Chapter 1

Advertising in Facebook

In This Chapter

Attracting new clients with Facebook advertising

Understanding how advertising works on Facebook

Developing ad campaigns to meet your goals and objectives

Setting your budget and time frame

According to Business Insider, Facebook posted almost $7 billion in advertising revenue in 2013. And, in a rebuff to its many critics, Facebook’s mobile advertising revenue started outpacing its web-based revenue in fourth quarter 2013, with mobile advertising accounting for 53 percent of advertising receipts. That gave Facebook its first-ever quarter with more than $1 billion in mobile ad revenue. (For more information on using Facebook’s mobile advertising, see Book VIII, Chapter 4.)

By any measure, that’s a lot of money, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook makes an effort to keep that revenue stream a-flowin’. Clearly, Facebook has a vested interest in making the ads an easy and pleasant experience for both the marketer and the Facebook community.

In this chapter, you find out how to make strategic and tactical advertising decisions that produce the results you want. You discover how to set your marketing goals and objectives, allocate a budget, and set your time frame.

In Chapter 2 of this minibook, you learn the mechanics of using the Ads Create tool to set up a campaign, write and target an ad, and start running it. Chapter 3 deals with the Power Editor for more complex campaigns. By the time Chapter 4 of this minibook comes around, you’ll be ready to hone your advertising skills by setting up ad testing, measuring your test results with the Ads Manager tool, and modifying your campaign if needed. Hang on — it’s going to be fun!

Introducing Facebook Advertising

Placing ads on Facebook provides one of the most targeted advertising opportunities on the Internet today. You decide exactly which Facebook users will see your ad. Your choices include (but are not limited to) age, gender, education, location, language, interests, relationship status, and keywords in your targets’ Profiles. You can even choose to advertise only to people who have a birthday within a specific week. When you can narrow your target audience to that granular level, you can be pretty sure that whoever clicks your ad is a prospective customer.

Within Facebook Ads, you can advertise an external URL (directing people out of Facebook to your website), or you can advertise something internal to Facebook, such as your Page, an event, a post, or an application.

Understanding auction bidding

Facebook uses an auction-based system, in which you bid on how much you’re willing to pay for each action. (By action here, we mean each time someone clicks your ad or each time Facebook places your ad in front of 1,000 people.)

There are two different bidding processes for advertising: One process is for advertising by clicks you receive, and the other is advertising by the number of times your ad appears (impressions).

Before we dive deeper into Facebook Ads, we want to introduce the terminology.

• Cost per click (CPC): Cost per click is a model in which you pay for an ad only when someone clicks on your ad, whether it appears in the right-side column of a Facebook Page or within someone’s News Feed. This works particularly well when you want to direct people to your website or other external URL.
• Cost per impressions (CPM): You pay based on how many thousands of people see your ad — a measurement known as impressions, or CPM. (CPM stands for cost per thousand. Okay, really, it stands for cost per mille; mille means one-thousand in French.) You may find this option works better for branding purposes, or when you’re trying to direct people to someplace within your own Facebook presence. Facebook optimizes the delivery of your ads to target the people most likely to help you reach your stated objective, such as Likes or joining an Event.

Facebook Ads competes on more than price. Facebook will show the ads that it determines are the most likely to be successful — that is, the ads that will give Facebook the most revenue!

The actual amount needed to “win” a bid fluctuates constantly. That’s partly because Facebook continually evaluates ad performance and partly because the pool of competing ads is always changing.

You can make your ad more competitive by raising your bid. Facebook will only charge the amount necessary to win the auction even if that amount is less than your maximum bid. Therefore, you have nothing to lose by entering your true maximum bid.

You’ll never be charged more than the maximum cost per click you set. And you’ll never be charged more than your daily or lifetime budget for your ads, regardless of the option you choose.

Setting a flat fee to promote a post

Facebook’s Promoted posts are a special type of internal advertising. Instead of paying by click or by thousands of impressions, you pay a flat fee to have Facebook to push a post directly into the News Feeds of your fans.

You will be able to set a lifetime budget that lasts for the time frame you set for your Promoted post campaign. Charges, which are incurred by impression, will be deducted from your budget.

