropped from 230 million down to 470,000 people. So you can always look at the right-hand side here to begin to see how many people you’re going to reach. Some of you will recognize something like this a little bit from the boosted post section where it says, hey, this is how many people you might reach during this time. That’s essentially what this estimated daily result section is.

Peder Aadahl (00:27:24):

I’d also note that because we chose the objective of driving traffic or, in this case, people clicking on the link to come to the website, it also gives us an estimate of how many people we’d reach this way as well with the budget we have. So, that can be helpful sometimes when you’re starting out to… If you have a short amount of time you can increase the budget and you’ll see this also change as well.

Peder Aadahl (00:27:50):

All right. However, we should probably look down here and be like, well, 18 to 65, maybe we want to reach everybody in that demographic, but maybe we want to get maybe a little more specific. For example, one of the things that we have done is, with some churches, is we’ve had ministries that were targeting maybe specific… people with children specifically.

Peder Aadahl (00:28:15):

One of the things I brought up last week or that you saw maybe in the ad example earlier was Monday night childcare. That’s very specific to families or even single parents that have children, having a way for them to be able to drop their kids off and take some time and do some things that they didn’t… not really have the ability to do before. It’s a ministry there. So in that case it would be worth it so that when we spend our money we’re actually reaching the right people, right, to drive them in.

Peder Aadahl (00:28:43):

And so in that case you can go down to this detailed targeting area and start typing in different things if you want. And you can see when I start typing parents, you can begin to see right off the bat I can start targeting people that are pre-teens, teenagers, I mean, if you’ve got a youth group ministry, this is a good example, preschoolers. Something sometimes that can be helpful there, sometimes a church will do a preschool. There you go. That’s another way you can go about targeting people like that. There’s just a lot of different ways that you can go about targeting specific groups of people.

Peder Aadahl (00:29:20):

And, let’s do this, let’s do parents all, and there we go. We went from 470,000 down to 96,000. So you can begin to see you get more and more specific on who you’re able to reach. And this is what is a big difference between this and a boosted post.

Isabelle Faletti (00:29:43):

Yeah. And defining your targeting, I would argue, is one of the keys to having a successful Facebook ad. Because if you do not define your location, if you do not define the age or the specific detail targeting such as parents, then you’re just blasting your information out to anybody who will listen.

Isabelle Faletti (00:30:11):

And the beautiful thing about Facebook Ads, about advertising in the day and age that we’re in, is that you truly can specialize, you can target, you can reach certain people based on their interests, based on their family status, based on their location. So if you see that potential reach dropping from 470,000 to 96,000, that’s actually a good thing in this case.

Isabelle Faletti (00:30:39):

You’ll see that the little barometer, it’s still in the middle, says green, your audience is defined. That’s a good thing. You want a defined audience, especially with your budget. You want to be using your budget well. So if your audience is defined, then you’re helping Facebook understand who is the most ideal audience to truly like or react well to your ad and click through to your website.

Isabelle Faletti (00:31:05):

So if this audience idea, this audience targeting is new to you, whether you’re running ads already or you’re not, then I really encourage you to spend some time on this audience portion, play around, again, like Peder said, think through, what is my ad for? Is it a Christmas Eve service, is it a preschool, is it a youth ministry event that I’m pushing out? And then that will impact your audience here.

Peder Aadahl (00:31:35):

Yes. Yup. Indeed.

Isabelle Faletti (00:31:40):

And real quick, we have a question from Judy. And Judy, we’ll talk about this more maybe after, but I want to address it since we’re talking about audiences and you asked, “Given the fact that we are embracing virtual worship, can this area be expanded?”

Peder Aadahl (00:31:55):

Absolutely. Yup.

Isabelle Faletti (00:31:58):

Yep. Yeah. So it can, and it really comes back to what actually I just mentioned. You want to be using your budget well, and it always helps to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. So if you’re seeing a Facebook ad for a worship night, for a virtual worship night in the next state to you, how would you respond to that? Would you make time out of your schedule to attend that live event or would you not?

Isabelle Faletti (00:32:33):

Typically, doing more of a local event, because you have that name recognition, you have that trust, that does help more so, but you’re absolutely right, Judy, since this is more of a virtual live streaming world that we are in right now, you can play around with expanding your radius differently and just seeing what your engagement, what your click through is.

Peder Aadahl (00:32:56):

Yes. There’s some use cases there where if you had an audience list that was maybe sometimes outside of the area that has been attending some of your virtual services, I could see maybe targeting them. That is a little bit more advanced as well.

