Many of you will be aware that Facebook has started to push it’s advertising platform in recent months, and certainly as a user of Facebook I have noticed more and more ads appearing. We wanted to take a look at running a few simple campaigns to see what the costs involved were like and how detailed the oft talked about targeting was.
Creating an Facebook ad really is very easy, and is split up into three simple steps.
1. Designing Your Ad
Designing a Facebook Ad
Designing your ad couldn’t really be simpler. Put in a destination URL, a headline, some ad text, and an optional picture and you’re good to go. There are some useful links to best practices, reasons for rejection and a design FAQ on the page also.
For some reason their preview of the ad has a line saying “Phil Boyle likes this” with a thumbs up icon beside it, but this hasn’t appeared any time we’ve seen the ad displayed.
2. Targeting
Targeting A Facebook Ad
Facebook offers some great targeting options, but also leaves some basic ones out. For instance, you can easily target just men or women, just those in a relationship, or even just those who are engaged. This is a great service for anyone in the wedding industry looking to drum up some business!
However, it only allows you to geographically target by country, which will be too coarse for many businesses, especially smaller local businesses.
Similarly, their other targeting filters will be great for certain business types but all but useless for others.
3. Campaign Pricing
Pricing A Facebook Ad
All the usual options are available when it comes to controlling the cost of your campaign, but there are also some things that we find a little strange. You have to set a daily limit, as they bill you every day. There are also no VAT invoices available for your campaigns at the time of writing.
You can choose either CPM or CPC payment for you ad. We went with CPC ourselves. The suggested bids seem to be picked out of thin air, and they are quickly creeping up too, presumably as more advertisers buy up slots. Pay what you want to pay and don’t be afraid to cut your bids. They do offer a decent set of reports so you can analyse what effect changing your bids has.
Our intention with Facebook advertising was primarily to get our brand in front of as many people as possible with as little cost as possible, and to that end it has been pretty successful. We’ve had coming up to 9,000,000 impressions on our ads and spent less than €900, and that was just targeting Ireland!
So, in summary, if Facebook’s targeting can identify any niche that your business is interested in, it could well be a useful advertising platform for you to explore. For the rest of us it’s probably just a good way to get some cheap name recognition going.
We don’t have a product or sale as a goal of our Facebook advertising, but if you do we’d love to hear how you have gotten on with it and whether you think it has been a success or not, and any other thoughts people have on social network advertising.
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