Why would you want to pay to advertise your Page Post? Facebook enables you to reach out to other Facebook users who might not have another means of discovering your company’s expertise, product, event, application, or service. You may also want to target Friends of your existing fans to show social proof (that is, your Friend likes me, so you should, too). Or you may want to push an important sales message or update into the News Feeds of your community for people who may not see your updates otherwise.

We discuss Promoted posts (sometimes called Promoted Page posts) in more detail later in this chapter.

Paying a premium price

Premium ads are reserved for clients with a budget of $30,000 or more per month. (Wouldn’t that be nice?) They may appear on the Logout Page, which offers the largest creative format to drive video views or direct response traffic, or on the home page. Ads within the Mobile News Feed, Desktop News Feed, or Right Column on the Homepage offer the greatest visibility. After all, they appear on the most visited Pages of Facebook.

Targeting your ads strategically

Facebook gives you multiple options for targeting your ads to Facebook users. By far the most common method is demographically, but you can also target by interest areas, by geographic region, by keywords that people use in their Profiles, and/or by how they have behaved on Facebook in the past (target users who are most apt to like something).

Compare Facebook’s methods for targeting to the search term-matching method used for most Google AdWords or ads in Yahoo!/Bing. (Google does offer a demographic option, but it’s not as accurate as Facebook’s.)

When you place ads on these search-engine platforms, you select and bid on certain keywords that might be entered by searchers. If your business is car insurance, for example, you could opt for “car insurance,” “car insurance quotes,” or “auto insurance” as keywords.

By comparison, on Facebook you select the demographics or other characteristics of the audience you want to view your ad. People with those characteristics may or may not be searching for what you offer. Suppose that you determine that your ideal customer for car insurance is a 35-year-old male college graduate who lives within 25 miles of your city. You can easily enter those target demographics when you set up your advertising; only people who meet those criteria see your ad.

Targeting by demographics

Since the search term approach isn’t relevant to Facebook, knowing your target demographic is critical. You may have some general thoughts about whom you’re trying to reach in terms of your marketing efforts, but we recommend going through your customer list (or a small sample, if your list is large) and charting the following attributes to start:

• Age
• Gender
• Location

Using Facebook Insights to obtain basic demographics

If you don’t already have a customer list with demographic data, use your own Facebook presence to glean demographic information. From your Facebook Page, take a look at Insights — Facebook’s statistics area, which shows your community’s demographics, including gender, age, and location. Here are the steps to get to that information.

1. Log in and navigate to the Admin panel by clicking on the page name beneath the heading “Pages” in the left-side navigation.
2. On the Admin panel, click the See Insights button in the top right.
3. On the Insights page, choose the People tab at the far right in the first row of navigation, as shown in Figure 1-1.
4. Choose whether you want the demographics for Your Fans (people who liked your Page), People Reached, People Engaged, or Check-Ins in the second row of navigation.

   For basic demographic information, you probably want either Your Fans or People Reached.

   For example, Figure 1-1 shows detailed information about the demographics of Your Fans, broken down by gender, age, location, and language for a specific Facebook Page. Now you can apply this information to decide which demographic segments to target in your ad campaigns.

   We cover Facebook Insights in more detail in Book IX, Chapter 2.

You need to decide not only the target demographic for your ad, but also what to advertise. Match the content of your ad to what’s likely to appeal to your target demographic. For instance, a sporting goods company might have one ad for younger people who are interested in extreme sports and another for an older demographic interested in Pilates or yoga.

Targeting with additional parameters in Facebook

To get a bit closer to your target audience, try selecting Precise Interests and/or Broad Categories when you set up your ad campaign, as we explain in the next chapter. In addition, users may have entered specific words within their Profiles on their About page, or in their Timelines. Perhaps they indicate they like volleyball or horror movies, or that they liked The Beatles’ Facebook Page.

If you use the Power Editor (see Chapter 3 of this minibook), you will find other options for identifying your audience based on external activities, such as people who have visited new car websites.

Figure 1-2 shows an About page with text within the user’s Work and Education section that might be used as keywords. See the interest areas listed under the More drop-down menu.

