In 2007, less than 8 short years ago, Facebook launched ‘Pages’, which allowed businesses to have a separate presence. You could now have ‘fans’ instead of ‘friends’.  Business owners had a social media outlet to use as another avenue to market their product or service and capture another segment of the market.

In those days, the audience reached was pretty much 100% organic and you had a good chance of reaching your friends or fans with each post.  Now, however, the organic reach is not much more than 15%.

What does ‘organic reach’ mean?

Organic reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your post through unpaid distribution.

What is a business to do?  Spending quality time posting on your Facebook Page with the current reach is really not worth your time and energy.

Facebook’s solution to this was the development of paid advertising.  These ads reach 89% of the intended audience.

Define Your Marketing Objective

How you build your ad campaign on Facebook depends on what you want to accomplish.  In other words, what your marketing strategy or objectives are.

Some of the things you can use ads to do are the following:

  • Send people to your website
  • Promote upcoming events
  • Promote webinars
  • Get more readership of your posts
  • Get more fans to your page
  • Get installs of your app
  • Increase engagement in your app

Establish Your Criteria

Once you’ve defined your objectives, you need to define your audience.  You can make your reach as broad or narrow as you want.  Here are the criteria:

  • Location – Country, city or postal code plus areas specified by distance from your location.
  • Demographic – Gender, age, language spoken, education, relationship status, work (employer, job title and industry), income, life events (upcoming birthday), etc.
  • Interests – Based on people’s interests, likes and pages they follow.
  • Connections – Target people and friends of people who follow a page, use an app or are attending an event. Or target only people who aren’t already connected with your business.
  • Behaviours – Purchases, device type, etc.
  • Custom Audience – Specific Facebook users identified by a list of e-mails, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or people who have visited your website.

What is it Going to Cost?

Ads appear in the right sidebar.  Naturally, this space is limited, so the first thing you need to realize is that you are actually bidding on the space against others who want it too.

The Budgeting and Pricing section’s Advanced Options can be optimized for your ad type. Facebook will automatically bid for you in the most successful way to reaching your target audience. When Facebook bids for you, you are bidding using Cost per 1,000 Impressions (CPI).

If you’d rather be in charge of how your budget is spent, you can expand the Advanced Options list, select Optimize for Impressions or Optimize for Clicks and then specify how much you would like to bid. You only pay for the ads shown (impressions) or clicked, depending on what you have selected.

What is Optimized for Impressions?

Optimize for Impressions will use the Cost per 1000 Impressions pricing model while the Optimize for Clicks uses Cost Per (single) Click. The bid amount field will give you a suggested minimum and maximum bid range that is based on competitor’s bids for the target audience you have defined.

Choose a bid that works for your budget and is still going to be competitive. Don’t forget that if your bid is too low your ads will never be shown.

Your budget can be set for a daily amount or for the life of your ad, in which case you will enter a date range. If you select that, Facebook will stretch out your placements so that you don’t spend your entire budget all at once. The ad stops when your budget is used up or the end date of the campaign is reached.

What’s Next?

If you know you want to try Facebook ads but all this sounds too complicated, book your 30 minutes no obligation FREE session today.

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