How to Get Real Facebook Page Likes With Facebook Ads

Learn how to get and buy real Facebook Page likes, followers, and engagement with Facebook Ads to build your audience and brand awareness.

If you want to grow your Facebook Page Likes exponentially and have ever thought about how to do that. We made this guide for you. 

Facebook Ads is the only legit method to buy real Facebook Page Likes, followers, and engagement.  

This guide will explore how to grow Facebook Page likes with ads, how to do it with scale, and why it matters to get real Facebook followers instead of buying fake followers from unreliable sources.

The strategy we will show you will only apply to gaining new, real Facebook page likes. While there are similarities to other Facebook Ads strategies, and you can utilize some methods you learn here in different strategies, it’s still best not to use the strategy for other campaign objectives.

But if you want to learn more about the benefits of Facebook ads or how to grow sales with Facebook ads, you can check the articles from the links.

This strategy complements any other Facebook Ads strategies you’re implementing now or in the future in your social media marketing or digital marketing. It boosts your brand awareness directly through impressions, enabling you to create effective remarketing campaigns for the same audiences, tests new creatives, and much more. 

Check out this guide if you want to gain new Instagram followers with Facebook ads.

But before we explore how, let’s look at the benefits of real Facebook Page Likes and followers, why they matter, and why you should be wary of fake followers in the first place.

Benefits of Real Facebook Page Likes, and Followers

  • Accurate target audience
  • Discover effective content 
  • Increased engagement rates
  • Build trust and credibility
  • Monetizable audience
  • Effective remarketing
  • Grow brand awareness
  • Drive traffic to websites
  • Opportunity to test new business models
  • Increase organic social media traffic 
Benefits of Real Facebook Page Likes, and Followers

Why Do Real Facebook Page Likes and Followers Matter?

If you’re building a long-lasting, trusted, and valuable brand and want to achieve growth through Facebook, you must gain real page likes and followers to attain your goals. 

Gaining fake followers and page likes as a strategy always falls flat, and the one paying the future price of the said venture is the business that desires growth. 

It’s a fact that gaining real Facebook followers and page likes can be costly, tedious, and slow. Still, the overarching benefits are worth it if the end goal of having more real followers materializes in actual growth for the business.  

While it may be easy to buy a package of followers for cheap, you will have the bought followers just as decoration or pixel art without any real potential. 

Using fake followers and page likes to grow will lead to worsening engagement rates and spam. The most damaging aspect is that fake followers will destroy any future potential you could’ve found from audience data as fake followers generate unusable data.

The most significant benefit of real Facebook page likes and followers is the audience data we collect and the quality engagement rate we receive. 

That is why real Facebook engagement from real people matters. 

The opportunity for a brand, business, or influencers to use the knowledge of their audience can greatly power their future digital marketing strategies, whatever their end goal may be. 

Growing real engagement and brand awareness through the ads, we are about to create in this guide creates new opportunities for our growth bed to flourish. 

How to Get Real Facebook Page Likes, Followers, and Engagement With Facebook Ads

Before we can start advertising, let’s check out the basic setup of what you will need to advertise on Facebook: 

  • You’ll need an active Facebook Ad account and a Business manager account.
  • Connect the Facebook Page to a Facebook Ad account or Business account.
  • Pixel Installed on websites and landing pages (while optional and not necessary for this campaign, you might want to install it regardless if you have a website or landing page)
  • Optionally, It would be best if you already had page likes on the Facebook page (the more you have before starting is better), but you can still advertise from the ground up. You just won’t have all the audience options available to you. 

Remember that Facebook Ads are often updated so that anything can change, especially regarding naming, user experience, etc. But always ensure that your campaign objective is “Page Likes” or your campaign is an “Engagement Campaign” with Conversion location set to Facebook Page, and Page Likes is the ad delivery optimization. More about these soon. 

Now, you have everything you need to get started. 

With these steps below, you will achieve a Facebook ad campaign focusing on Page Likes. Let’s get started.

Create A New Facebook Ad Campaign For Page Likes

Start by going to the ads manager on business.facebook.com and clicking the “Create,” which will open the campaign objectives.

Creating a new Facebook Page likes campaign

From the campaign objective -list, choose “Engagement” under Consideration and select “Page Likes” further down. 

If you’re not seeing the page likes on this screen, remember to set the Conversion Location as “Facebook Page,” choose your Facebook Page, and make sure that in the “Optimization & Delivery”- section, your optimization for ad delivery is set to “Page likes.” All these changes are made on the Ad Set -level. 