When you create a Facebook ad, as we show you how to do in Chapter 2 of this minibook, you can enter the demographics, Likes, Interests, and keywords in the Audience section. Figure 1-3 shows the Audience section of the Facebook Ad Creation Tool. You can see how many choices you have. Fortunately, Facebook displays a dial to estimate the size of the potential target audience based on the selections you make.

Be careful not to narrow your audience too much when using Precise Interests or keywords from Profiles. Different people may use different keywords in their Profiles or may not select all their Precise Interests. You might exclude many potential customers. Watch the size of the potential audience on the dial; remember that only a small fraction of that audience will actually take an action.

Grasping the Anatomy of Facebook Ads

You’ve probably seen Facebook ads in the far-right column of a Facebook Page below the Sponsored heading, in your News Feed, or on your Facebook home page or log-out page. (If you haven’t, check out Figure 1-4.) Depending on the type of ad, you can choose where your ad will appear.

As many as seven ads may appear in that column at one time, depending on where you are within Facebook. They may appear on any page of Facebook or search results.

You can’t choose whether your ad will receive the top, middle, or bottom position, but the bid you place for the ad and how many clicks your ad receives affect the placement. Facebook uses its own algorithm to choose which ad to display based on multiple factors, including the historical performance of a particular ad at a particular bid price.

If you’re advertising something internal to Facebook, and you optimize your ad to show it to people who are most likely to engage with it somehow, Facebook does the bidding for you.

Ads placed within the News Feed usually have a more eye-catching graphic component than those in the right column. Again, Facebook uses complex algorithms to decide whose News Feeds will display your ad.

According to Nanigan’s Performance Marketing Insider, ads in Facebook News Feeds have a much higher click-through rate than ads in the right column, but a lower return on investment (ROI). For more information, see http://prfm.us.nan. Consider showing ads in both places, depending on your objectives. You’ll have to test for yourself!

Advertising by objective

Recently, Facebook simplified its advertising products, especially for small business users. It reduced the number of ad types and improved consistency in the look and feel of ads. Facebook streamlined the process of purchasing ads by focusing on specific marketing objectives.

As you see in the next chapter, your process starts with the question, “What’s Your Advertising Objective?” Facebook offers these choices:

• Clicks to Website
• Website Conversions
• Page Post Engagement
• Page Likes
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• In-store Offer Claims
• Event Responses

Facebook will recommend an appropriate type of ad and pricing strategy based on your choice of objective. However, you can always choose to test a different strategy if you want. In Chapter 4 of this minibook, you learn how to judge the performance of your ads against your objective and how to compare results based on your bidding choice.

Promoting posts

Promoted posts may appear in either the News Feed or the right column. A “Sponsored” notice appears just below the post in a News Feed. Posts appear higher up in the feed so the audience will be more likely to see them. As with any other post, users can interact by liking or commenting on the posts.

Advertising on Facebook versus other platforms

Facebook Ads works a little differently than Google AdWords, Yahoo!/Bing, or LinkedIn pay-per-click (PPC) ads, or even banner (display) ads. (If you aren’t familiar with banner ads, don’t worry; we go into a little more detail on that topic in a bit.)

While the ads look superficially similar, the click-through rate (CTR) on Facebook’s right-side column ads is usually lower than the CTR on PPC search engine advertising that appears in the right-hand column of search results pages.

There are obvious explanations for this difference. Not only is the social audience larger and less specific than the search audience, but the social audience may not be actively searching for what you’re advertising. (That’s bad.) But if people do click your advertisement, you know that they’re your target demographic. (That’s good.)

Banner ads are graphic ads placed on targeted, third-party websites or blogs that you believe your customers will visit. These ads may appear at the top, bottom, sides, or be embedded within the text on a web page. Sample banner ads are shown in Figure 1-5.

When people click a banner ad, they’re taken to a specific page on your web site, called a landing page. More highly trafficked ad publishing sites charge a higher rate to host banner ads. Banner ads are typically purchased directly from the publisher of a site or are placed on multiple websites when you purchase them through an advertising network. Google is one of many such advertising networks.

