Chapter 3
How To Start Advertising On Facebook
Brett Lewis
Facebook advertising works on a bidding model similar to Google ads. You bid on the price you are willing to pay to have your ad shown, and then you are charged in either one of two ways:
- Cost-per-click (CPC): This method is as simple as it sounds, charging you for when someone clicks on your ad.
- Cost-per-thousand (CPM): This method charges you per 1000 people who see your advertisement.
Google advertising uses keywords in your Google searches to determine which ads to display. With Facebook ads, you bid on target demographics and keywords that appear in user profiles.
To describe Facebook ads further, we’ll follow the blueprint depicted below:
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Goals
Having an endgame is important. Understanding what you want as a result of your ad campaign is a crucial concept. Basically, starting with the end in mind is what I am getting at. What do you want as the outcome of your Facebook campaign?
Driving traffic to your website? If so, how do you measure success?
- Newsletter signups?
- Product purchases?
- Whitepaper downloads?
If you are sending all traffic to your Facebook Page, your conversions to ‘Likes’ are tracked in the stats.
Facebook ad campaigns all start with your goal. Take some time to think about what you really want as the outcome.
Ad Campaign Plan
Set up a formal campaign that outlines different types of ads to split test. Split testing involves changing one piece of the ad, such as the photo, and keeping the other elements the same to see which ad performs better.
Rotate your ads every couple days to keep them fresh. No one wants to see the same ad over and over again.
Targeting
Facebook offers some good targeting options from geographic pinpointing to interest-based targeting.
Put yourself in your target’s shoes. If you are advertising a car seat for children, it would make sense to select the following targets for some of your targeting options:
- Demographics > Parents > Moms > Moms of preschool kids
- Interests > Additional Interests > Parenting (magazine)
Some targeting options are:
LOCATION: You can target by country, state, city, or zip code.
AGE: You can choose a range, or no upper bound maximum. Facebook gives you the option to require an exact match within an age range if you select the Require Exact Age Match box. This means that if a user turned 56 yesterday, that user will not be shown the ad for which you selected the age range of 25 to 55.
GENDER: Straightforward choices of men, women, and all.
INTERESTS: Interests are displayed in a person’s profile and are drawn from the keywords used in their information. There are a of interest based targeting options in this section and it pays to take time to dive into the mindset of your potential leads to uncover hidden gems.
NOTE: There is an option to “Expand interests when it may increase link clicks at a lower cost per link click” This option lets Facebook automatically expand the interests in your detailed targeting criteria if there's a chance to reach more people likely to click your link.
CONNECTIONS: There are several valuable options in this section. For example, you can opt to display your ads ONLY to people who already like your page.
Alternatively, you can display your ads ONLY to people to DO NOT currently like your page. This second option puts your ad in front of a population of targets that are not already familiar with your brand.
Budget
How much are you going to spend per day?
How much are you going to spend for the whole campaign?
Have peace of mind knowing that you will not over spend on your campaign by utilizing these options. We like to set a time span for our campaigns with a daily budget. For example, a 30 day campaign at $5/day. Our total ad spend would be $150 for that single campaign.
One point to consider is the average daily reach of your campaign for the selected upon budget. Compare that number to the potential reach for the entire campaign. This comparison will determine your campaign’s saturation.
The campaign below has an average daily reach of 3,300 and is set to run for 30 days. At the daily budget of $25, the campaign will not saturate the total reach 100%. It would take approximately 45 days to reach the 100% saturation point.
Run Facebook Ads
According to a SearchForce study, Local ad spends will increase to $152.2 billion in 2018.
This is likely due to the targeting options Facebook can provide due to the database of information Facebook gathers from users’ profiles and geo-fencing options. These targeting options help you narrow down your audience to help increase the ROI of the Facebook ads.
While we’ll cover advertising on Facebook in more depth in the next chapter, here’s an example Facebook ad that appears to the right of a user’s Facebook Page with targeting based on interests.
Tracking
Getting a handle on the success of your Facebook ad campaign is essential!
Be sure to use trackable links in your ads to determine if your ad generated the sale or the lead.
The use of trackable links (UTM codes), promotion codes that customers provide (from the ad), and custom landing pages are good tracking options.
Facebook will provide you with a dashboard to monitor ad performance. This will include:
- Link Clicks
- Page Likes
- Campaign Reach
- Frequency
- Clicks
- Clickthrough Rates
- Total Spent
- And More!
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