Isabelle Faletti (00:33:07):

Yep. That’s a good question though, Judy.

Peder Aadahl (00:33:09):

Yep. Absolutely. All right. Then looking at this, just to continue down here, you want to make note here that… looks like somebody asked just about potential reach, question mark. I just want to take a note of that. What that simply means is this is Facebook’s estimate of the size of the pool of peop… yeah, the size of the amount of people that are in this targeting pool, for lack of a better phrase.

Peder Aadahl (00:33:38):

In other words, the people who match 10 mile radius around Colorado Springs between the ages of 18 and 65 who are parents, that’s how many people estimates are in this group as a total, if you reached all of them type concept, that’s what that would be. So hopefully that gives some explanation on that.

Peder Aadahl (00:34:03):

Down here at the bottom you’re going to see placements. For the most part, I’m just going to recommend to everybody that you probably can just select automatic placements. It’s going to be the easiest for you. Manual placements, I’ll just note here, this… Automatic placements puts it out everywhere on the Facebook network essentially, that includes Instagram, that includes Facebook Messenger.

Peder Aadahl (00:34:28):

And this is audience network, and this is essentially some ads that Facebook has the ability to push out that are beyond facebook.com or beyond Instagram, things of that nature that are out on different websites, different apps, potentially. That’s how you’re able to reach people who are maybe on those platforms as well. Now, if you just want to reach people on Facebook and Instagram, it’s pretty easy. You can just unselect these, and you’re going to be directly targeting them, or one or the other, you can just unselect one.

Isabelle Faletti (00:35:04):

Yeah. To your point, the automatic, or what does Facebook call it? The automatic placements-

Isabelle Faletti (00:35:11):

… the recommended… Yeah. That’s a good place if you’re starting out. Facebook is smart, and it will show your ad to the people on whatever platform they are on. So starting out choose the recommended option, you can’t go wrong with that.

Peder Aadahl (00:35:28):

Yep. All right. So let’s get into actually the ad section. So within each ad set there’s the ability to create ads, and this is obviously what people are going to see. Obviously when you’re doing the boosted post it’s just a post on the Facebook page, but this is actually you going out and being able to create an ad and versions of ads actually to test sometimes. And we’ll showcase how to do that in a second here.

Peder Aadahl (00:35:54):

I’m actually going to give an example of a church here. I should note here, dynamic formats and creative, I’m not going to go through these things. These are a little more, sometimes they’re more advanced. We’re just going to act like this is a single image ad for the most part and walk through the different options. You can play around with this, but, for the most part, we’re just going to try to streamline this so it makes it very simple to understand. Single image or video, this is just what we’re going to recommend you start with for sure.

Peder Aadahl (00:36:30):

When you come down here to the ad creative, and this is where you’re going to need to upload potentially the, well, actually this is where you need to upload your images or potentially a video. Click add media, we’re going to add an image, and I’m going to upload one. Here we go. [inaudible 00:37:00]. Christmas Eve service.

Isabelle Faletti (00:37:10):

It’s coming up soon.

Peder Aadahl (00:37:11):

There we go. And you can begin to see then, okay, all right, it starts to begin to preview what things are going to look like. It’s going to show you what it looks like on the other placements that Facebook is going to reach out to or be pushing your ad out to, on the right-hand side as well. And then just working through adding the text and headline and description, probably more specifically the one thing that you want to make sure, I know this sounds cliché, but just make sure you have the right URL of where you’re directing people to go. It’s amazing how even somebody like myself has to make sure I double check that even being inside of the ads platform [inaudible 00:37:48].

Peder Aadahl (00:37:49):

So, I’m going to paste in a URL for my ChurchSpring website. And obviously it’s got a bunch of gobbledygook, which it defaults to, by the way. This is why I need to go back up here and start correcting things to what you want it to be. So…

Isabelle Faletti (00:38:10):

Yeah, Walter, you just asked, “Is this where we upload our landing page?” That’s a good question. So you will want to create your landing page on your website before you get to the step of creating your ad. So, in our Christmas Eve service we walk through actually how to create a Christmas Eve landing page. So you would already have that created on your website. You would then copy your URL for that specific landing page and then paste it right where Peder pasted his website on the website URL.

Isabelle Faletti (00:38:43):

So then when people see your ad on their phone, on their laptop, they can then click the ad and they will be directed to wherever you are telling people to in this website URL section. Yeah. And as you add the text, as you add the headline, you’ll see that the ad does update in real time so that you can see what it’ll look like for people.