Engagement Ad Conversion Location setup For Facebook Page Likes
Optimization and Delivery set to pages likes

Give the campaign a recognizable name; for now, you can skip the ad set and ad creations. 

After clicking continue, you will see more options to modify. The only thing you should do now is to activate the Advantage Campaign Budget (also called “Campaign Budget Optimization” in some instances.  

Setting up a Facebook page likes campaign

Depending on delivery optimization choices and bid strategies, the option will distribute campaign budgets across ad sets to get the best results. 

Now you can choose either a daily budget (How much you spend roughly in a day) or a lifetime budget (Basically, a max budget for the campaign). We recommend using a daily budget for more precise ad budget distribution and making optimizing down the line easier. 

When the daily budget is active, you can add a campaign spending limit to the campaign in the campaign details above. 

For now, you can leave the “Create A/B Test” unchecked. 

Now you have successfully created a campaign that optimizes for Facebook Page Likes from the get-go. 

It’s time to create and design the audiences we want to start using. 

Audience Types For Facebook Page Likes Campaign

Welcome to the best part of Facebook Ads – designing the audiences we want to target.

We will use as many audiences as we need to find the best audiences for the optimal performance of our campaigns. Every audience will need a testing period. 

We will also use three types of audiences, depending on data availability, custom audiences (based on Facebook Page), custom lookalike audiences (based on the Facebook Page), and saved audiences.

We will discuss testing and analyzing its results later in this guide; stay tuned. 

But for now, we want to create at least three different audiences for our initial campaign testing. 

If you create more than three audiences, don’t test them simultaneously. (Don’t test with more than three audiences). Because of the Advantage Budget setting, it will prioritize the best ad set anyway, and you want to learn more from the audiences in the beginning. 

Later on, it won’t matter as much. 

Here’s an idea of what audience to build initially for your tests. 

  1. Broad audience 
    1. You might want to set an audience that has no targeting to a specific country if necessary in your business goals; otherwise, leave it as “worldwide.”
  2. Broad With Interest 1
    1. A broad audience with one interest (choose an interest that matches your Facebook Page) 
  3. Broad with Interest 2
  4. Broad With Interest 3 (Wild card)
    1. Choose an interest that could work but is not apparent. You never know.
  5.  Lookalike custom audiences 
    1. We will cover this in the next chapter. But essentially, you want to add the lookalike audiences to the same rotation as the rest of the audiences when testing. 

How To Create a Saved Audience For Facebook Page Likes Campaign 

To start creating audiences, head over to the audiences tab. Next, click on the ‘Create Audience” and choose the saved audience -option.

Give the audience a recognizable name. For example, COUNTRY+INTEREST/BROAD. 

Then choose the desired location of the audience, such as “US” or “WorldWide.”

Facebook Ads Saved audience creation

At this stage – the audience would be the broadest option available, which is a great starting point to test your ad and campaign performance. Always have at least one broad option initially. 

Then you can start creating audiences that might include other features such as age, gender, language, and interests. 

Always be as broad as possible, even when adding more detailed targeting options. Narrow audiences tend to be more specific and, in turn, more expensive for your campaign. 

On this screen, you can also add a variety of connections to the audience, such as:

  •  Exclude people who currently like or follow your page (Facebook won’t show your ads to people who already like your page)
  • People who currently like or follow your page (Not recommended for the style of the campaign we are doing now)
  • People similar to those who currently like or follow your page (Not as powerful as a lookalike audience, but it’s worth testing separately)

Now that you have created the audiences, you might need to wait until the estimated audiences appear in the audiences tab. As long as the audience is marked as green and ready, you can use it in the ads set, which we’ll set up soon. 

Next, we will build a custom audience based on your Facebook Page.

How To Create a Facebook Page Custom Audience

A custom audience is an audience you already have, and by creating a custom audience, you can customize your current audience by different variables for making better-targeted ads. 

A custom audience is also a requirement for creating a lookalike audience later on. Build the most common custom audiences immediately, even if you lack the data to create a lookalike audience. 

Start by clicking the “Create audience” again and now choosing the “Custom Audience”-option and choosing under the “Meta Sources” Facebook page option. 

Creating Custom Facebook Page Audience

On the next page, choose your Facebook Page. 

Next, we will be choosing ‘events’ that determine the type of audience data we want for our custom audience. 

Let’s choose from the event most crucial for us:

  • People who currently like or follow your page (Highly recommended)
  • Everyone who engaged with your Page (A good option as well) 
  • People who engaged with any post or ad (Later on, a good testing option)
Modifying a custom facebook page audience

You will need to decide on retention marked in days for the last two options. Please leave it to the default (365). 