As with Facebook, Google and Yahoo!/Bing ads work on an auction system. You place a bid for ad space (either for search engine ads or banner ads), essentially letting the search engines know how much you’re willing to pay per click or per 1,000 impressions. With search engine ads, you may pay less for your ad when there’s less competition; however, if you bid too low, your ad may appear on page 3 or later of search results, which few people ever actually see.

The cost per click (CPC) on search engines can range from 10 cents to a few dollars, depending on how competitive the market for search terms is. In many cases, the CPC on Facebook is significantly less — but so is the return.

Comparing CTR and conversion rates

The click-through rate (CTR) — the percentage of visitors to a site who have clicked on a specific ad — typically runs around 0.10 percent for banner ads averaged across the Internet, roughly the same as the CTR on all types of Facebook ads combined at 0.11 percent.

Let’s look at the fine print. Prior to the development of News Feed ads, Facebook’s stamp ads — the ones that appear in the right column with a small graphic — used to receive a CTR between 0.04 percent and 0.40 percent. That’s much lower than Google’s typical 1.5 percent CTR on its PPC search ads, and even lower than Google’s 0.2 percent to 0.45 percent CTR on its display ads.

According to AdSpringer (blog.adspringr.com/battle-ctr-conversion-facebook-news-feed-ads-vs-stamp-ads), Facebook’s CTR rose dramatically after October 2013, when Facebook introduced large format graphic ads within the News Feed. CTR on these ads shot up to a remarkable 1.5 percent to 6 percent.

This doesn’t mean that you’ve found advertising’s Holy Grail! Alas, News Feed ads linked to outside sites appear to have a lower conversion rate than Google search ads. (Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the desired action, such as making a purchase.) As a result, your return on investment (ROI) may plummet. One option is to use Facebook’s Lookalike Audience feature in the Power Editor, which we discuss in the next chapter.

Defining Types of Ads

Facebook allows you to create many types of ads. Different types of ads may appear in News Feeds, in the right column, or in mobile environments. Facebook offers the following ad types:

• Pages
• Events
• External websites
• Applications
• Individual posts in the News Feed

For more detail on ad types, see https://fbcdn-dragon-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t39.2365/851593_514339305349474_836951008_n.jpg.

Readers who formerly used Facebook’s Sponsored Stories know that they are no longer available. But one of their best features — social engagement — is now available on all eligible ads. Whether you advertise an external site, or something internal to Facebook, people can respond to your ad without actually leaving the ad by clicking Like, Join, Comment, or Share as indicated. When someone clicks one of these options, you’ll be charged for a click.

For example, when people click the Like button in the ad shown in Figure 1-6 on the left, they automatically like the website URL listed in the ad. Similarly, people can RSVP to an event by clicking Join, as shown in Figure 1-6 on the right.

The social engagement component of Facebook Ads may make it easier to get the outcome you’re looking for, because people don’t have to click through to another page to take an action. If you have powerful ad copy that makes people want to connect with you, you lessen the chance that they’ll forget to like you or take another action after they click your ad.

You don’t need to do anything special to create ads that promote part of your Facebook presence. Facebook automatically creates a layout like those in Figure 1-6 when you indicate that you’re advertising a Facebook Page, group, or Event. Read more about how to create ads in Chapter 2 of this minibook.

Facebook tracks these clicks and much more in the statistical reporting section of the Ads Manager, which is shown in Figure 1-7. In-depth statistical analysis of your ad performance is covered in Chapter 4 of this minibook.

Looking at Promoted posts in more detail

Promoted posts push a post into more of your fans’ News Feeds. You can create them directly from the Facebook Timeline on your Page. This type of ad involves no targeting or bidding. Facebook has made it clear that not all posts on a Page are seen by all the people who like a Page. At the Facebook Marketing Conference in February 2012, Facebook stated that on average, each post is seen by 16 percent of a Page’s fans. Over the span of a week or a month, you may reach more than 16 percent of your fans with all your posts collectively, but not everyone will see every post.

The reach for many posts is low because people are connected to a lot of Friends and may like many Pages. It simply isn’t possible to show all the updates from all their Friends in someone’s News Feed.

Facebook uses complicated algorithms to determine whether a specific person is shown a post. (See Book IV, Chapter 2, for more information on these algorithms.)

