So you want to run ads on Facebook
for your business, whatever that business is? Thanks to Social Ads from
Facebook you can target 400,000 people in Ireland
target ads but even better than Google you can almost be sniper-like on how you target the ads. You can target by age, gender, work status, relationship status, college education and interests.
In this walkthrough, let’s pretend to advertise to UCD folks. All you need is a credit card and to spend a minimum of five dollars on your ad campaign.
1. You need to decide what your ad is going to be. We’re going to advertise jobs in McDonald’s to those in UCD.
2. So first go to Facebook.com/ads
3. Click on the big green button!
4. Choose what website address you want to be clicked. Here it’s the job page on www.McDonalds.ie
5. From here choose your audience. We picked 18-25 year olds that attend UCD.
6. It said there were circa 1380 people from UCD on Facebook:
7. Then write your ad and you can also include an image. The McDonald’s logo was chosen.
8. You can also see a preview of what the ad will look like:
9a. After this you can choose how much is to be spent and what times the ad will be shown. You can also pay per click or by views:
9b. If you choose pay per views you have the option of also displaying the ad in the News Feed of people, something which will probably get you a lot more clicks and views since people actively scan and read their News Feed.
10. Finally, review the campaign and pay up and off you go.
Remember though that just because you can advertise and target specific people does not mean that you will get a lot of click throughs. You have to work hard on writing good copy and using good images to get the attention of a Facebook public that doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to ads. A Facebook user is different to a Google searcher is different to someone that responds to TV or newspaper ads.
Measuring Facebook Campaigns
Check your website stats:
While Facebook is a walled garden and you can’t see inside it without logging in, they still send a lot of traffic out to websites. If you have set up a Facebook Profile, a Page, a Group or run Facebook “Social Ads” then they can all send users from Facebook to you. In addition so can anyone else in Twitter if they’re talking about you. For a marketing campaign you should have special website addresses tailored for the campaign so you know only your campaign elements are sending that traffic to your site. Google Analytics or any of the clones will allow you to measure incoming traffic from Facebook and you can tell if they are coming from profiles, ads, pages or groups.
Facebook Lexicon
Facebook Lexicon allows you to see what Facebook users have been discussing. It’s a keyword trend program that doesn’t show the number of times a keyword is mentioned but the number of people who mentioned the keyword one or more times over a certain period of time. More details on Facebook Lexicon here. For companies you can get an estimate of the number of times your brand or product is mentioned. Ideal to see are there jumps around the time you start a campaign. You can also compare up to five different keywords at the same time. But there’s a big but, it doesn’t give raw numbers so it’s just a rough estimate but it’s still good. Maybe you can purchase them from them though? Big marketing companies would probably pay for that.
Facebook Pages
I recently created a Facebook “Page”. The Page was called “Gnéas” as a joke. When you become a fan, your friends also see you’ve become a fan of it as it shows up in their news feed. So a few people saw “Damien is a fan of Gnéas” and the viral element would have encouraged others to join too. The stats that are provided to Page owners are fairly good.
This is the Insights Control Panel (Everyone calls the stats pages Insights these days):
This is a graph of sign-up activity:
Some demographics of the Fans:
Facebook Social Ads
Read this Blog Post on how to run Social Ads. Like Pages there’s a whole section on statistics for your ads.
This is the Ads control panel. Note that the ads for the Gnéas page got canned because the Facebook prudes deemed the ads inappropriate:
Here’s how you can export all your data to Excel and add more calculations:
Facebook Apps
Many marketing campaigns will include the creation of special applications to get people to learn more about your brand/product. If you have an application created, Facebook will give you a whole load of information about installations and usage. Who, what, where, when etc. Data once again can be exported and presented to you.
Messy Measuring - Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups can be created by anyone and some do well and some stagnate. It takes a lot of work to keep activity going and Facebook really prefers if you use Facebook Pages to do marketing. They supply nice stat tools as mentioned above for Facebook Pages but nothing at all for Groups unless you pay a considerable sum for a sponsored Group. But you can manually check your group and measure it. Measuring it is a case of seeing how many have signed up for the Group and what the activity is like. So for example, the Bertie, Take Enda With You group:
You can see how many members there are. Then you can see what kind of activity is happening by counting the number of discussions, photos and videos that have started/ were added.
And you can also look at the Wall activity.
