Facebook Advertising for Beginners

The basics of pricing, targeting, placement, and targeting for Facebook advertising.

• Pricing: Facebook advertising for Pages is sold either on a cost per click (CPC) basis where you pay only if users click on your ad or on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis where you pay for the total number of users who see your advertisement. There is no minimum bid for advertising, Pages can spend anywhere from $1.00 to $1 million and the budget can be adjusted throughout the campaign. You can pay by credit card, PayPal, or possibly a custom billing option depending on the size and frequency of your ad buys.
• Placement: Facebook advertising will be displayed to relevant audiences on the right-hand side of their Facebook home page. The advertisement includes a 25 character title, a thumbnail image, and a 150 character message. Facebook also recently added the ability to include your status updates automatically as the ad message but note that it still cuts you off at 150 characters
• Targeting: By default, Facebook targets all users 18 and older in the default location you choose (country or state). You can change any targeting specifications you wish. You can target by: city or state, age, gender, education level, relationship status, languages, or keywords that appear in their profile. Once you enter one Like for targeting, Facebook will provide other suggestions (I tested “coffee” and it suggested “coffee in the morning” and “pacific northwest”). With each change you can see what the size of your target audience is- in case you’re interested, there are more than 800,000 Facebook users over the age of 18 in the US who like coffee.
• Campaigns: Facebook advertising campaigns can include multiple versions of your advertisement and they begin with setting a daily budget and a maximum daily bid. The more popular your advertising target is the more it will cost you for each click so you set a maximum bid for each target area; the daily budget ensures that your advertisement is turned off everyday once you reach your budget and the ad will be shown again the next day until you hit the daily budget. If you spend less than your daily budget you will not be charged the difference. There may be one advertisement in the campaign or you may want to try running two or three different versions (with new message or pictures) at once to see which performs the best; the system optimizes automatically so that the most popular of your ads will automatically be shown more often.
• Outside Ads: You should also think about advertising your Facebook campaigns on outside sites- such as advertising a recipe contest on a foodie social network or recipe site to drive interested foodies to your Page for the contest and to become brand fans. If you’ve added Google Analytics to your Page you can track the success of these by looking at the referring sites and goals.

For more information from Facebook check out their advertising page: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/