Peder Aadahl (00:39:11):

Absolutely.

Isabelle Faletti (00:39:12):

Yeah. So, like Peder mentioned, it is important that you customize the text, the headline, because Facebook will place default text on it based on your landing or based on your website link. And that’s typically not created for people to take an action from an ad. So make sure to take the time to think through and write out some engaging ad copy, ad text.

Peder Aadahl (00:39:40):

That is very true. Yes. All right. And this is where you actually can do some additional things of, you can add additional options if you’d like to try some different text copy, you can add different headlines, things of that nature. I better make sure… Make sure that your times match the creative. 7:00 PM and 7:00 PM. Yeah. And then once you’re comfortable feeling like this looks good to use, then you can publish it. So, I think… Should we do that? I just want to-

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:26):

Lets do it.

Peder Aadahl (00:40:26):

… make… All right.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:27):

Let’s hit the publish button.

Peder Aadahl (00:40:29):

Right. So we have a set up there.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:33):

So if you don’t have-

Peder Aadahl (00:40:35):

Yes, this is good.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:35):

… your…

Peder Aadahl (00:40:35):

This is good.

Isabelle Faletti (00:40:36):

Yeah, that’s perfect. So we won’t be actually publishing it right now because we don’t need everybody to be seeing Peder’s card, but this is helpful to see. If you haven’t already set up your card on file for Facebook Ads, then it will prompt you to. Again, Facebook wants you to launch an ad, so it will make sure that you’re doing everything that you need to to launch the ad. So you will need to place your card on file, it can be your church card, whatever card you use for this budget line item in your church. You can add that and then hit publish, and then it will take some time for Facebook to approve of the ad based on their own set of approval process.

Isabelle Faletti (00:41:20):

Peder, how long does it take typically for an ad such as this with an image to be approved?

Peder Aadahl (00:41:27):

An ad such as this where it’s just primarily driving traffic, it will pro… Within 24 hours it should be approved. So, when you publish it it’ll go from a draft status to a in review status, and that’s where Facebook’s going in. Now, if Facebook does see an issue it will not publish the ad and let you know of the issues that you need to change.

Isabelle Faletti (00:41:53):

Yeah. Great. So we’ll pretend that we were able to hit publish. So, Peder, do you want to navigate back to what would happen if they click publish? What would be the default page that Facebook would bring you back to?

Peder Aadahl (00:42:11):

Yep. So, it would default you typically back to either the campaign view, the ad set view, or the ad view, whichever one you’d started on to begin with. It’d bring you back to this page. As you can see, everything here that we’ve done, some tests and it’s including last week, they’re all in a draft status. That just means they’re not published. So you would see a similar symbol here when they’re published, instead of in draft it would say in review. And then when it is ready it would go from in draft to active.

Isabelle Faletti (00:42:47):

Yeah. Perfect. And so this is the area where you can review how your ads are doing. So, Peder, I know we don’t want to go into too many details on that because that could be a whole nother Facebook live session, whole courses are created around Facebook Ads analytics. So, can you give us a very high level of how people should interact with the reporting section of Facebook Ads?

Peder Aadahl (00:43:17):

Yeah. As a matter of fact, we probably should maybe… we can probably even pull up an example here to take a look at.

Isabelle Faletti (00:43:23):

Perfect.

Peder Aadahl (00:43:23):

Go back to one of our previous examples. So if we look over here on the right-hand side, somebody was asking about understanding how things are performing, things of that nature. This is a good example of that where, especially when we’re doing a link click one, once again, we can begin to understand, okay, we got eight link clicks yesterday, in this case it cost us $1 and $7 cents per link click from this ad. And I will note that in some cases you can change the view of what things look like in the analytics. It defaults to this. That is an okay one to view.

Peder Aadahl (00:44:12):

The one that everyone should probably get familiar with, or I would say a second option to look at is the performance in clicks toggle here. And what that does is you begin to understand that, yes, you had eight people click the link, but you also had 20 people click on the ad overall, things of that nature. How many of the eight were unique? That means how many individuals, if you would. In other words, you could have eight and you could have six. In other words, six people clicked on the ad eight times, if that makes sense.

