Facebook advertising has become one of the fastest and most effective ways to generate high quality traffic and leads. if you are already familiar with the concept of search engine marketing, then it won’t be hard for you to get familiar with the Facebook Ads platform. Instead of focusing on keywords, you will be able to target your audience based on demographics and interests. While most search engine advertising only allows you to buy advertising on a per per click basis, Facebook offers both cost per click advertising (CPM) and buying on an impressions basis (CPM).
Before you start creating your first Facebook Ads campaign, it’s important for you to understand how to setup your ad campaigns. Let’s quickly run through three points of interest when setting up your first Facebook Ads campaign; advertising types, demographics and daily ad spending.
Advertising Methods: CPC vs. CPM
Just like you are already familiar with advertising on Google, Yahoo and Bing using a cost per click model, you can do the same through Facebook. One of the biggest struggles with search engine advertising is the increasing prices in the CPC model, fortunately Facebook Ads also offers another method of advertising which is on an impression basis, also known as CPM. Just like the search engines run off a click through rate (CTR) ranking system, Facebook also takes the CTR into effect. The higher your click through rate, the lower you will have to pay per click.
Most advertisers will start their campaigns out in a CPC model, then take their best performing ads and back them out into a CPM model, which may actually save them money in the long run. Facebook will serve up CPM advertising before CPC advertising, simply because they know they will make money off the CPM advertisers.
Demographics
The best way to create a winning ad campaign on Facebook, is to heavily drill down on your demographics until you find the best targets that work. The ability to pick and choose what demographics and audience you would like to target to is what makes Facebook Ads one of the most superior advertising platforms on the internet today.
Just for example, let’s say you want to target anyone on Facebook that is interested in “Frank Sinatra”, living in the United States and over the age of 18. Just plug in these demographics into your filter and you quickly have targeted everyone that is within your demographic range. Facebook has thousands of “interest” and “fan pages” that help you sort demographics beyond just the basics of age, location and gender.
As you can see in the screen shot above, after plugging in the demographics we mentioned above, this ad campaign will target 736,640 users that fall into your demographic field. This is just an example and I went wide spread on age. In a real campaign, it would be smart to break down your campaign by smaller age groups and split gender.
Daily Ad Spend & Limits
Lastly, it’s important to understand and respect the pure power and size of Facebook. With over 500 million users on the social network, it would not be hard for them to send a few million impressions your way within a few hours. With that said, it’s very important to manage your daily ad spend and click rates.
Above we have a screen shot of the “Campaigns, Pricing and Scheduling” part of setting up a new ad campaign. If you are new to Facebook Ads, I would recommend setting your daily limits to $5-$25 a day depending on how much you are willing to spend. You should spend a decent amount of time testing and tweaking your ad campaigns for best results and click through rates.
Getting Started with Facebook Ads
To get started with your first Facebook Ads campaign, simply log in to Facebook and select the “Advertising” link at the bottom of the page. From here you can start messing around with campaign creation and have an ad up and running in no time. Once you submit an ad, your creative will have to be approved by the Facebook Ads sales team, but this is usually only a few minutes to a couple hours during regular business hours.