Other measurements to take into account are the number of people that respond to messages that you send to the whole Group. See what the response rate is like. Don’t be surprised if it’s very very low.
In this walkthrough, let’s pretend to advertise to UCD folks. All you need is a credit card and to spend a minimum of five dollars on your ad campaign.
1. You need to decide what your ad is going to be. We’re going to advertise jobs in McDonald’s to those in UCD.
2. So first go to Facebook.com/ads
3. Click on the big green button!
4. Choose what website address you want to be clicked. Here it’s the job page on www.McDonalds.ie
5. From here choose your audience. We picked 18-25 year olds that attend UCD.
6. It said there were circa 1380 people from UCD on Facebook:
7. Then write your ad and you can also include an image. The McDonald’s logo was chosen.
8. You can also see a preview of what the ad will look like:
9a. After this you can choose how much is to be spent and what times the ad will be shown. You can also pay per click or by views:
9b. If you choose pay per views you have the option of also displaying the ad in the News Feed of people, something which will probably get you a lot more clicks and views since people actively scan and read their News Feed.
10. Finally, review the campaign and pay up and off you go.
Remember though that just because you can advertise and target specific people does not mean that you will get a lot of click throughs. You have to work hard on writing good copy and using good images to get the attention of a Facebook public that doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to ads. A Facebook user is different to a Google searcher is different to someone that responds to TV or newspaper ads.
Measuring Facebook Campaigns
Check your website stats:
While Facebook is a walled garden and you can’t see inside it without logging in, they still send a lot of traffic out to websites. If you have set up a Facebook Profile, a Page, a Group or run Facebook “Social Ads” then they can all send users from Facebook to you. In addition so can anyone else in Twitter if they’re talking about you. For a marketing campaign you should have special website addresses tailored for the campaign so you know only your campaign elements are sending that traffic to your site. Google Analytics or any of the clones will allow you to measure incoming traffic from Facebook and you can tell if they are coming from profiles, ads, pages or groups.
Facebook Lexicon
Facebook Lexicon allows you to see what Facebook users have been discussing. It’s a keyword trend program that doesn’t show the number of times a keyword is mentioned but the number of people who mentioned the keyword one or more times over a certain period of time. More details on Facebook Lexicon here. For companies you can get an estimate of the number of times your brand or product is mentioned. Ideal to see are there jumps around the time you start a campaign. You can also compare up to five different keywords at the same time. But there’s a big but, it doesn’t give raw numbers so it’s just a rough estimate but it’s still good. Maybe you can purchase them from them though? Big marketing companies would probably pay for that.
Facebook Pages
I recently created a Facebook “Page”. The Page was called “Gnéas” as a joke. When you become a fan, your friends also see you’ve become a fan of it as it shows up in their news feed. So a few people saw “Damien is a fan of Gnéas” and the viral element would have encouraged others to join too. The stats that are provided to Page owners are fairly good.
This is the Insights Control Panel (Everyone calls the stats pages Insights these days):
This is a graph of sign-up activity:
Some demographics of the Fans:
Facebook Social Ads
Read this Blog Post on how to run Social Ads. Like Pages there’s a whole section on statistics for your ads.
This is the Ads control panel. Note that the ads for the Gnéas page got canned because the Facebook prudes deemed the ads inappropriate:
Here’s how you can export all your data to Excel and add more calculations:
Facebook Apps
Many marketing campaigns will include the creation of special applications to get people to learn more about your brand/product. If you have an application created, Facebook will give you a whole load of information about installations and usage. Who, what, where, when etc. Data once again can be exported and presented to you.
Messy Measuring - Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups can be created by anyone and some do well and some stagnate. It takes a lot of work to keep activity going and Facebook really prefers if you use Facebook Pages to do marketing. They supply nice stat tools as mentioned above for Facebook Pages but nothing at all for Groups unless you pay a considerable sum for a sponsored Group. But you can manually check your group and measure it. Measuring it is a case of seeing how many have signed up for the Group and what the activity is like. So for example, the Bertie, Take Enda With You group:
You can see how many members there are. Then you can see what kind of activity is happening by counting the number of discussions, photos and videos that have started/ were added.
And you can also look at the Wall activity.
Other measurements to take into account are the number of people that respond to messages that you send to the whole Group. See what the response rate is like. Don’t be surprised if it’s very very low.
