Setting up Facebook ads is far different from creating ads on Search engines. Think of the difference between a person searching for a product, service, or information, versus a person who is just killing time at work on Facebook. In this tutorial we will walk you through the basics of signing up for Facebook ads as well as the basic strategy we employ when choosing images and ad copy.
Step 1: Where the ad takes you
Login to Facebook and click the small down arrow in the top right of your screen and select “Create an Ad”. You will be asked for the destination of your ad and you will see a list of pages. Although you may enter the URL of your website, we recommend using your Facebook page. Ads directed to an external URL will cost more than an ad for a Facebook page. “Liking” an external page will show in the persons News feed, however, liking your business page will keep them exposed to new posts from your business page.
Step 2: Creating Your ad
Title: When you are advertising a Facebook page you cannot change the title of the ad. It will always be the name of your page.
Copy: Writing copy for your page is easier than you think. Our goal is to get the person’s attention and ask them to like something that everyone likes. Getting someone to read your services and buy based on the ad is unrealistic. Remember that this person is not on Facebook to buy anything. Instead our goal is get the person to like your page, then become interested in your Facebook updates that periodically appear in their news feed. We generally tell clients that 4/5 Facebook posts should be entertaining, helpful, or anything but sales jargon. 1/5 can fall into the category of shameless self promotion.
Image: The primary goal of the thumbnail image, measuring 100×72 pixels, is to get the user’s attention. You will have to get creative here and try to find something off of Istockphoto.com or maybe you have some pictures of your own. Your logo is not a good Facebook ad image.
Landing View: For best results you should create a Facebook tab as a landing page for your ad. We have instructions on how to create your own Facebook tab. Unless you are a developer, it is probably easiest to use Iframe Apps to create a landing page. If you don’t want to make a landing page you can just direct users to your timeline. When users see the ad they can click the title, which will take them to the landing page, or they can click the like button which won’t take them anywhere.
Step 3: Choosing Demographics
You will have to use common sense when choosing your demographics. We usually do business locally so we set our ads to appear within a 50 mile radius of Philadelphia, and we want to target business owners. Selecting “Small Business Owners” has an audience of 90,000 people. It sounds like a lot, but even great Facebook ads will only get clicked 1 out of a 1000 times they are displayed. In a few months our ads will have been displayed to every person in this group several times, so we will need to write new ads or widen our audience to stay cost effective.
Other options for targeting include a persons interests, their relationship status, their education, and their connections.
- Interests can be used to target pet lovers for a veterinarian, reading for an Author, or Photography for camera sales
- Relationship status might be helpful for something like a wedding band who wants to target engaged couples
- Education is a good way to target a more affluent market
- Connections can be used to target friends of people who like your page. This becomes more effective as you get more “likes” and the pool of “friends of friends” expands.
Step 4: Objective and Budget
We leave the objective set to “Like my page” because that is our objective rather than trying to call attention to particular post. We won’t go into why this causes you to pay by the impression rather than pay per click. After a few days the ad above ended up costing about 75 cents per click/like.
We suggest creating at least 5 ads to start with. Check them periodically to replace poorly performing ads with new ones. Unlike Search Engine ads these ads will be continually shown to the same people so their performance will decline over time. Depending on the size of your audience you may need to replace all of your ads each month or change your audience if their performance declines.
What is a good Click through Rate (CTR) for a Facebook Ad?
Obviously it depends greatly on what you are trying to sell, but in our experience .1 % (1 of 1000 clicks) is acceptable. We have seen ads as high as .5 %. If your ads are less than .1% we suggest coming up with new ad ideas.
Who is a good fit for Facebook ads?
Not all of the business we work with are a great fit for Facebook. If you don’t have an active news feed it is probably not worth investing in Facebook ads, but for some businesse Facebook ads can be a great investment. Remember that the more people who like your page, the more likely other people are to like it. People are more likely to be 500th person to like your page than the 25th, so sometimes a Facebook ad campaign is necessary to get your page off the ground.
