Facebook Ads Basics

Just about all of my readers know that I’m a big proponent of Facebook ads.

The reason is simple. With Facebook ads you can get highly targeted and low cost clicks. You see Facebook knows a lot about its users. They know where they live, what they do, what their interests are, what things they like and do not like. Facebook is a gold mine for the marketer. In fact that’s what makes Facebook so valuable. Think about it. In the US alone there are over 130 million Facebook users. Thought the world there are over 800 million daily active Facebook users. Even better for the marketer is that these users are mostly not children. Most active Facebook users are over the age of 18, this is very good if your selling a product online since people over 18 dont have to ask a parent for a credit card.

All of these users are feeding Facebook a huge amount of data which it gladly stores, indexes, and will use to assist advertisers to deliver ads to the people most likely to take action on the ad.  At the time of this writing Facebook has about 300 petabytes of data stored about its users. In case you dont know a petabyte is 1 billion megabytes! Here let me give you real world examples of how much data Facebook has about their users. If you had a audio MP3 encoded at 1MB per minute it would take 600,000 years worth of non stop audio to full up 300 petabytes. Most computers come with a 500GB hard drive, well you would need 150,000 of these computers to store 300 petabytes.

Ok so now that we are all convinced of the fact that Facebook knows a lot about a lot of people. The question now becomes how do we tap into this data and use that to our advantage. Well of course Facebook is not going to just open up their data center and let us start helping ourselves to all of this invaluable information, however they will let us create ads and help us by showing our ads only to the people most likely to click on them.

The first step is going to be to select what kind of action you want from your Facebook ad.

Im not a big supporter of Facebook fan pages anymore so for this tutorial Im going to focus on website clicks as these are going to generally be what is most useful to people looking to make money online. Also before we get to involved in this training I want to make it clear that Facebook is unlikely to approve any ad that links to a affiliate offer. But really you should be sending people to a presale page anyway and not directly to your affiliate link. If you are sending them to a presale page for an affiliate product you should word your ad to say its a ‘review’ of the product in question. This way you look like a critic to Facebook and not a marketer. Its unfortunate but internet marketers (especially those in the make money online niche) do have a bit of a bad reputation in general. (this is due to some ‘bad apples’ in the business and not because IM is a bad business).

The next step is going to be to enter the URL of where you want people to go to after they click. This normally is going to be your sales page or your squeeze page.

Next you upload your ad image. The image should be something that stands out and that grabs peoples attention.  Also these images need to be quite large. Facebook recommends 1200X628 pixels. Also you can upload up to 6 different images and Facebook will rotate these images in your ads at no charge. This way you can see which images people respond to best and later elect to have the ad only show the images that get a good response. I recommend that you do this, it costs nothing, and it may lead to better conversions.

After your images are uploaded you will need to enter your ad copy. An ad consists of a headline and a body. For each you are limited in the number of characters you can enter. When writing your copy you should always be asking yourself. Does this wording make me want to click on this ad? If the answer is not ‘absolutely yes’ then you might consider further tweaking your copy.

Your also going to be given the option to link a Facebook fan page to your ad. You will need to do this if you want your ad to show in the news feed of your target audience. Putting your ad in a the news feed is a feature you 100% for sure dont want to miss out on so if you dont have a fan page to link to your ad then make one. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people wont be visiting the fan page you link to this ad, its just a requirement to have the ad show in the news feed.

Now that you ad copy is all set up its time for your targeting. You can see that Facebook has a number of options and demographic selections for targeting your ad.

Unfortunately your target audience is going to depend on your niche so its not something I can just tell you how to set up. If you use common sense though you should be able to get your target audience well defined (in the green area). For example when I advertise this blog I target people age 21 and over, who are in the USA, United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand and are interested in ‘internet marketing’ or ‘making money online’. This is a good target audience for me as getting clicks for 16 year old teens in Thailand is not likely to bring me a return on my ad investment.

Once your ad is all set up and you have your target audience defined the last step is going to be to set your budget and decide how to pay for your ad. There are two things I want to touch base with on this step.

First: There is an old saying that you ‘shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket’. Well this is true with Facebook advertising as well. No matter how big or small your ad budget is you should not put it all into one ad. Instead you should make several ads, each one with a fraction of your budget. Then run all of the ads for a day or two and see which ones are performing well and which ones are not. You can then stop running the non performing ads and shift their portion of your budget into the ones that are doing well.

Second: How should you pay for your ads? You have the option to pay per click (CPC) or to pay per thousand impressions (CPM). In my experience I got better results when I paid per thousand impressions. That is my over all cost per click to my website was lower when choosing  CPM over CPC.

So thats a quick overview of how to set up a Facebook ad. I hope you found it useful and I hope you consider Facebook ads as a viable traffic source. I have used them with success and I know a lot of other people who have as well. If you put a little effort into targeting, tweaking your ad copy, and running multiple ads at once (and removing the poorly performing ones) you can get targeted  traffic at a cost that is hard to match. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments section below. I’m always glad to help if I can.

 

 

 

 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.