10 Things You Should Know Before Placing Facebook Ads

Advertising on Facebook can drive traffic and raise your visibility level in the eyes of potential customers. Like most other online advertising campaigns, the buyer can spend as little or as much as his budget allows (Facebook's maximum advertising per month costs $30,000).

Using Facebook ads to reach your customer universe is a highly successful way to boost sales and drive traffic to your page or website, if properly utilized. Facebook's software is able to spider out to reach Group members and Fan pages who have interests similar to your product or service.

For example, if you are a dentist, your ads will be placed on Group pages that live within a specific radius of your home, as it is unrealistic for anyone to travel a long distance to see a dentist. If you are a children's clothing boutique, your advertisements will be displayed on Group pages of moms who have children and live close to your storefront.

A few tips to help get you started:

1. Facebook allows you to target your customer universe when creating your ad. You can target gender, age, and specific locations, educational background, people with children, etc.

2. Targeting your audience is one of the most effective means of a successful ad campaign. If you have not spent time thinking about who your customer is, it is important that you do it before you place your advertising campaign on Facebook.

3. Don't be too narrow-minded. Think in terms of who all of your potential customers are, and then base your targeting on that model. After keying in the demographics, Facebook will tell you how many possible matches they have - and you can determine an advertising budget based upon that number of potential customers. 

4. Many successful advertising campaigns begin with trial and error. Attempt two or three different ads, and watch them for a week to see how well each one performs (I'll be talking about statistics as well as Google Analytics in a future blog.).

5. Your ad title should be catchy and no longer than 25 characters. Seduce the customer into wanting to read more about your business.

6. Although it is not necessary to have a Facebook page or be a member of Facebook to purchase advertising, it is probably a good idea. Your ad will have a URL (a landing page) which you designate when you design the ad. Many buyers choose to use their Facebook page as the URL, but you may also use your own website.

7. Be sure that the content on the designated landing page matches the content in the ad. You will have a higher success at closing the deal if your page content is consistent with the ad. Anyone who has ever gone on a Internet date based on an photo, only to find the person looked nothing like the photo knows what I'm talking about here.

8. Facebook ads allow for image placement in the creation. Be sure your image is consistent with your landing page. Images must be no larger than 110 pixels wide and 80 pixels tall, or smaller than 5 MB.

9. Use the keyword function. Your customer uses certain words and phrases to get information on products and services similar to yours. Conceptualize what those words might be, and add them into your Facebook ad (your customers won't even know that you did it).

10. Mull all of this over before starting your ad campaign. Contemplate the keywords, the look and style of your ad, the catchy title, whether to use an image, and targeting demographics to reach specific groups of people. It's better to know as much as you can in advance and utilize the power of Facebook's software than to simply throw something up there willy-nilly.