Your Pocket Guide To Facebook Advertising

Facebook has become one of the most powerful advertising platforms for web marketing. The numbers speak for themselves; with 1.44 billion monthly active Facebook users, it’s the hottest platform out there to advertise your marketing messages.

Before you start advertising make sure you know what you want to get from your advert; What’s your objective? Who are you looking to target? Do you need a call to action? What’s your budget? How long are you going to advertise for?

This quick pocket guide should help you to understand all the the basics of Facebook advertising and give you an insight into performance Ad analysis:

Set up your Facebook Ads Account

To start advertising on Facebook you need to set up your Ads account. To do this, go to ad creation and select an advert objective.

Dependent on the aim of your advert, Facebook offers you a choice of objectives to choose from; you may want to drive traffic to your website (increase conversions on your website) or encourage Facebook users to come to your event (raise attendance at your event). Here’s a full list of the objective options from Facebook:

Campaigns and Ad sets

Facebook updated their campaign structure in 2014 to make it easier to manage ads. The overall structure has three tiers: The Campaign, the Ad sets and the Ads. Here’s a quick visual from Facebook for Business:

The Campaign allows you to better organize your ads per objective. The budget and time setting is your Ad set. Here you’ll define your total budget, start and end date of your advert. Each Ad set can feature multiple ads but remember to give a name to each set; this will make it clear for you to identify the demographic target and reach.

Budget

By default Facebook will propose the bidding and audience reach for you. You can specify either a daily budget or a total budget you want to spend on your advert. If you’re jumping in the deep end with your first advert/s then I would recommend to test the waters with budget; £5 a day, £20 a day, or £100 for a week. You have nothing to lose.

If you select to use a total budget Facebook will try to split this evenly across the campaign’s lifetime. An end date is mandatory when using a total budget.

Analyze your campaign performance

Once you’ve gone live with your advert you can monitor its performance. It’s important to keep up to date regularly on how your advert is performing. Facebook will automatically display the most useful data for each campaign you set up.

Image from Adespresso.com

Most people tend to look past the frequency number but it is one of the most important metrics to monitor. It basically tells you, on average, how many times a unique visitor has seen your ad.

This data is free so make the most of it. Record it and report on it, discover what has worked this time and what improvements can be made on your next advert/s. You may want to change images, key messages, and test different call to actions.

Source: http://www.business2community.com/facebook/your-pocket-guide-to-facebook-advertising-01289247