Peder Aadahl (00:44:48):

And then beginning to understand impressions, that just means the number of times the ad was served. And reach, this is the amount of people it reached. So if you remember back at that one section, somebody asked about this, the potential reach. So if this was looking at that same pool of people, for example, of that 96,000 we reached 1,047 of them. That’s what that’s about. And then frequency is the number of times the ad hit somebody, in other words, on average 1.1 times per individual here within the reach. Those are good questions.

Isabelle Faletti (00:45:30):

That’s great. Yeah. And ads, there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of different filtering options that you can have for the reporting that Peder’s showing here. So, like he said, start with the default view that Facebook recommends and then go one level deeper, go to performance and clicks. And that’s a really, really great beginning point that you can see, are people actually clicking on my ads?

Isabelle Faletti (00:45:59):

If that’s your goal, if you want people to be going to your website landing page to learn more about your Christmas Eve service, you want people to be clicking on your ads. If your click through rate, how many people are clicking on your ad, if you don’t have a lot of people clicking, then maybe that would mean you need to update your picture that you’re using or your text in the ad because people quite aren’t engaging with it.

Isabelle Faletti (00:46:25):

So there’s a lot of different next steps that you can do, but that’s where you can find the information to understand, how are my ads doing, because that’s a big question. Once you push it out there, what’s going on? This is where you can find out. This is where you can lift the hood and see what’s going on with Facebook Ads.

Peder Aadahl (00:46:45):

Absolutely.

Isabelle Faletti (00:46:47):

Okay. So I know we have some really good questions that have come in, Peder, as you’ve walked through this step. So, I want to go ahead and answer some of those questions. So for those who are listening, if you have any other questions right now that have come up, go ahead and place them in the comments below so that we can answer them. Again, Peder, he’s a master of all this, so please ask away and we’ll get to as many as we have time for here.

Isabelle Faletti (00:47:20):

So Tom has a great question that I’m glad he asked for, specifically with the Christmas season coming up and special events, he asks, “I have seen event ads on Facebook that show the number of people interested and people planning to attend. Does the Ads Manager have an option for this?”

Peder Aadahl (00:47:38):

That’s a great question. As a matter of fact, it does. If we go down here to Christmas Eve ad set, and this will be at the ad level, if I click create here again, and by the way, I was able to publish this, I did throw up a quick payment.

Isabelle Faletti (00:47:56):

Nice.

Peder Aadahl (00:47:57):

Let’s do. Whoa. All right. Back out. Okay. Will do event, see if we can do this. I come down here, you can see Facebook event. And then you should be able to add in the Facebook event URL here and promote something of that nature.

Peder Aadahl (00:48:21):

So if you are more familiar utilizing Facebook events, that’s not a bad thing. I understand why some people have been probably using that quite a bit maybe for a church in some capacity already. I know some people are doing that probably for maybe sometimes services on Sundays, things of that nature where they’re going to be live streaming from the Facebook event. So, that makes sense as well. But yes, that’s another way that you can target people that way.

Isabelle Faletti (00:48:48):

Yeah. And, oh, I love Facebook events. There’s a lot I could say on that, so I’m going to try to control all my excitement about Facebook events. But we have talked about how to use Facebook events in the past when we’ve talked about Facebook specifically. And Facebook events, that is a good option if you have special events going on, such as trunk retreat, a Christmas Eve service maybe.

Isabelle Faletti (00:49:18):

Ultimately though, remember you do want to be directing people back to your website. So if you have a Facebook event for trunk retreat, I’m saying that because our church is doing that next weekend, go ahead and create a Facebook event for that. That does help people who are searching your area for fun things to do. That helps your church, your Facebook event pop up. However, remember to always link back to your website. So, always have a learn more or to register click here, and go back to your website. That’s your home base, your website.

Isabelle Faletti (00:49:57):

And, yeah, so for Facebook events something that I did see when you were showing that, Peder, is that you have to create the Facebook event first it looked like, is that correct?

Peder Aadahl (00:50:09):

Yes. Yep.

Isabelle Faletti (00:50:10):

Okay. Yep. Yeah. So, Tom, yes, you can, just make sure you’re creating the Facebook event first and then you create your ad. Okay. We have a good question from Ron, really good question, because we’ve had some other listeners comment about this very topic. He says, “It seems like when I run an ad Facebook sends like bots that are not real people just to fulfill their race to this many people likes.”, any thoughts comes on that, Peder?

