A quick guide to Facebook advertising

In our previous post about engaging users in Facebook, we touched upon using Facebook ads to engage more users. This article looks more in-depth at the different types of advertising and how you can use them for your business. Facebook is not only the biggest social network in the world, but also a great advertising platform. Although seen by many as the most direct competitor for Google Adwords, in my opinion, Facebook advertising is more of a complement. Facebook ads are able to reach users that you wouldn’t find if using the Google platform and vice versa.
Target specific groups of people with ads
For example, if you want to target teenagers it is easier to do it using Facebook than Adwords given that you can select specifically the range of ages that you want to target. On the contrary, if your company sells B2B Google ads are probably a much better option. Facebook offers three types of advertising:
  • Facebook ads
  • Sponsored stories
  • Facebook exchange

Facebook Ads

This is the traditional way of Facebook advertising. You create an ad by:
  • Configuring your audience (age, gender etc)
  • Targeting devices (PC, mobile or both)
  • Choosing the location
  • Selecting the maximum cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM)
  • Uploading a picture and creating text.
You can use these ads to promote your website, your Facebook page, a specific post and even a Facebook App to increase the number of likes and traffic.
Increase visibility of your page

Sponsored Stories

This type of ad increases the visibility of a page or post among the friends of users that are already engaged with the content. When creating a sponsored story campaign you can choose what kind of user action you want to promote (such as a like, a comment, a share or a vote on a poll). Once the campaign starts running, the Facebook friends of the users that previously interacted with a post or page will start seeing ads like the one below on the right side of the screen or in their news feed.

Facebook Exchange

These ads work well for ecommerce
In my opinion this is the most interesting kind of Facebook advertising. If you have an existing ecommerce website, and you offer Facebook login as a way to register users to your website, you will be able to use this feature. Exchange is a retargeting tool that allows you to target users that previously visited your website and left without purchasing. It is possible to reach these users in two different ways:
  • Liquid ads: these are like regular ads, but they automatically show the most relevant product for each user.
  • News Feed: it will allow you to reach users by advertising on their main feed.
This is an excellent way to remind users of past activity and also leverages your digital channels to their maximum potential.

Features

There are also a few more features which are common to all ads:
  • Facebook can now optimise advertising for user actions such as likes, comments, or link clicks.
  • You will be able to track your websites conversions by putting a small piece of code on your “Thank you” page and therefore optimise your campaign for conversions too.
Facebook advertising is a powerful tool that can turn the popular social network into one of your best conversion tools. If you think that your target audience is a frequent user of this social network it would be a good experiment to try…you have nothing more but a few pounds to lose!
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Published by

Alexis Pratsides