Small businesses are finding social media pages as great additions to their overall web presence. Having a Facebook page for your business is common place for businesses of all sizes. If you are ready to take the next step, creating a Facebook Ad campaign is something to consider.
Currently Facebook Ads allows advertisers two ways to advertise on Facebook: either a business can create an ad campaign that will link to a page within your own website or a business can have the Facebook ad link to your Facebook page. So the first step is to consider where you want people to end up once they click your ad. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
When creating your ad, Facebook allows a small image and text. The ad title can have up to 25 characters and the ad text can have up to 135 characters. The image you include will need to be 110 x 80 pixels. The addition of the picture is something get right. Pictures that are too complicated to make out at that size should be avoided. Also, make sure you crop your picture so it is not distorted.
With Facebook Ads you can be very detailed with who will see your ad. These ads are very targeted allowing you to choose gender, interested, location, and even relationship status among many other specifications. With these many specific details, it is important to use the text in your ad to your advantage and be very specific for your audience.
It is best to create several very specific ads rather than one generic one. A targeted ad will be more likely noticed by the user with a higher click through rate.
Once you have determined your ad and the audience for your ad, you have two options on how to run your ad. Facebook Ads can either be Pay for Views (CPM) or Pay for Clicks (CPC). Both options have you set a daily ad budget and for Pay for Clicks you set the maximum amount per click you are willing to pay.
Once your ad is created and the budget is set Facebook must approve the ad.
Those familiar with online advertising will see many similarities with Facebook Ads and other online ad services including Google AdWords. The ability to ad a quick image and to create extremely focused ad display parameters is a plus with Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads is still overall more limited in the number of eyeballs. Google Adwords show from reports that it has a higher success rate. Because of this, we recommend using Facebook Ads as a smaller part of your overall online advertising budget. It has isn’t place, but use in moderation.