We’ve all seen them…the little ads on the side of our Facebook pages. Some of us have even clicked them. However, have you ever considered placing an ad to promote your business?
According to a report released by research group eMarketer, they estimate that Facebook will make over $4 billion in advertising revenue in 2011—and nearly $6 billion in 2012.
Ads can be extremely targeted for specific demographics. Because Facebook has over 500 million active users, you’ll want to drill down to a more specific audience. Some of the options include:
- Location, including country and city
- Age, sex, married, single, language
- Education and work
- Likes and interests
As you make your selections, Facebook indicates how many people are in the potential target.
You determine when your ad appears. For example, if you’re having a sale, you may want your ad to run just three days before to the sale.
Setting your budget is crucial. Facebook charges for its ads in one of two ways: by impression or by click. Impressions are counted each time an ad is shown to a user, regardless of whether the user clicks or not. Clicks are counted each time someone clicks an ad.
You determine how much you’ll pay per click or per thousand impressions. And, you decide how much you’re going to pay per day. Facebook “suggests” an amount for each click or impression, but you determine your own amount.
Ads link to something when clicked on. It can be a Facebook Page or event, a website…virtually anything on the Internet.
Get creative when designing your ad! You want it to catch someone’s attention. Each ad has a title, graphic, destination URL and body text. The body only has 135 characters, so be succinct. You do have the ability to make changes once the ad has started.
I ran an ad for one of my seminars as an experiment. The demographics I selected were adults within 25 miles of Denver, who didn’t follow my Facebook page. My daily budget was $10 and I ran the ad for 10 days.
Once the campaign was over, I reviewed Facebook’s advertising report. 404,229 people had the opportunity to see the ad (impressions) and 75 people actually clicked on it. The average cost per click that I paid was $1.31 and I spent $98.61.
Clearly, the number of people who clicked wasn’t very high. I probably should have narrowed my target even more. Maybe the ad wasn’t “eye catching” enough. However, several people did register based on the ad, so it paid for itself.
Facebook advertising is fairly complicated and this is just a basic overview. As it’s their major source of revenue, Facebook has developed very good advertising guidelines. To get started, go to the bottom of the Facebook page and click the “Advertising” link.
Have you run ads on Facebook? Were they successful? Any tips?
