I am sure everyone has seen an advertisement while scrolling through their Facebook page. But how did these ads appear on your page? Let’s take a look..
How Facebook Ads Work
Facebook advertisements are easy to create and use. They also are affordable and appeal to a wide variety of audiences. They are a really good way to get in front of the right people. The first thing to do on Facebook ads is choosing a goal for what you want to come from this ad.
An advertising objective is what you want people to do when they see your ad. You could want them to purchase something, subscribe, like your Facebook page, use your services, etc.
Facebook has different ways to target your audience. Location is a big one – do you need to live in a certain city or area to use this? Then there is demographics which is things like age and gender.
Facebook can provide information for your advertisement based on reach. They provide things like click-through rates, cost per 1,000 impressions, cost per click, and so much more. All of these are really useful for future advertisement campaigns and how you can improve your ad.
Facebook organizes your advertisements into three levels: campaigns, ad sets, and ads. The campaign is the top level which is what you want to achieve. Ad sets define the target options and then the ads show the physical ads that you have out there for your audience to see.
Audience Targeting
Interest targeting is great for Facebook ads because they have so much information on the users interests based on their activity, like likes, comments, and profile information. This information is then used to create different audiences that you can add to your advertisement set based on what you want.
Behaviour targeting includes things like how much time you spend online, your buying behaviours, spending habits, and more. Facebook has different partners that provide this information to them as well. This is what makes Facebook ads so effective – the information they have to ensure your product or service is targeted to the right people.
This is an advertisement that showed up on my Facebook. It is targeted to me – I do dance and am very active, therefore am constantly purchasing and wearing athletic leggings to keep up to my lifestyle. I comment and share dance posts and like lots of those pages, so it makes sense! It is crazy that Facebook knows this about me and can target me.
How to Create Facebook Ads
Identifying your primary audience is very important when creating Facebook ads. This tool can create a very specific audience based on your product and service. The more relevant your audience is to your product, the better your ad will do.
Choosing a budget for your advertisement is important so you do not spend too much on these ads. It is best to start smaller and then see your engagement and how well these ads do before having a big budget.
Ad placement is where your advertisements show up. Facebook will automatically recommend where these ads should show up which is a good tool. You can also edit the placement.
The last step is the ad creative tool. This is where you create an ad name and where you choose to create an ad or use an existing post. You can do your ad in the way of a single photo or video or choose a carousel that shows multiple.
This is another ad that showed up on my Facebook, and I thought it was funny because my brother works for GoAuto, so it is relevant but also not necessary as I already see all my brothers posts. Notice the “Sponsored” below the page name. This is an ad placement embedded within my newsfeed and looks like a regular post from friends, minus the sponsored part.
It is easy to just click on an advertisement and buy something, but it is important to think how that ad appeared and appealed to you before you go spending money or subscribing to something.
View Your Advertising Data
Facebook has advertising reports that you can create. There is a reports section where you can pull different reports on your ad that are important to use. You can export this data to Excel, where it is helpful to see and use.
Success metrics are also important to use. These are things like number of clicks, number of impressions, etc. Basically everything you need to track your success with the advertisement and how well it is doing for what you need.
Implement Best Practices
Make sure to follow the Facebook guidelines:
- no images with more than 20% text on them
- landing pages must be relevant to the ad
- no nudity
- no violent, shocking, disrespectful or sensational language
- no personal characteristics
My Personal Insight
Personally at this point in my life I don’t really have a need to create Facebook ads as I am working at an accounting firm. However, I find it so interesting and useful to understand how advertisements are catered to consumers and consumer behaviours are connected to this. Overall this learning was so useful and makes me a conscious consumer as I know how advertisements can be placed to try to convince me to spend money.
I think that moving forward I am going to be more conscious and really think of the advertisements on my page as I now know the process. I am going to evaluate how well they work and really look at what is being done on the advertisement. Also, how does this ad appeal to me, the audience? In my current job I have no need for making Facebook advertisements but I am going to be a more active audience. I think I am sometimes bad with my money and can buy everything that just appeals to me, so I should be conscious on Facebook for this problem.
Works Cited
(2020). Retrieved January 31, 2020, from Linkedin.com website: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/advertising-on-facebook-2/next-steps?u=2109516
Marketing with J 