How to advertise on Facebook

Targeting

The real draw of advertising on Facebook is the ability to target your ads at an incredibly precise audience. There’s no need to waste time, effort and money on finding the most appropriate publication, TV station or billboard location for your target market. Just choose your target audience (e.g. women, aged 30-45, with an interest in cooking, located in London) and the ads will be delivered towards your chosen demographic.

This also gives you the opportunity to experiment and see who your brand appeals to. Change the age setting or gender you target and see how your click-through rate changes.

Campaign options and pricing

Select a budget and timeframe that fits your marketing plan. If you have a particular offer or event to promote then you may want to put a short sharp burst of cash into promotion. Alternatively it might make more sense for you to put a small budget in and keep the campaign going indefinitely.

Facebook ads work on a pay per impression basis. Rather than paying a fixed amount you set a maximum daily or lifetime budget from which Facebook draw every time it serves one of your ads to your audience.

It’s worth noting that ads compete with each other for Facebook exposure based on a number of factors including success rate and who you are targeting. There’s no way to guarantee your ad will appear in a certain place, but you will only ever be charged for ads which are served.

Monitoring your success rate

Facebook’s ad manager allows you to keep track of how your ads are performing, with a range of data about who is clicking through to your sire and how often. It’s also worth using free software like Google Analytics to assess how users are behaving when they click through to your site.

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