Facebook Advertising is when someone uses the Facebook Platform to create advertisements that can be seen by Facebook users.
It is one of the most popular methods of online advertising (along with Google Ads) and it is also the main source of revenue for the Facebook company.
Why you should use FB Ads
There are two main reasons why you should use Facebook advertisements:
- Facebook has 2.27 billion monthly active users. This is 29% of the total world population! That means that the chances that your target audience is on Facebook are quite high.
- Facebook lets you show your ads to a very specific group of people. So, for example you can only show your ads to single mothers of age 25-35 who live in Nebraska talk English and Spanish and they like alcohol.
And being able to narrow down that large pool of Facebook users to your ideal client is gold.
How you can use FB Ads
To get ready for running Advertisements on Facebook you first need to follow these 5 steps:
- The first thing you need to do in order to start running Facebook Ads yourself is to create a Facebook Business Manager account by going to business.facebook.com and sign up for free using your normal Facebook account’s credentials.
- Then you need to set up your payment method.
- Next you need to create or claim an already created Facebook Page.
- The next step is to create an Ads Account.
- After that you can go to your Ads manager and create an Ad from there.
The video below shows you an Ad on Facebook that was shown to me when I was scrolling down my Facebook feed.
Then you can see all the 5 steps mentioned above plus how I was able to replicate this exact same Ad by going to my Facebook Business Manager and creating it.
Facebook Ads vs Traditional Advertising
Let’s see the difference between Facebook Ads and Traditional Advertising in the example shown in the video above of a university that wants to advertise their Alumni network.
How can the university run this advertisement without using Facebook Ads (or any other similar online advertising method)?
They can try to run Ads on television. But which television? Of what country? When you run an International business school your Alumni can be anywhere in the world after they graduate.
You can try putting big banners at bus stations close to the university or all over the country and hope that some graduates see the banners.
What if the image on those banners though is not the correct one? What if it doesn’t appeal to the graduates? You can try a different image, but how much money will you have spent by then?
In other words, there are two main problems with traditional advertising:
- You can’t be sure whether your target audience (alumni) will see your ad
- In order to test different images or text copies you have to spend too much money
On the other hand, by using Facebook Ads you can test different ad images and text copy with a very small budget and you can also target your exact audience (alumni) by specifying your audience’s interests.
Which type of Facebook Ads you should use
The Facebook Algorithm is remarkable.
If you say to Facebook that you want your ad post to get engagement (i.e. likes, comments and shares) you will get engagement.
If you say to Facebook that you want clicks to your website, this is what you will get.
Or in case you want people to complete a certain action on your website (e.g. buy a product) then the Facebook algorithm will show your ad to people more likely to by your product.
So, depending on what you want to achieve from an Ad you can select the appropriate objective.
The Facebook Ads Objectives
How to run profitable Ads consistently
Once you manage to create an Ad that works and brings you the results you wanted (e.g. clicks to your​​ website), then you need to be able to maintain the ad.
Why? Because an Ad that works well now doesn’t mean that it is going to work well in 2 weeks.
All Ads will eventually stop producing great results and it is up to you to make sure that you have always at least one Ad that performs well.
So, how do you do this?
By scaling Ads through duplication.
This means that you can duplicate an Ad, create an exact copy of it and change something very small like the budget or the age of your audience.
By slightly tweaking an Ad like this the Facebook algorithm thinks that you created a brand new ad and it starts showing it to more people.
Constantly sharpen your FB Ads skills
Facebook Ads is an amazing tool you can use to reach a great number of people by paying very little money compared to traditional advertising.
Just like Email Marketing, FB Ads have been around for some time now and it looks like it will still be around in the years to come.
Even though it’s easy to start running Ads on Facebook and get good results by following this post’s instructions, the Facebook Ads Algorithm is something very dynamic.
It keeps changing due to things like GDPR or the Cambridge Analytica incident. Or it changes as part of Facebook’s revenue strategy.
No matter the reason it changes, what you can do is stay up to date, sharpen you​​r skills on FB ads as much as you can and try to take advantage of this awesome tool as much as possible.
Have you ever used Facebook Ads? If yes, did you get results out of it? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
Until next time.
