Facebook Ads: How They Can Help Your Business

The 800 pound gorilla of social media, Facebook, has never really been known in the business mainstream for being a hub for online advertising. Although it has had this capability for some time, with the same sort of audience breadth as Google, Facebook is never compared with Google in this respect.

However, under the radar, Facebook has grown its share of online ad revenue considerably over the past three years. Pay per click (PPC) advertising is now a definitely legitimate course of action on Facebook for business webmasters.

However, a Facebook ad campaign simply can not be a carbon copy of a Google ad campaign. Facebook is not Google by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, both platforms are pay per click, but they differ in their targeting systems:

• As Google is a search engine, it targets people with ads based on keywords or queries. Facebook is a social media site, so it targets people through demographic and psycho graphic information that is given by the person performing a query.

• Google targets people in real time. What a person searches for in that moment is the results that they will get. Facebook pay per click reaches people who only might be interested in your services or products. They may be looking for updates from friends and your ad needs to ‘distract’ them.

Click through rate is just as crucial for Facebook advertising as for Google. People are not actively searching for your products or services on Facebook, so your Facebook ads must be truly standout. However, if they are, a webmaster can achieve much lower cost per click stats with an inordinately high return on investment. Facebook ads, for some businesses, are actually much more effective in delivering visitors than Google. Even a tiny click through rate with Facebook ads can be extremely profitable for a business.

One of the big advantages of using Facebook for online marketing, is the ability to build a brand. Rather than trying to sell directly, create something that your target audience will want to share with friends such as a video, free report, piece of software, or smartphone app.

If you can target your Facebook users based on their demographic information, you can hone your ad campaign to a point so fine that a low conversion rate to your landing page can end up being extremely profitable, because you have found the people that are predisposed to liking your business anyway.

Target your Facebook ads to each audience differently. Providing one generic ad to a generic audience never works. You can target your ads to different demographics and psychographics and see if they work. On Facebook, you can test by age, geographic location, interests, lifestyle, even by places that they visit. Analyze each of the targets and how they respond to the ads to determine the most captive audience and the most appropriate ad.

If this is done well, Facebook can deliver a large number of targeted visitors. Although the cost per click may seem somewhat expensive when compared to Google on the surface, the opportunity to find and create an ad to a laser targeted audience gives you the opportunity to not only build a more loyal audience, but also to know exactly who this audience is, from their age to their interests, and to know what they like for the future.