If your fans haven’t interacted with your posts for a while, they may stop seeing your posts in their News Feeds. Oh, no! Engaging content is the best way to solve this problem for free. Make sure that your fans are watching for your posts, and make sure that you’re posting fun things to keep the Likes and comments rolling in for each post.

If this doesn’t work, however, you may need to spend a few advertising dollars to give your Page a lift with a Promoted post. The Promoted post appears in the News Feeds of more of your fans and their Friends, and/or to people you choose through targeting.

Facebook offers a shortcut, called Boost Post, for promoting a post. You can choose to boost any post directly from your Timeline, without bothering to use the Ads Create tool. Except for the fact that a boosted post can appear only in a News Feed (not in the right-hand column), a boosted post works exactly the same as a promoted post. For more about boosted posts, see facebook.com/business/promoted-posts.

You also may want to consider which posts are best to promote. Certainly, Facebook Offers (discussed in Book III, Chapter 1) are leading candidates for this advertising solution. Other good options are fun posts that get a lot of interaction; occasional sales messages that you don’t want people to miss; and intriguing photos that interest your audience and boost interaction. Or you may want to watch the interaction a previous post receives and then decide to promote it after the fact to reach more fans with a post that is already a winner.

Structuring ad campaigns strategically

In the Facebook Ads Manager, you arrange your ads into campaigns. A campaign is a group of similar ads.

For example, if you’re advertising your Facebook Page, your goal is to get people to like your Page. If you run an ad and get 30 clicks, but only 15 people like your Page from those clicks, your conversion rate is 50 percent. If you change the copy of your ad, and 30 people click your ad and 20 people like your Page, your conversion rate is 66 percent. The second ad converts better and gets you more for your money. Facebook automatically optimizes ads within an ad set to display the best performing ones.

The Ads Manager is where you can see all your campaigns in one place and access your reports and settings. We discuss the Ads Manager in Chapter 4 of this minibook.

You may want to create a separate campaign for different products, services, goals, or marketing objective. You can set daily budgets for your whole campaign, ad sets, and/or for each individual ad. You can run a single ad, but it’s placed under a campaign heading and ad set that you choose. Create a new campaign when you’re advertising

• A particular product
• A particular product in a region or country
• An event
• Your Page

You may want to run two identical ads — one using the CPC model and one using CPM — to see which gives you a better ROI.

Typically, you want to run some test campaigns with small budgets first to find out which ad performs best. Lest you think that this testing will break your bank, you can set a daily budget so that the ad stops running automatically when it reaches your limit. After you know which ads are performing best, you can run them for longer periods with bigger budgets.

Knowing what you can’t advertise

Facebook has guidelines about what you can and can’t advertise. It reviews each ad for appropriate language, content, and formatting. If your ad doesn’t comply with the guidelines, Facebook will reject it. Some of the items that you can’t advertise include

• Work-at-home sites that promise easy money for little or no investment
• Multilevel marketing opportunities, such as Mary Kay and Avon
• Software that contains spyware or malware
• Sites that have domain forwarding, in which the listed URL forwards to another website

  Even if your site is innocently forwarding the domain, many places that have domain forwarding may be doing so for shady reasons.

• Landing pages that have a pop-up window

  Having a pop-up window may be an innocent way to get subscribers to your e-mail list, but many people don’t like pop-up windows, and sometimes, they can’t even close them.

The obvious items are prohibited or highly restricted:

• Tobacco
• Gambling
• Pornography

Facebook heavily restricts the language that can be used in ads for certain products or that are targeted at certain demographic groups. See the Facebook Advertising Guidelines at www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php if you’re advertising any of the following items, among others:

• Adult products
• Dating sites
• Alcoholic beverages
• Drugs and tobacco
• Gambling and lotteries
• Pharmaceuticals and supplements
• Weapons and explosives
• Subscription services (such as ringtones)

Identifying Your Goals

Before you start spending money, have a goal in mind. What does a successful ad campaign look like? Attracting 50 more Likes? Selling 25 more widgets? Having ten people sign up for your newsletter? Getting ten comments on a post? Whatever goal you decide on, write it down, and come up with a way to track your progress.