Peder Aadahl (00:50:44):

Yeah. You’re actually not wrong on that. Believe it or not, Facebook does send bots. It should not be for the purpose of reaching a certain amount of people, if that makes sense, based on whatever the objective is. It’s to actually look at the page that you’re sending people to, or the event, or whatever it is, that’s what that’s going to be about. It’s Facebook double checking things.

Peder Aadahl (00:51:12):

Keep in mind whether you’re advertising on Facebook or Google, for example, they’re trying to have a good user experience for the actual user, for everybody who’s on these platforms. And so they’re trying to make sure that when you go to that, let’s say they go to that URL, that that URL exists, that there’s nothing that seems off on that URL. And so, yeah, you may see some, to a certain extent, bot traffic on that level.

Peder Aadahl (00:51:41):

Now, if you’re talking about… you see a bunch of traffic that doesn’t seem quite right potentially besides that, I would maybe look at the targeting of the ad just to try to look at that again to see if that could be a situation that’s… something going on there in some capacity where… Yeah. Once again, if you go back to what we talked about earlier, when you created the… let’s say in this case you created an ad set, you forgot to make the radius specific enough or entered the right cities or something like that, so yeah.

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:19):

Yeah, that’s really interesting. I didn’t know that about bots. So, hopefully for our listeners that is something new that they can take away from today’s lesson here. So for everybody who is listening, if you’re thinking, great, I’m ready to start my Facebook Ads, but what do I put out there, what is an actual ad idea? Peder showed it perfectly. Look at what’s coming up with your own church. So, a Christmas Eve service, probably many churches will have a special Christmas Eve service.

Isabelle Faletti (00:52:54):

Peder’s mentioned in the past that the first time that people come to your church it’s not always on a Sunday morning, so what events does your church already have as part of their community outreach that are not on Sunday, that are not necessarily your Sunday worship service? Do you have a pre-K ministry, do you have a youth ministry, do you have a clothing drive that you’re doing? That’s your content right there. So Facebook Ads, they’re really an extension of your community outreach ministry. So take a look at your event calendar and you have ideas right there ready to go.

Isabelle Faletti (00:53:34):

I think it was last week, I believe it was Melvin, he mentioned, Pastor Melvin, he mentioned that his church was moving. That’s a great opportunity to use a Facebook ad, reach your new neighborhood that you’re moving into. So get creative, jot down a couple ideas, and I think you’ll have a long list of potential ideas ready to go.

Isabelle Faletti (00:53:59):

So, Peder, if we have people who they’re just ready to launch ads… You did an amazing job. Thank you first off for walking through the steps that church leaders can take to really reach their neighborhood, their community, their city in a whole new way than really ever before. So thank you for doing that. But so if we have listeners who are listening but they still feel a little overwhelmed of their next steps, what can they do to work with you specifically since you do this, you’re our ad expert?

Peder Aadahl (00:54:32):

Yes. Yeah, no, you can go out to digitaloutreach.church/cs and schedule a time to meet, and we can talk through what you’re looking to try to achieve, and we’ll work together to try to make something happen. Some people from last week already have reached out, looking forward to kicking something off here already this week for a church.

Isabelle Faletti (00:54:55):

Awesome.

Peder Aadahl (00:54:55):

They reached out last week for a giveaway. There’s different things like that. If you think about the ministries inside your church, the events coming up, to Isabelle’s point, and you’re looking for a little more guided help on this front, I would highly recommend you take advantage of that. And we can sit down and chat.

Isabelle Faletti (00:55:12):

And Christmas, the holiday’s here, it’s probably busy season for you, Peder, so I would encourage anybody… I mean, this is a 30 minute consult, digital outreach consult. It’s like you have no excuse to not take advantage of this opportunity. Peder is just setting this up for ChurchSpring Live listeners, for ChurchSpring Live friends and family, so take advantage of the skills and the gifts that God has given Peder. He loves working with churches, and he loves to brainstorm, and he’s incredibly good at what he does.

Isabelle Faletti (00:55:52):

So, I cannot stress enough for everybody listening, go to digitaloutreach.church/cs, set up that free time, free 30 minute digital outreach consult with Peder right now, get in your time so that you can be prepared for the Christmas season coming up for the new year that will be right around the corner before we even know it. So, commit to that. And then I would encourage everybody to set a commitment to yourself to create a Facebook ad. If you have already created a Facebook ad, great, create a new one with the information, with the tools that you now know after today’s live stream.

Isabelle Faletti (00:56:37):

If you’ve never created a Facebook ad for your church, you now have the information that you need to know to create the ad. So next week I would love to hear from our listeners that you created a Facebook ad for your church.

