Facebook Ads Killing Google Adwords

The PPC Marketing over at Facebook is really on fire right now. Their program is certainly stealing some of the thunder away from Google Adwords. In many cases, Facebook trumps the ROI for Adwords simply because it’s not as big and everyone isn’t running an ad on there… yet!

You better believe that the Facebook advertising platform is going to be big, even for many local businesses. You can grow your fan base, advertise specials, etc. The demographic targeting Facebook has, based on users’ “Likes”, makes it even easier to laser target your ads.

Here’s my little tutorial to get you up and running fast on Facebook Ads!

Lets say you’re a florist in the middle of February. This is one of your busiest holidays and you’ve decided to run a Facebook ad.

In the sidebar of the home page find Ads and Pages then click on Ads Manager.

Then click the green button that says Create an Ad. Now you can start making your ad.

First, make a plan. Map out exactly who it is you want to target; age, sex, TV shows, whatever, write it down – this is good to do for any advertising message by the way .  This information will help write the ad but it will also help when we get to the demographics section. You notice that every year at this time the majority of your customers are males age 25-39, so we’ll target these guys.

Now, decide if you want to advertise a website or something you have on Facebook, like your fan page for instance. For this example, we’re going to advertise a specials page on our florist website.

Next, think about your title. This is one of the most important elements of your ad, you need a good one to grab your prospects attention quickly. Since we decided we are going to target males, we’ll include that in the title, then go on to create the body of your ad and add an image. All of these elements can be changed or run multiple ads with different titles, descriptions and images and see which one is pulling better results – called an A/B split test.

Here’s where we’re at so far:

Now you get into the targeting the demographics. This is really fun to play with. Put in all kinds of stuff, try different cities, definitely play around with Likes & Interests, that’s always interesting to see.

You’ll see that your Estimated Reach number fluctuates bases on how many people fit your description. For this exercise I’m going to target it to Wilmington, NC males ages 25-39 who are in a relationship. Now that CANNOT be done on Adwords – take that Google!

Next is setting up your scheduling your campaign and budget. You can either set up a daily cap or lifetime of the campaign budget. If you know you want to spend $500 per month indefinitely then it’s probably best to set a daily budget of $16. Lifetime budget, on the other hand, allows you to set one amount that is spent throughout the life of the campaign.

Review your ad one last time then click Place Order.  Your ad should begin showing within a couple hours.  You probably won’t start to see any stats until at least the next day.

It’s really not too bad, and even a little fun creating these ads on Facebook.  As always, if you need help in getting your campaign up and running, give us a call!