Advertising on Facebook

Have you tried any Facebook advertising?  Here are a few tips, tricks and bits of info to help you out.

If you are familiar with Google PPC, you will know that you target a large audience and split test different ads to see the response.  On Facebook, you are able to actually target your audience better and create ads specific for that audience.  Spending a little time getting to know Facebook advertising is a good idea.

You can choose the location, gender, age, likes and interests, relationship status, workplace and education of your target audience. If you are the admin of a Facebook Page, event or app, you can also target your ad to people who are already connected to you.

You can also load your customer list in and create a custom audience to market to.  This audience will be warmer and most receptive to your ads.  It’s a great way to get them to buy more.

Understand Your Market

In order to do really well on Facebook, you need to effectively define your market. This will help you to take advantage of the targeting factors that Facebook currently provides. To help define your market, ask yourself what is the need your company satisfies and who your customers really are.  Once you understand how you help them and who they are, think about what that tells you about the customer.  Are they older, less active and more likely to be home using the computer during the day while they watch talk shows?  Then run ads during the day and focus on people in the right age range that like various talk shows. The better your profile of your customer is, the more ways you can reach people and connect with them over their interests (with your ads).

Measure Initial Conversions As Fans, Comments, and Likes

Since most users will not make a purchase right away, you need to make sure that you are engaging them. Plan posts that are engaging, compelling and designed to get people used to interacting with your page.

Monitor Your Ad Performance

Throughout each Facebook advertising campaign, you should be tracking how well the ads perform. Are you on track to reach the goals that you’ve set? Are your advertisements achieving a reasonable click-through level?

Facebook provides advertisers with a number of monitoring tools including their basic ad manager area as well as downloadable data about each campaign you are running.

To help you out, the main areas you want to monitor are: clicks, click through rates (CTR), actions, action rates, and CPC. Each of these variables will differ depending on what type of campaign that you’re running but in theory, the more targeted your ad, the higher click through rate you should have. Keep in mind, your click through rate will tend to go down over time as your entire target population views your ad and decides whether or not they want to respond.

Ad Stagnation

To avoid ad stagnation, make sure you are frequently trying new ads.  You don’t want people to get bored and ignore your ad. It’s good for them to keep seeing your name but it’s not good for them to keep seeing the same ad.

Test Landing Pages Versus Facebook Pages

In traditional online advertising, users are directed to a landing page where they are often asked to join a mailing list or make a purchase.  I suggest testing driving traffic to a landing page and to a custom page within Facebook and see where you get the better response.

Develop Creative Ad Copy

While the image is what first catches people’s attention on Facebook, conversion is ultimately about the ad copy making them click and the landing page text making them buy/opt-in etc.

If your advertisement doesn’t provide a strong call to action, there is a good chance that the user won’t respond.

The best way to determine effective ad copy is to take a look at the existing sites around the web. Which are the ones that you see most often? Even if the ads appear to be annoying, if you continuously see them, there’s a good chance that they are doing something right. Click on ads and see what types of products are being offered and what the pitch is.

The best way to improve your advertising is through research and other advertisers provide you with plenty of free information. While copywriting books can assist with writing catchy effective headlines as well as how to structure landing pages, your best information will come from other ads. Also check out magazine racks at book stores and see what headlines are being used. Often times you will find great headline ideas there.

Reach More Fans Through the News Feed

The number of users accessing Facebook on mobile devices has increased drastically. 60% of all users are visiting Facebook on their phones and tablets.

This has serious implications for advertisers because when users access Facebook via mobile, there is no right-hand column – which means there are no traditional ads.

To get your Facebook ads into the News Feed (specifically Page Post ads, Page Like ads and Sponsored Stories), you have to use the Power Editor.

The best way to get started is by using the free Power Editor Chrome plugin.  (How to set it up: Open Chrome, install the Power Editor, and access it here. Select “all” accounts when prompted so you can access your past ads too. Facebook has created a guide to using it.)

But the main feature you’ll want to pay attention to is the “Placements” feature, which enables you to take any ad (like a Page Post Ad – my favorite) and select whether you want it to go to your users’ Desktop News Feeds, Mobile-Only News Feeds, or both. When you choose one or both of these options, your ad will ONLY be seen in the News Feed and not in the right-column.

Ad Guidelines

Facebook recently revised their guidelines for Facebook ads that appear in the News Feed, like Promoted Posts, Offers and ads that you target to mobile Facebook users. Any image-based ad that goes out to the News Feed of users – like a still from a video advertising your next webinar, for example, or a product image offering a discount – can have a text overlay, but that text can’t take up more than 20 percent of the total ad image.

Broad Categories

Consider broad categories a larger audience bucket, compared to precise interests (usually a smaller audience). These are pre-organized audiences that Facebook creates by examining basically anything a Facebook user does, clicks on, or writes anywhere on Facebook.

There are lots of options in Broad Categories that may be appealing, but for the most part these are very large groupings of Facebook users that should be chipped away at using other targeting options. Here are a few examples of the types of Facebook users a business can target with this option:

• Small business owners (6.4 million in the US)
• People engaged for 1 year (2.3 million in the US)
• Has a birthday in the next week (2.8 million in the US)
• Soccer fans (8.7 million in the US)

I could write for days about Facebook ads, but I just wanted to get you some general info to get you started.  Please comment and let us know what has worked for you!