For those of you who have never considered paid advertising on Facebook because you thought it would be ineffective or complicated, you may be surprised to find out just how easy it really is.
Facebook ads help promote your page or content to users who you have not connected with yet. Facebook allows you to target specific demographics based on user data, meaning that your content can directly reach those who are most likely to be interested in your company, product or service.
The first thing you need to consider is what you want to advertise. Use Facebook ads to support an ongoing marketing goal, announce a new product, promote an event, or simply to help brand your company. There are countless uses, just make sure you know what your goals are and how you intend to measure the success or failure of your campaign.
Determining how much to spend on a Facebook ad is entirely up to you. Set a realistic budget that will enable you to reach your goal, but don?t spend too much or too little that the effectiveness of your ad is impacted. The default Facebook setting is to pay for impressions (CPM), but using advance features you can also choose pay per click.
Facebook allows for a high level of targeting to ensure your ads reach your desired audience. You can filter by geography, age, gender, and interests. You can also target your ads based on connections. For example, you can have your ad appear only on the pages of friends of those who have liked your page and who live in your city.
Facebook utilizes all the information it collects from users for it?s advertising program, allowing advertisers to specifically target to their selected audience for the greatest ROI. There are several advertising strategies to consider here, and what you do will vary based on your specific marketing goals.
After you complete your ad and it goes live, being able to measure your results will help you determine the success of your ads. Facebook provides several metrics to allow advertisers to see how their ad is performing.
The first level of metrics shows the number of impressions your ad receives. The impressions can be measured against clicks to determine the rate of success of your ad.
The clicks metric measures the total number of clicks your ad has received?whether they clicked on the ad or you received a like directly from the ad. Click-throughs measure how many times your ad was clicked divided by the number of impressions.
Two additional metrics, actions and conversions, measure the number of people who took an action on the ad, and how many actually responded to your ad and completed an action, such as liking your page or joining an event.
Finally, Facebook will let you know how much you are paying for each conversion. This number is a good indication of just how effective your ad is. The lower your cost per conversion, the more effective your advertising is. If it is too high, you may want to reconsider your audience or ad message.
Facebook ads can be an incredibly useful for businesses that want to extend their reach and grow their audience and customer base. Because Facebook uses all the information it gathers from users, advertisers can specifically target their ads to those who are the most likely to respond.
If you are new to advertising on Facebook, don?t be afraid to experiment to determine what works best for your business. Use your metrics to determine the effectiveness of your ads, and replace stale ads with ones that deliver a new message. You set your budget, so don?t be afraid to try something new?it may just pay off.