Advertise on Facebook

Facebook Advertisements are a great way to increase traffic to your site, test a product idea or service, and gather feedback on your target market. If you have 10 minutes and a modest budget, you can create a Facebook Ad.

For those of you who have experience with pay per click advertising and online marketing, you will appreciate the simplicity of creating a Facebook Ad, which you can do in three very simple steps.

To access your advertising area, scroll down to the bottom of your Facebook page and select “Advertising.” This will take you to a landing page, and in the top right corner, click on the green “Create an Ad” button. You will immediately be taken to the first step of the advertising process.

1) Design Your Ad

In this first step, you enter your destination URL which is where anyone who clicks on your advertisement will be redirected. You can also create a title up to 25 characters, as well as a description up to 135 characters and an image. You can even see a preview of what your advertisement will look like in the box to the right.

2) Targeting

This next step is what makes the Facebook Advertising well worth it. You can focus on thousands, or you can adjust the targeting to focus on less than 100 by adjusting the location, demographics, likes and interests, and connections on Facebook.



Some interesting areas to target by in the advanced setting include birthdays, languages, education, work, and even relationships statuses. Think about how valuable it would be for a photographer to run an advertisement focusing on “engaged” statuses.

As you fill out the targeting fields, Facebook projects the estimated number of people that fall into those parameters:



If you want to modify the number of people for your “Estimated Reach” you can simply go back and adjust the fields until you are hitting your target market.

3) Campaigns and Pricing

The final step is to create a campaign name, a budget, and a pricing model. As you can see from the screen shot below, you can create a per day budget, or a lifetime budget. In the schedule section, you can also determine if you would like your ad to run for a specified amount of time or indefinitely.



Typically, whatever Facebook suggests as a bid per click is good to go with, however,  in the advanced settings of this section, you do have the option to change that.



You can also choose between “Pay for Clicks” where you pay when someone clicks on your advertisement, or “Pay for Impressions,” where you pay every time the advertisement is displayed. “Pay for Clicks” is almost always the way to go, as you are paying for direct leads, and paying for impressions only may exhaust your budget.

After reviewing the details and making the appropriate payment, Facebook will review your ad for approval. Once approved, your advertisement will be live and you can log into your account anytime to view statistics. This is not only a great way to capture online leads, but also to help you collect valuable data about who is actually buying your products and services.

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