Review your baseline values before you start advertising. For instance, look at your website analytics to check how much site traffic Facebook currently generates for you. How many sales come from those leads? With that information in hand, you can assess whether paid advertising makes sense and how much you should spend.

Gaining connections

Advertising your Page is one of the best things you can do with Facebook Ads. You know that the people who click your ad are in your target market and enjoy Facebook. Connecting with new people on your Page allows them to get to know you and your company.

Before you begin your advertising, collect more baseline data on how your Facebook Page performs currently. The Insights feature makes it easy.

Note these measurements:

• How many new Likes for your Page do you get per week, on average?
• To what extent are your current fans making the extra effort to interact with you — likes, comments, shares, and so forth? This statistic is indicated by the Engagement numbers.
• Do you find a difference in the demographics of Reach versus the demographics of Likes, Comments, or Shares? (We discuss how to view demographics in the earlier section, “Targeting by demographics.”)

We talk more about Insights in Book IX, Chapter 2, but here’s an overview of how to access your baseline performance data:

1. Log in to Facebook as your Page admin.
2. Click the See Insights button in the top right of your Admin panel.

   The Insights Overview area opens, which has some nice graphs. As shown in Figure 1-8, you can see tabs for Overview, Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, and People. We cover Insights in more detail in Book IX, Chapter 2.

   • Overview: This tab provides a summary where you see all the critical information about your Page. Click the section header for more details about each category, including statistics on posts, user interaction, and what you spent to promote your posts.
   • Likes: Number of unique people who have liked your Page. You can compare the number of new Page Likes in the current period with the number acquired during the previous week, month, or quarter. Use this to keep track of the growth of your Facebook Page and whether your Likes come from free traffic or ads.
   • Reach: Number of unique people who have seen any of your Page posts from either free traffic or paid ads and how they have interacted with your posts. Compare this with Total Reach, which tallies how many unique viewers have seen any component of your Facebook presence, including ads. By looking at activity of your Page overall, you can assess whether efforts to increase user interaction have worked. The chart in Figure 1-8 compares Post Reach in the past week with Post Reach in the prior week.
   • Visits: Shows which parts of your Facebook presence that people visit the most (tabs, Timeline, Profile) and what actions they have taken. This is somewhat like the old “Engagement” section, but more detailed. It now includes information about which sites have referred traffic to your Facebook presence. Use that information to decide where to place content and where to promote your page to increase Likes.
   • Posts: Lots of details, such as when people visit your Facebook Page, which posts work best, and what you’ve spent to promote your posts. Drop-down arrows let you segment results by audience characteristics or actions taken. Use this information to refine your content to increase interactive and decrease negative responses.
   • People: Demographic information about the people who have visited, liked, or otherwise interacted with your Page. Use this tab to see how successful you are in reaching your target market and whether the demographics match up. If not, you might want to revisit your targeting and other marketing assumptions.
3. To download your data, click the Export Data button in the top-right corner of the page. Refer to Figure 1-8.

   A query window appears, where you can set the date range, data type, (Page or Post), and file format you prefer: a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a comma-separated values (.csv) file.

   

4. For strategic advertising analysis, select Page Level Data, a file format, and the date range.

   You can download any date range, but there is a limit of 500 posts at a time. See Figure 1-9.

5. Click the Download button.

   With these settings, you can get the data to graph how many Likes you’re getting per week, how many Likes and Comments you receive on your posts, and your demographics.

   Write down all these baseline measurements or save them in a file so that you can compare them with your Insights after you run the campaign. Make sure you’re reaching people on Facebook who will interact with and be part of your community.

If your current Facebook community isn’t too large, see whether you can determine how many of your fans are already customers and how much money they’ve spent with you. With that information in hand, you’ll have a more accurate picture of the effect that your Facebook community has on your bottom line. That’s not to say that having a community isn’t of value in itself, but you’re running a business, after all, and your advertising dollars — and advertising labor hours — need to be well spent.

If (and only if) you have selected Page Likes as your advertising objective, you can send new visitors who click on your ad to a special Welcome tab rather than to your Timeline. You set this up in the Ads Create tool (see the next chapter). Click the Advanced Options drop-down list under the Text and Links section and select Landing View. On the following drop-down list, choose which tab or app you want to establish as the landing page. (See Book VI to learn more about adding tabs to your Page.)