While you can add more events to a particular audience via the “include more people”-button, we don’t recommend it. It’s better to test each audience with one event at a time. 

Now give the custom Facebook page audience a recognizable name (For example, FB LIKE/FOLLOW) and a description if you want. 

If you already have enough Facebook Page likes or Follows, you can create a lookalike audience based on those likes, which we will cover next. 

How To Create Lookalike Audiences For Facebook Page Likes

To create a lookalike audience on Facebook, start by clicking “create audience” in the audience tab.

Now you will need to select a lookalike source as the base audience from which you will create the lookalike. Click and choose your custom Facebook page audience you made earlier under “other sources.”

Creating A lookalike audience from your facebook page engagement

Alternatively, you can find your Facebook Page audience from the select your lookalike source”-menu and choose your Facebook Page under other sources. 

Now select the audience location. However, remember, you will need to have at least an audience size of 100 in the same country. Or otherwise, you won’t be able to create the lookalike.

For example, creating a worldwide lookalike is possible, but it would require to have individually 100 users from each country.  

Worldwide Lookalike audience facebook

If you’re unsure where your users come from, remember that you can always refer back to your Facebook page’s insights tab and learn more about the demographics. 

After choosing the location, you have to select a percentage of a country’s population between 1 and 10%, 1% meaning the most similar to your base audience and 10% the least alike. 

The percentage also means 1-10% of users in the target country. And 10% is the broadest while 1% is the narrowest. You can see your estimated reach below the slider.

You can create as many lookalike audiences as you want, but as we said earlier, the broadest usually works best; but keep testing to find your sweet spot of scale and performance. 

You can’t individually name your Facebook lookalike audiences as they follow a naming convention of their own. That is why naming your custom audiences is critical to identify your audiences later on. 

Now that we have created our first audiences let’s start using them in ad sets in our FB Page likes campaign. 

What To Do If You Don’t Have Enough Data To Create Lookalike Audiences

We promised to give you some tips on what to do if you don’t have enough data for a lookalike audience. 

The critical to understand here is that a lookalike audience is not a guarantee of better performance, not by any means. 

Sometimes it may even perform worse than the broadest saved audience, which is why the lookalike audiences act like tools in our testing as we scale. But regardless, you want to test it to be sure. 

You need to keep exploring and testing with different saved audiences until you have enough data to create exciting lookalike audiences based on user activity on your Facebook Page.

The best lookalike audiences have the most data available to them. So, it might not be as great when you first get the opportunity to create a lookalike audience. 

It’s better to have thousands of followers rather than just a hundred page likes in a target country before creating a lookalike audience.  

How to Create Facebook Page Like Ad Sets

Head back to the Facebook Ads Manager. There are three ways currently to create an ad set in Facebook Ads:

  • Click “Create” and choose “new ad set or ad,” and give it a name after choosing your campaign
Creating an ad set for Engagement campaign Facebook ads
  • You can click “Edit” on your campaign and click the action menu (three dots) and select “create ad set.” 
Facebook Ads action menu in campaign editor
  • or, from the same view, click the “create ad set” -button.

Via ad sets, you control the audiences who will see your ads. Only one audience can be active in an ad set at any time. (although you can combine many audiences into an audience in the audiences tab.)

Scroll down to the Audience section.

  • Click and search the saved audience and choose one of the many saved audiences you created earlier.
  • If you have lookalikes and custom audiences available, you can find those audiences by searching the custom audience search bar. 
  • Alternatively, you can create new audiences or customize previously created audiences here.

When choosing a saved audience, you’re ready to go. 

But if you’re using lookalike audiences, you can customize it further. Make sure that the location matches your lookalike audience’s location. 

While you can change the age, gender, add languages, and detailed targeting, leaving the lookalike as broad as possible in the beginning is better. Later, you can test with more variables in your ad sets. 

For Page likes campaigns, it’s better to leave the “Automatic Placements” checked. 

Facebook ads Page likes placements

Now for the final check-up: 

  • Make sure that the conversion location is set on your Facebook Page
  • Optimization for ad delivery is set to “Page Likes.”

Now you’ve created your first ad set! To save time, you can duplicate your ad sets via the action menu and only change the audience. 

How to Create Facebook Page Like Ads

Choose one of the two ways to create ads in Facebook Ads:

  • Click “Create” and choose “new ad set or ad.” Choose your campaign and the ad set, and give it a name after choosing your campaign.
First step to creating a Facebook ad creative
  • You can also click “Edit” on your campaign and click the action menu next to the ad set (three dots) and choose “create ad.” You can also duplicate ads from the action menu to save time later. 