Isabelle Faletti (00:56:53):

So for those of you who want to move forward in your communication, in your community outreach, comment below right now, comment below that you are going to commit to creating an ad for your church this season, this holiday season. This is the best way to move forward, by committing to it, by having a public commitment. So if you’re ready to take that next step, create an ad for your church, commit to it, place a comment right now so that we can all celebrate with you and we can celebrate with you and partner with you in these next steps.

Isabelle Faletti (00:57:32):

So, thank you again for everybody joining in. This is always such an honor to be doing ChurchSpring Lives. If you’re new to ChurchSpring itself and you want to learn more about how ChurchSpring can help just your church and help your website maybe go from an outdated or old or just really time consuming church website to a frustration free, a lot easier to manage website, I would invite you all to attend a free demo that we have. Our co-founders, Mike and Rohn, oh, man, they put in a lot of work and time for a webinar where they walk through behind the scenes of our church website platform.

Isabelle Faletti (00:58:25):

They answer a ton of frequently asked questions. We have a live chat on there with our team, so if you have questions about the website platform you can chat in and our team will answer. So go ahead, sign up for that demo webinar. It’s at churchspring.com/demo. Or maybe you are just ready to dig in and just jump in and try out ChurchSpring for yourself, we offer a free trial, a free seven day trial at churchspring.com/trial, no commitment whatsoever. You can cancel at anytime in the seven days. You will not be charged for that.

Isabelle Faletti (00:59:04):

You have access to the entire platform, so it’s not like you sign up for a trial and you only have access to 25% of the website or something, no, you can get the full experience when you sign up for a free trial. And you have full access to the support team. I’m on the support team also, so you’ll be reaching out to myself, to my coworker, Jen, and we want to be helping you out. So go to churchspring.com/trial to try us out, kick the tires a little bit and see for yourself what ChurchSpring’s about and how we can ultimately help you.

Isabelle Faletti (00:59:41):

It looks like Walter. Thank you. You’re committed. You said that, “We’re going to do an ad for an upcoming prayer conference.” That’s amazing. I love the idea. That’s great. I want to hear how that goes. And then we have another one from pastor, or I believe it’s Bishop Diggs, oh, you look forward to working with the team in this new adventure. Thank you. We’re excited to be working with you guys too.

Isabelle Faletti (01:00:11):

All right. Well, I do want to invite everybody to next week’s ChurchSpring Live. We’re going to be shifting topics from Facebook Ads to a very important platform that I believe every single church should be using to reach their community, their city, and that is Google Ads. Google Ads, it’s truly a unique way to appear in search results for people in your area. It can help your church connect with new guests that maybe they’re not on Facebook, or maybe they’re on Facebook only once a week. How else can you reach your city?

Isabelle Faletti (01:00:59):

Peder, again, he’s going to be on next week because, guess what guys, he’s our digital marketing guru, and he does this, and he has success, and he helps churches bring in new guests and grow the church and grow the kingdom of God. So he’s going to unpack what you need to know about Google Ads before you even launch an ad campaign. So, similar to Facebook, you have to have a clean house almost before you can launch. So if you’re new to Google Ads or maybe you’ve never even thought of using Google Ads for your church before, this live event next week on Thursday, October 29th, it is truly a must attend.

Isabelle Faletti (01:01:45):

Peder, he rents Google Ads, again, for churches all over the country, and he can help your church too use Google Ads. So, next Thursday, October 29th at 10:00 AM central. Mark down your calendar, I want to see you there. Bring your questions, bring your listening ears, bring your encouraging words so that we can, again, just partner with you as we talk about a topic that may be new to a lot of people I think.

Isabelle Faletti (01:02:16):

Thanks again for everybody attending. As we’ve mentioned a couple of times, we do have a replay available, it’s churchspring.com/csl022. So if today’s topic was a lot of information, go ahead, watch the replay. Sometimes repetition, that is key, churchspring.com/csl022. I will update that replay with a lot of the resources that we talked about. I’ll be linking specifically to Peder’s contact information, digitaloutreach.church/cs so that you can get a hold of him to set up the free 30 minute digital outreach consult with him. So be sure to be looking for those resources later today.

Isabelle Faletti (01:03:10):

So thank you again for everybody for tuning in today. It’s always such an honor to be working with churches and ministries all over the nation. Thank you, and we will see you next week. God bless.

Peder Aadahl (01:03:24):

God bless you.