So you’ve decided you want to get into Facebook advertising? With millions of daily users, your audience is certainly going to be on Facebook.

Getting started with Facebook advertising is simple, yet expensive if you go in blind. With this article we help get you get familiar with different terms and what to expect when you’re preparing to launch you first Facebook advertisement.

Facebook Ads and Formats

The most familiar ad format you’ll see on Facebook is the post within the newsfeed. In addition, you can purchase ads to be seen in the sidebar and mobile devices.

In terms of formats, there are various types you can choose from. We could speak for a long time on which format suits each ad (including canvas and carousel), but with a small daily budget, you can test them all out.

Facebook Targeting

Facebook targeting allows you to get your page and posts in front of specific audiences. The easiest people to target are those who have liked your page, yet haven’t seen your post.  

This may not makes sense but Facebook tries to serve the best content to people in their Facebook feed. If your ‘fan’ hasn’t engaged with your content recently, they won’t see your post on their timeline therefore you’ll need to boost the post to them. Fortunately, this is cheaper than targeting a cold audience.

Based on your fans and their likes, interests, activities, and behavior you can tell Facebook to find what is known as a look-a-like audience. This works as the new people you’re targeting like similar things as your existing audience therefore are likely to be interested in your product and/or service.

Another option is to upload your email list to Facebook. If Facebook finds a match, you can target your email subscribers with a new offer. You can then do a look-a-like audience (as above) of this new list too.

These are the popular targeting methods.

Facebook Advertising Objectives

As Facebook develops as an advertising platform, they’re offering more ways to track your advertising campaigns. With over a dozen possibilities, these three are ones you’re likely to use starting out.  

1. Conversions: Getting people off Facebook to your website isn’t easy (Facebook wants you to stay on Facebook) therefore you want to track conversions if you have a specific goal such as registering for a webinar, downloading your PDF or buying something.
2. Post engagement: When you have a post on your page doing well organically, this is a good time to either boost the post to the rest of your audience that haven’t seen it yet, or a completely new audience.
3. Video views: There are over 8 billion video views a day on Facebook alone. The video views objective is a new therefore is relatively cheap at the time of writing. It’s a great way to introduce people to your company if you have an awesome video that adds value to potential customers.

Facebook Advertising Tools

Each advertising campaign can have a number of objectives therefore being able to track your results is important. There are dozens of tools available with these three proving popular:

• Facebook Ads Manager App. A simple app from Facebook to produce ads from your mobile quickly and helps you track basic objectives.

• Qwaya. As you start to increase your spend on advertising, split testing ads helps you keep your costs down and conversions high. Qwaya can assist you split test your advert text, images and audience efficiently.

• AdEspresso’s Compass Report. The compass report produces a report card letting you know at a glance how your ad is doing relative to the competition based on $290 million of Facebook advertising they’ve tracked. A great tool for small businesses creating Facebook ads internally.

Every tool functions differently. With some more likely to suit you than others. If these three don’t quite do what you’d like, look around and see if there are any that allow you to track what you won’t.

Facebook Advertising Offers

Facebook offers allow you to create coupons exclusive for Facebook users who can then claim the offer in-store and/or online via email confirmation.

These coupons work like the traditional coupons you receive in the mail with discounts via percentage or dollars amounts.

Need some help with Facebook Advertising? We can help. Contact us today!

Filed in // Social Media Marketing