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An In-Depth Guide to Facebook Advertising

An In-Depth Guide to Facebook Advertising

With over 600 million members, Facebook has quickly become an internet behemoth – and an incredibly lucrative advertising platform. For people who are familiar with traditional PPC, Facebook will be a bit of a shock.

Though you’re paying per click as you would in search, the mindset of someone on Facebook is very different than someone on search.

When you’re on search, you’re usually looking for an answer to a problem. For example, someone might type in “how to lose weight.” Weight loss ads that target that keyword have the advantage of knowing that the visitor is already eager for a solution.

Facebook works completely differently. Instead of seeing qualified visitors, you have to target by demographic. Though you might target women between 22 to 28 if that’s your target demographic, you still can’t know for sure that they’re interested in weight loss.

That’s the main difference between Facebook and search; search is permission-based marketing, while Facebook is interruption based.

So how do you do Facebook marketing well?

==> Start with Attention-Catching Images

The most important aspect of a Facebook ad is the images. Your images should be both attention catching and relevant to whatever it is you’re selling.

Try to find a handful of completely different images. For example, if you’re doing a weight-loss product, you might want to try one of a woman, one of a couple, one of a woman with a measuring tape around her waist, a photo of the product and something completely off the wall.

==> Split Test

Test the images, the headline, the copy, the landing page, the offer and just about anything else you can think of.

Because of the way Facebook is set up, you can get a lot of data on how your ad is performing without spending a lot of money. Since you only get one click every 1,000 to 10,000 visitors (or more), you can quickly see which ads are getting clicks and which ones aren’t, without paying for too many clicks.

Also, you can usually test quite a few ads at once. Unlike search PPC, where you’re usually just testing two ads, on Facebook you can test as many as five ads at the same time.

==> Targeting

Targeting plays a huge role in your success. The more specifically you can target your audience, the better.

The most basic level of targeting comes in the form of demographics. You can target by gender, by income, by geographic location, by marital status and more. However, targeting by demographics alone probably won’t give you the ROI you need.

To achieve a good ROI, you’ll also need to target by keywords. Keywords are interests people have listed and pages they’ve joined. Adding keywords will vastly narrow down the pool of impressions you can get.

Start with narrow targeting, then get more specific once the ROI has been proven.

If you can craft attention-catching ads, split test regularly and target your audience specifically, you stand a very good chance of running a successful Facebook PPC campaign.