First, make sure that under “identity,” Facebook shows the correct Facebook Page. You can change it directly in the Ad set settings or the ad creation menu. 

Choose an ad creative to be your ad, and optimize the image or video according to the placements. Use the ad preview next to it to confirm that everything checks out visually. 

You will get an error if the image or video isn’t suitable for a particular placement, as seen in the image below.

After choosing the ad creative, you can give up to five different Primary texts to go along with the creative. Create something that reflects your page the best, and remember to test various primary texts along your optimization journey. 

As all placements don’t use the primary text, it’s vital to use clear images that showcase your Facebook page’s promise every time. 

And that’s it. You created your first Ad!

Ad creative creation for Facebook Page likes campaign

After you have found the best ads that work in your case, you can duplicate the main ad set with the ads, only modify the ad set’s audience, and leave the ads unchanged to save time. 

Now that you know how to create the ad let’s look at some ad creative tips for creating better and more engaging ads. 

Tips For Creating Better Facebook Page Like Ads

These tips are helpful if you’re unsure how to get started with these ads. These tips offer you a starting place. Every Facebook page is different, so in the end, it’s critical to find your optimal style of ad creative that works with your unique Facebook Page and brand in general. 

The best ads are usually the top posts on your Facebook page. Suppose you have the data and followers available to you. Learn everything from your current audience and replicate what worked the best in the past. 

Reflect on your page’s topic always, as over-promising in the ads will have a high churn rate of followers in the coming days after they liked your page. 

Create ads that fit your page, for example:

  • Use old posts that had a high engagement rate 
  • Create new posts with your Pages formula
  • Bring out your USP – Why you should follow the page 
  • Test whether image ads or video ads work for you
  • Test different formats – Simple images vs. detailed images, short vs. long videos, etc.
  • Get inspiration from larger Facebook pages that have a similar audience
  • Have clear CTA’s in the image and video. For example, mention follows for XYZ. 

Creating engaging Facebook Ads creatives is an iterative process, and you might not get it right initially. It’s vital to keep learning from previous ads to succeed later. 

How To Optimize A Facebook Page Likes Campaign in Facebook Ads Manager 

When optimizing a Facebook Page Likes ads campaign, you have to 

  • Understand and analyze the critical metrics for further growth
  • Manage budgets accordingly
  • Seek an average cost per result and strive for better performance with every test you follow. 
  • Be ready to take action if your performance isn’t up to the bar with your goals.
  • Test ad sets with new audiences and new ad creatives
  • Learn what ad creative and audiences work, and replicate their success
  • Learn to scale. Not every successful initial test will end in a scalable ad creative or audience, be cautious. 
  • Improve data management workflows to be faster at analyzing your metrics.
  • Adjust your overarching business goals with the progress of the page likes campaign. 
  • Develop a process that helps you on the right growth path. 

First, we will look at the core metrics that help you optimize a Facebook Page campaign, and then we will look at testing more in detail. 

Tracking The Performance Metrics of Facebook Page Likes Campaign 

All data you need is available on the Facebook ad manager dashboard.

Alternatively, you can use the insights tab in Facebook Business manager to evaluate page analytics, for example, comparing organic performance against paid performance. 

The most crucial metrics you need to optimize, analyze, and keep track of: 

  • CPM
    • Cost Per Mille – The cost per thousand impressions. Tracking CPM is vital to the health of a campaign, as Facebook bills us by the impressions.
    • Sometimes a high CPM indicates that an audience is too expensive outright, and not even the best ads can overcome that.  
    • CPM can fluctuate between days, but sometimes it means your performance is worsening. Also, remember to average it out.
  • Reach and Impressions
    • Reach is the number of people that have seen your ad.
    • Impressions are the number of times your ads have appeared on the screen.
  • CPR (Cost per result or The Cost per Facebook Page Like, in this case)
    • It shows you how much a Facebook Page did cost you. 
    • Sometimes you might want to calculate the CPA yourself to get a more accurate picture of the actual cost instead of a rounded number that Facebook ads show you. For example, $0.09 is not the same as 0.0869.
  • Conversion rate (Page Likes / Impressions)
    • Is the rate of how many likes you get by dividing it by impressions
    • Tracking conversion rates can tell you a lot about how well your ads do in the real world.
  • Amount Spent
    • Its the estimated total of all costs associated with the campaign during the chosen period.

