Affordability of Facebook Ads (Part 2)

Businesses with small advertising budgets should stick with boosting their posts or promoting their pages to increase the number of interactions, recommended Sykes.

You can spend as little as $5 to get more engagement with these ads. Facebook allows you to set a per-day ad budget or set a lifetime budget, which means your ad runs until that set budget is reached.

Facebook Ad Prices Determined

When you create an ad campaign on Facebook, you enter into what is essentially a worldwide auction. You compete for space with hundreds of thousands of other advertisers.

Facebook can’t always fulfill every advertising request; therefore, the highest bidders get the most impressions. The bid you place will be based on either a click, 1,000 impressions or a conversion. In general Facebook Ads bidding works like this:

1.You select the audience you want—the more targeted, the better.

2.Facebook tells you how many people are in that audience.

3.You set a daily budget that will reach X number of people in a day. Your daily budget can be as little as $5 a day.

4.You press play and watch the ads work.

“Facebook will then serve your ad to as many people as it can for your daily

 budget, usually the least targeted people within your targeted segment.

Bidding on Facebook Ads

You can bid on your ads, or you can let Facebook bid on keywords and targeted users for you.

There are options: manual or automatic. With manual, you can set your own bids. With automatic, Facebook selects the best price for the biggest bang for your buck.

Set Up a Facebook Ads Account

Setting up your Facebook Ads account is simple, said Kent. To set up your account:

◾Click the down arrow in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page.

◾Click “Create Ad” in the drop-down menu.

◾Facebook will prompt you to create a Facebook Ads account.

This account will house all your different campaigns and provide an overview of each campaign your business is running.

Manage Ads from Your Facebook Business Page

Facebook Ad Manager is the interactive dashboard you’ll use to create and track all of your Facebook campaigns. “Boosted posts, however, can be created right from your business page News Feed.

She provided a step-by-step walk through for boosting posts:

1.When you publish a new post from your Facebook business page, a blue button that says “boost post” will appear beneath your post.

2.Click on this.

3.Ad Manager will pop up, which allows you to set your budget and audience for the boosted post.

           

Manage Facebook Ads from Your Smartphone

Use the Facebook Ads Manager app to run Facebook campaigns from your smartphone:

Download for iPhone: http://apple.co/1xyHnSm

Download for Android: http://bit.ly/1LBzuFE

You should continue using the Facebook Pages app to manage your business page. If you haven’t used it yet, this is a great way to receive notifications when one of your Facebook followers interacts with your business.

Download for iPhone: http://apple.co/IV6OL5

Download for Android: http://bit.ly/1hHRUGG

What to You Include in Your Facebook Ad

Creating an advertisement for Facebook involves elements if the advertisement is going to appear in the preferable News Feed section.

Company Name. Use the same name that you use on your Facebook business page. Your name will appear in bold text, followed by the word “sponsored,” which Facebook places to identify the advertising message.

Post Text. You’ll have roughly 155 characters to get your message across when you build your ad in Facebook Ad Manager.

Picture. The image takes up the majority of the space, so make it work. If you sell cooling systems, for instance, it is usually better to use happy and attractive people, dogs, and children enjoying the cool air on a hot day than a picture of a boring air conditioner.

Headline. Ad headlines are bold and 25 characters or less. One does not have a lot to work with in the headline.

Link Description. Use this description to let people viewing your ad know what they will get when they tap through to the link you include. “This the last chance for a selling message.

Link. The tap-through link to your small business website.

Use of Photos or Videos in Facebook Ads

Images, graphics and short videos can show your potential customers more about your business than text alone. But deciding to use images, videos or just plain text will depend entirely on what works best for the message you’re trying to convey.

Kinds of Images to Use in Facebook Ads

Facebook provides you with guidelines to follow when adding images or videos to your ads. Use any photo or video above 1,200 pixels by 628 pixels for best effect.

Facebook has access to free stock images which…can give you an air of respectability for your ads, even if you don’t personally have great photos to use.

Guidelines for Video Ads on Facebook

Facebook recommends uploading videos in MP4 or MOV format, but supports a number of other video formats. These are the basic technical requirements for Facebook ad videos:

Length: 120 minutes maximum

File Size: Up to 4 GB maximum

Frames: 30 fps maximum

Facebook Pixels

Have you ever visited a website, then been surprised to see an ad for that same company pop up the next time you log onto Facebook? That’s no accident. That’s retargeting. Facebook uses “pixels” to track visits to advertisers’ websites.

Pixels are pieces of code that you can embed into the backend of your website.

When someone visits your website, a Facebook pixel allows Facebook to track those people. Then, when those people who have visited your website log into Facebook, they’re retargeted with a Facebook Ad that reminds them of your company, your products and services.

Facebook Lookalike Audiences

You can use information about the people who like your Facebook posts to find potential customers among Facebook’s 1.71 billion users.

To create a lookalike audience, Facebook “takes your existing ‘like’ database and creates a profile of other similar people from it, to which you can advertise your services.