Facebook: Lesson: How-To Use Facebook Advertising

Introduction

Facebook Ads are similar to Google Ads, with the important differences that with Facebook you can better target your audience by filtering down to more highly targeted segments, including age group, gender, language and geography. (According to Alexa, the majority of visitors to the bigger holiday rental listing sites are females over 35). You have a market of up to 500 million – and growing fast – that you can filter and target by placing an ad on their pages to encourage people to visit your Page, or to follow a direct link to your own external website.

Facebook ads usually cost less than advertising with the other networks (such as Google) because of its lower costs on keywords and per impressions, and because it has better targeting.

You can choose between a cost per click advertising (CPC), or cost per thousand impressions (CPM) strategy. But before you start with any campaign you have to first target your intended customers and focus your ads with the geo-targeting data that Facebook provides to you.

Although Facebook has 500 million users it’s irrelevant unless YOUR audience is relevant to you.

So find out. Go to www.facebook.com/ads/create and run an exercise targeting your ad (use the list below to help you). For my properties it typically covers around 36,000 users when I target by language (English) sex (female) age group (35+) and on keywords such as ‘vacations’ and ‘house rentals’ in the country of my property. In other words, I can choose to reach out to some 36,000 highly targeted profiles expressing an interest in a number of keywords that match my property.

If you want your targeted customers to click on your ads and make conversions, then the cost per click is ideal for you, but if you want to promote your brand and create awareness to people the cost per thousand impressions is an better strategy.

Whether you opt for cost per click or cost per thousand impressions you have to set your daily ad budget l because then your ads will automatically stop displaying at your budget limit and you control your spend.

Facebook’s online ad tool can be found at http://www.facebook.com/ads/

It’s better for precisely targeting your demographics and keywords
Whilst  Google Adwords (and others) do this, on Facebook advertising you can target keywords ands demographics much more precisely and so get more ‘bangs for your buck’.

Because users have to be logged in to see your Facebook ad, you can be sure that your ads are only shown to the people with profiles that contain your targeted keywords and demographics.

For example, saying you want to bid on the keyword ’holidays’ and ‘Tuscany’ to females above 35 years old ensures that only women aged over 35 mentioning the words ‘Tuscany’ or ’holidays’ in their profile will see your ad.

It’s because of these better targeting options that I believe Facebook advertising  achieves higher click through rates than Google Adwords, and at less cost.

It’s usually much cheaper – so much better for small businesses
Google Adwords are expensive to even bid on medium popularity keywords. On Facebook Ads, some initial keyword comparisons reveal you can get very decent results at about one quarter of the cost per click on Google Adwords. It’s a more cost effective – and a way for rentals to gain a presence online without a big budget.

You can take advantage of using images/photos in ads
The ability to show images in your Facebook ad is a huge advantage over Google Adwords. In Facebook, it’s easy to upload a small image that helps emotional engagement, and helps draw your target user’s eye to your ad for more clicks.

Less restrictions when setting up ads
Not only can you benefit from inserting images in your ads, but you also have almost double the space for your ad descriptions (currently 135, instead of Google’s 75 characters) allowing a touch more creativity.

Target and sub Target

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad. Use these demographics at minimum:

Location

Facebook allows advertisers to target by country, county/state/province, city, and suburb. All advertisements are required to have a location selected.

Age and Sex

Gender is a standard targeting filter for Facebook. Bear in mind that the vast majority of users of paid listing sites are females over 35 years of age.

Keywords

Keywords are based on a user’s profile information including Activities, Liked Locations, as well as Favorite Books, TV Shows, Movies, and more. Spend time on this field and you’ll discover connections with some of these keywords.

Languages

If your ad is in English obviously make sure it’s only targeted at English speakers.

Understand Your Market

To be effective when advertising on Facebook you need to have properly defined your market. To define it, go through a ‘market segmentation’ process defining who your customer is. Age, sex, geography and interests are the biggest factors.

 

Set Your Goals

It’s too easy to spend a lot of money on Facebook ads constantly ‘experimenting’. If you set a budget on a campaign for, say, $10 a day you should know what you would like to receive for that money.

You do want customers, but as Facebook marketing is not about instant sales there are two practices that are good to keep in mind when setting your goals.

 

Keep Thinking for Long-Term Relationships

For rental owners the payoff will be down the line – so spend over months, and don’t blow your budget in a day. A one-week blitz campaign is not going to work, but a long-term investment in advertising can produce measurable results.

 

Measure Initial Conversions As Fans, Comments, and Likes

Since most visitors won’t book with you right away you need to make sure that you are engaging them. Follow up with them often, and consistently.

Monitor Your Advertising Performance And Adjust Things Accordingly

When you’ve defined your goals, track whether or not you’re achieving them.

Facebook gives advertisers with a number of monitoring tools including their basic ad manager area as well as downloadable data about the campaign you are running. If you visit the ad reports area you can download three types of reports to determine how your campaigns and ads are performing: advertising performance, responder demographics, responder profiles.

The primary things to monitor are clicks, click through rates (CTR), actions, action rates, and CPC. Each of these variables will differ depending on what type of campaign that you’re running but in theory, the more targeted your ad, the higher click through rate you should have. Additionally, your click through rate will tend to go down over time as your entire target population views your ad and decides whether or not they want to respond.

 

Don’t Over Target

Whilst you should take advantage of Facebook’s targeting features, it’s more important that you get your property and the experience your providing out there and then build the relationships.

Marketing is a balance and the last thing you want to do is spending all of your time increasing ad relevance while not interacting with the users who are clicking through. Spend time tracking your ads’ performance but also make sure that you spend time connecting with all the people that respond to your ad.

 

 

The official Facebook explanation of Facebook for business has lots more details on getting your rental on Facebook.