A special tab should tell more about your business and give users a compelling reason to join your community. Figure 1-10 shows the REI Trail Mix tab, which tells visitors to click the Like button, shows the store locator, and offers some special blog posts with expert advice and information about the company.

Acquiring leads

Acquiring leads for your business with Facebook Ads could be your goal. Maybe you’d like your potential leads to sign up for your newsletter, a free half-hour consultation, or a free quote. In this case, you’ve probably set up your ad so that clicking it sends users to a website outside Facebook. When you do this, make sure that the landing page correlates directly with the Facebook ad.

You may want to have a special landing page on your website that clearly relates to your call to action. If you send visitors to your general website, they may not see the link to request your newsletter, or they may be distracted by all the other nice things on your website and forget to request a quote.

The landing page is part of your website; just make sure that the response to the call to action in the ad is very clear.

Figure 1-11 shows an example of a good landing page. The only thing users can do on this page is click the Try It For Free! button (people always like free) or give the company a call. There’s no menu to start clicking, and there are no distracting ads on the page.

If your goal is simply to drive awareness of your brand rather than acquire leads, you may want to have your phone number or store address in the ad so that someone doesn’t necessarily have to click to contact you. If you’re having a grand opening or open house, put as many key details as you can fit in the 90 characters you have available in the body of the ad. See Chapter 2 of this minibook for more information on creating your ad.

Reconnecting with your community

By using Facebook ad features, such as Promoted posts, you can reconnect with your current community and gain interaction from dormant fans. As we mention earlier in the chapter, and as you can see at the bottom of each of your Page posts, only a portion of your community sees any specific post. Once you drop out of someone’s News Feed, it’s very difficult to get back into that News Feed organically. Advertising is a good way to reconnect with that person.

If your goal is to reconnect with an existing community, choose to target only those people who have previously liked your Page. Go to the Connections area of the Create Your Audience section in the Ads Create tool to accomplish this. You can also use a Promoted post to push a post directly into the News Feeds of existing Likes, who otherwise may not see it. (The Connections area offers other options, such as reaching out only to new users.)

Making Your Initial Decisions

Map out your strategy before you start. You need to decide how long to run your ad, how much to spend, and how often to change things. Read the case study in the nearby sidebar for a story about how one business makes successful Facebook advertising decisions.

Allocating a budget

Allocate a budget and time for the initial testing, as well as the longer-term Facebook ad. You don’t want to spend money week after week on an ad that isn’t converting as well as it could be. Your initial testing budget should be, at most, one-tenth of your entire ad budget. Run each variation of your ad for a short time. Even after just 20 clicks, you can start to see whether one is outperforming another significantly.

When allocating a budget, knowing what your clicks are worth to your bottom line is critical. How your product is priced and how many conversions you need to be profitable are factors to consider when you set your budget. Think of it this way: If you need 100 people to visit your site before you get a sale, and each sale of your product earns you a net profit of $20, it doesn’t make sense to spend more than 20 cents per click.

Rotating your ad

Plan on rotating your ad every couple of days to keep things fresh, especially if you’re advertising to a small demographic.

Again, this strategy isn’t a “set it and forget it” campaign. Ideally, after you finish your testing, you’ll have zeroed in on several ads that perform well. You can manually schedule one of those ads to run for a few days; and then schedule a different ad to run for the next few days. A bit of a nuisance, but it increases viewer attention.

If you aren’t getting as many clicks as you’d like, try adjusting your demographics to a slightly wider range by

• Adding more keywords
• Expanding the age range, adding more cities
• Increasing the geographical range

Setting a time frame

How long should you run your ads? This question is intimately tied to your budget and how effectively your ad is converting. Make sure to allocate time to do your testing. Testing may take a few weeks, depending on how many campaigns you’re testing and how many ad variations you have.

You can also target day and hour when your ads start and stop, along with many other variables. You can find more about these options in Chapter 2 of this minibook.

Allow time for your ads to be approved. Ads are reviewed manually at Facebook, and approval can take anywhere from several hours to a full day. After the ad is approved, it starts running automatically. The ad approval process is covered in Chapter 2 of this minibook.