Facebook Social Ads Interface

Looking to reach 22 million people? How about 29 million potential customers? Well, depending on who you trust, Facebook or Compete, you should be able to reach 20-30 million viewers by placing an advertisement on Facebook. According to Quantcast your ad could be seen by 90,000 unique visitors each month, that is to say if you don’t filter for your target audience.

Setting up a social ad on Facebook is very simple. After creating your Facebook account, click on the advertisers link in the footer navigation get started. You get the option to send your clicks through to your corporate site, your Facebook page or to create a new product page within Facebook. There are distinct advantages to keeping your click-throughs on Facebook before sending them to your corporate site including more detailed insight into the demographics of your potential customers (requires at least 10 fans) and the fact that Facebook product pages are now accessible by search engines to further broaden your potential audience. Creating a page takes only a few seconds but you won’t likely get the necessary 10 fans without putting significant time into creating a page that offers your visitors a reason to return and join in the social scene.

Clicking through the ad building interface, you select your target audience. According to Sugarrae, Alexa reports that 44.3% of Facebook users are in th US, UK and Canada. You don’t have the option to select more than one country so you will need to create additional campaigns to cover all three. Filter options available include geo location (in the case of th US this means country, state and city), sex, age range, educational status, political views and relationship status to name a few. As you slice and dice your target Facebook provides you with real-time estimates of how many potential customers you could reach. Selecting Colorado for example, drops the potential audience to 300k and selecting female only drops it down to 138k at the time this article was written.

The ad creating tab is extremely basic. You get a title, body and optional thumbnail. If you weren’t put off by all the bad press project beacon has received lately, you can also add social actions to your ad. Social actions work similar to the activity feed on every Facebook page, providing information about who recently interacted with your products and how.

The final tab in the ad wizard is the budget tab. After selecting CPM or CPC you can define your daily budget and per click or per thousand bids. Facebook offers suggestions to help you get good coverage. Basic tests I performed so far have indicated that CPC is slightly more affordable. Facebook seems to overestimate the cost of the clicks so using their estimates will tend to get you great coverage. I have also found that compared to similar ads running on AdWords for competitive terms, Facebook has a better CTR - likely due to less competition for those key phrases. As with any social networking site, viral content will really do the trick. Some early testers have reported that CTR on Facebook is so poor it isn’t worth the effort. While this may be the case for standard ads with boring content behind them, during my testing, interactive, viral content outperformed standard content by 2000% in terms of clicks even when using the minimum bid of $0.10 for the viral content and recommended bids for standard content.

That’s it! Once you have previewed and approved your ad, it will begin circulating in the ad space within an hour. Daily statistics in Facebook Insight (their analytics package) are updated every 12 hours so you won’t get to play around with Insight right away.  Enjoy!