Facebook Advertising TipsWith Google seemingly becoming increasingly affiliate unfriendly more and more people are switching to Facebook for their advertising campaigns as Facebook’s growth continues at a phenomenal rate.

Not only is Facebook usually cheaper than Adwords you have the ability to laser target your ads to those most likely to be receptive to what you are selling. In the very near future Facebook is set to overtake Google as the World’s most visited website, and did you know Facebook is thought to have only a 20th of the number of advertisers Google has?

Facebook vs Google

Here’s a few Facebook advertising tips to set you off on the right track.

Demographic Targeting

With Facebook it’s extremely important to ensure that you are targeting the right people. For example, there’s little point advertising a product that helps “develop a six pack” to middle aged Moms burning up their Facebook time playing Farmvile all day long. Common sense would give you an idea about who to target such a product too but there is a little trick you can use that helps you confirm your intial thoughts on your target market or explore one you know little about:

  1. Type into Google your basic search term – we’ll go with “how to get a six pack”. The first site that comes up for me is wikihow, now we want to ignore that site for our testing purposes and look for a high result that is a single domain, sixpacknow.com is a good one to try.
  2. Next, go to quantcast.com and paste in the domain name to bring up the demographics of people who visit that site.

You’ll see that 57% of people who visit sixpacknow.com are male with 26% aged 13-17 and 38% aged 18-34. Incidently, for our ad campiagn we’d probably want to ignore the 13-17 age group, as although they may well want a six pack they probably dont have enough money to buy the product we’re promoting.

Now there’s nothing earth shattering there but it does confirm our intial thoughts. I’m sure you can see how you could explore a niche where the target market is less predictable. To finely tune your market you could target it towards people in this category who declare an interest in going to the gym, muscle building, fitness etc either via their profile or via groups they may have joined. Now we have our target market we move on to split testing.

Split Testing Your Facebook Ads

The benefit of split testing your facebook ads can not be over emphasised. There are many different variations to test, picture, ad copy, landing page. It could soon become confusing if you try to test all of these at once, not forgetting expensive and of course we’ll need a decent sample size in order to draw conclusions. The best way I find is to split test one factor at a time.

  • Make two (or three or more) ads with different pictures but the same ad copy and let them run for a while in order to see which one attracts the highest click thru rate.
  • Then, choose the best performing picture and make two, three or more ads using the same picture but different ad copy. Evaluate which ad copy gets the highest click thru rate.
  • Finally, choose your best performing picture with your best performing ad copy and make several ads each sending the click to different landing pages.

Of course, the number of different ads, pictures and landing pages are pretty much infinite, so you’ll have to decide for yourself when you are comfortable with your campaign.

Final Killer Facebook Advertising Tip

Once you have your demographic and ad, then test out this. In your ad headline use the words of a city or region and then select that region or city as part of your demographic settings. For example “Want To Quit Smoking In Dallas?” targeted only to people in Dallas. Using the city name catches the eye of people who live there and can lead to increased click thru rates.

If you have any comments on the above facebook advertising tips or any of your own to contribute then please leave a comment.

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Filed under: Beginner • Intermediate • Pay Per Click • Uncategorized

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