Ad Set Testing

In the beginning, at the very least, have several audiences ready for advertising, as we outlined earlier. 

First, we want to set a basic performance level. We want to achieve an average. Then we can further optimize new audiences against the basic performance level and always target beyond average performance with audiences. 

Test every audience idea, analyze and confirm that it works. Because even if you think an audience would work for your page, let the data show it to you. Don’t guess and rely on the guestimation.

When ad set testing, don’t test too many at once, as you won’t see reliable data on each ad set. We need to get an accurate picture of the performance of each ad set and make data-driven decisions to get better at what we want to achieve. 

Keep notes of any trends you might discover during your tests, for example: 

  • Does a specific interest/country/demographic detail generate the most performance or drive future engagement?
  • Does a particular type of creative work best with a specific audience or vice a versa
  • Does niche vs. broad audiences work for your page or end goals better? 
  • Do lookalike audiences work better or worse than saved audiences?

And remember not to get discouraged if your initial ad set performance isn’t achieving the desired results. You will constantly improve and get better results the more data you collect.

Ad Creative And Ads Testing And Management

When you start testing, strive to have at least three different ad creatives. It will help you understand right away what type of ad creatives you should begin creating.  

Whether it’s video, images, or something in between, you will quickly learn what to build upon as we create our future foundation for testing.  

Once you have found your style that works, you can create more creatives based on it on the fly (For example, doing minor changes to images or primary texts). While we recommend testing before scaling, sometimes you can use the creatives immediately. 

Always save budget to keep testing new creatives, no matter the situation. Because if your ad performance worsens quickly, you would have a backup ad ready to go instantly. 

Remember to test ad creatives and ad sets separately – you want to find the best ads first and then try new audiences as you know what ad creatives work for your Facebook page – This is why we recommend using the broadest audience options first. 

When testing, even though Facebook will prioritize the best ad creative (when tested together), it’s good to be on top of what’s happening with the performance. 

For example, if your ad creative performs under the average after two or three days, don’t be afraid to stop using that ad creative immediately. Learn what you can and make a better ad or audience.

Ad Creative Testing and Engagement Metrics 

When testing ad creatives, you might want to also look for the engagement metrics on the Facebook ads dashboard. 

Usually, the most engaging ads work best for page likes. Metrics such as:

  • Post Comments
  • Post Reactions
  • Post Saves
  • Post Shares 
Engagement Metrics For Facebook Ads

You can find these metrics by changing your dashboard column to engagement.

Engagement Column Facebook Ads

Albeit in our testing, we found that the most engaging ad brings the most page likes, so keeping track of your CPR would do the same thing, but sometimes you need to dig deeper into your performance, and checking the engagement rates is an excellent way to do it. 

How to Keep Your Newly Gained Real Facebook Page Likes And Followers

You have now gotten through the easiest part: acquiring real Facebook page likes with ads. The real hard part begins now, how to retain the likes and keep your new followers engaged indefinitely. 

Tips on how to retain Facebook Page likes:

  • Keep posting similar content that you’ve promised in the ads.
  • Be active and Engage with your community regularly.
    • Reply to comments 
    • Keep the conversation going.
  • Engage with similar Facebook Pages
  • Keep experimenting with new content.
  • If your brand uses other social media platforms, consider bringing exclusive content to the different platforms. 
  • Learn from Facebook Insights critical metrics to keep engagement and Facebook Page growing -learn and adapt to new environments and changes – internal and external. 

Managing a Facebook Page community can be initially hard to get into, but in time, you will find your voice to keep your page likes and enable further growth again and again. 

Analyze everything you do, keep notes, and get better at it daily. The last thing you want to happen is to start losing the Facebook page likes you acquired with ads. 

Conclusion

Now you should understand how to get real Facebook page likes and followers by using Facebook Ads natively. 

It’s time to create your ad campaigns, make the most engaging ad creatives, find the best audiences and grow your real audience, whether from scratch or boosting your current audience.

Most importantly, remember that this is a growth journey. While some might get it right the first time, others might need more time and testing to find what works and what does not. The improved results are always hidden in the data, ready to be analyzed. 

When you achieve the growth you sought, remember to retain these new followers and likers by any method necessary. That’s where the real hard work starts.  

And if the growth of real Facebook followers wasn’t enough or just the first step on your greater growth journey towards building more brand awareness and engagement, we wish you the best. 

This article only outlines one small part of a winning social media marketing strategy you should have for online growth. You can connect with us if you need more help or a partner for social media marketing.