Facebook Advertising tips
The Biggest Audience, the Most Ad Options and Some
Risks to Navigate
For years, Facebook was disdainful of calls to monetize its hundreds of millions
of users, focusing instead on adding features and building critical mass. But
today, as a public company, Facebook has been adding advertising options at a
furious pace.
Not to be cynical, but the emerging Facebook value proposition to businesses
looks something like this:
Build your page on Facebook (free)
Pay to build your fan base
Pay to engage with your fan base
Pay to engage your existing customers when they are on Facebook
Given the pace of change, this chapter is meant to explore the major advertising
opportunities on Facebook today, help you understand aspects of targeting and
best practices that won’t change, and give you a frame of reference to assess the
new units that will inevitably be introduced in coming months. We’ll cover:
1. Marketplace ads
2. External URL ads
3. Facebook Object ads
4. Page Post ads
5. Sponsored Stories
6. Promoted Posts
7. Facebook Offers
8. Facebook Sponsored Search Results
9. Facebook Exchange remarketing ads
10. Custom Audiences
11. Action spec targeting
12. Facebook Premium ads
Facebook advertising options change fast. To stay abreast of the latest
developments, visit the official Facebook advertising page
www.facebook.com/marketing
Managing Your Facebook Ads
Before we dig into the ad offerings, let me point out that Facebook supports a
number of different levels of engagement for its advertisers, depending on the
size of their ad budget, sophistication of the tools required, and willingness to do
self-service. Facebook is ramping up ad opportunities very quickly, and its sales
and support staff is challenged to keep up. That’s likely one reason why, when it
launched Facebook Exchange remarketing, the company selected several partner
agencies to help sell the program, get clients onboard, and execute campaigns.
Your options as an advertiser are to self-serve using the online Ads Manager or
to be a “managed account.” Managed account status is reserved for bigger
brands spending hundreds of thousands of dollars or more on Facebook ads
annually—or for brands perceived to have the potential to do so. These bigger
companies are assigned ad reps, they receive strategic consulting, and they get
access to Facebook Premium ad units I’ll discuss later. These companies may
merit some Facebook schmoozing—or even a coveted invite to watch a “Hack,”
a mass all-nighter of frenzied code-writing at headquarters in Menlo Park.
Most advertisers, though, will be self-service accounts. Facebook Ads Manager
is a fairly efficient, browser-based tool to create, track, and manage your ads.
The ad units available via self-serve are called Marketplace Ads and Sponsored
Stories. If you want to create 20 or more ads at once, use the Power Editor.
Using Facebook Ad Management Tools
Anyone can get started advertising on Facebook right away with a cost-per-click campaign. But
given Facebook’s rapidly growing advertising options, scaling up can require more powerful tools.
Here are your Facebook ad management options, in increasing order of sophistication:
Ads Manager: This is a basic, intuitive way to manage Facebook ads manually using your web
browser. Build campaigns and ads, upload images one at a time, and control budgets and bids.
Power Editor: To manage several ads efficiently, download the free Power Editor software. If you
already use Google AdWords Editor, you’ll find Power Editor a cinch for creating and uploading.
Facebook ads in bulk and for converting to and from Excel spreadsheets if desired. Documentation:
http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Power_Editor_2012.pdf
Third-party platforms: Kenshoo, Marin, Clickable (Syncapse), and BuddyMedia are just a few of
the cloud software platforms you can invest in to build, publish, manage, and track ad campaigns—
not just on Facebook but across multiple social media networks—from one central dashboard. They
employ the Facebook Ad API as well as APIs of the other major networks. Traditional web analytics
platforms like Adobe Digital Marketing Suite (Omniture) have also expanded into social ad
management and search engine marketing (SEM).
Facebook Ad API: Prefer building to buying? If you have access to developers, you can create,
manage, and measure your Facebook ads via an API (application programming interface). It’s also
the framework for B2B companies to build Facebook ad-serving applications. Facebook says you
should go the Ad API route if:
1. You manage your own ad spend, and have many accounts or many ads;
2. You need a scalable alternative to Facebook Ads Manager;
3. You are an advertising tool vendor serving small and medium-sized businesses, and you
manage ads from multiple sources (like Facebook and other online advertisers); or
4. You are an ad agency managing budgets and campaigns for multiple clients.
Marketplace Ads
On Facebook, “Marketplace” is a collective term that describes a variety of ad
options that appear in the right-hand column of most Facebook pages under the
heading “Sponsored.” Some variations of these ads can appear within the
newsfeed as well.
You start by choosing something to advertise:
1. External URLs, e.g., YourDomain.com
2. Facebook pages you admin, e.g., Acme Widget
3. Facebook applications
4. Places, e.g., Blue Plate Diner, Mytown, KS
5. Events, polls, wall posts, videos, photos, or other “Facebook Objects”
On Facebook, anything that you can post to your wall can now also be sponsored
as a paid ad. During the ad-create flow, you can select either an external URL,
your brand as a whole, or specific posts or entities. You can choose to promote
either those entities themselves or the interactions your fans are having with
them—the stories generated when they like, share, download, comment upon, or
otherwise interact with your content. This latter option, the other main type of ad
unit, is called Sponsored Stories.
External URLs
With Marketplace ads, Facebook allows advertisers to send clicks to an external
URL, which launches in a new window.
Unfortunately, the bias of both Facebook and its users seems decidedly to favor
remaining within the Facebook experience and seldom venturing off to other
websites. Or, as Ben Pickering, CEO of the Vancouver-based Facebook
development firm Strutta puts it, “In general, advertising on Facebook is more
effective at driving behavior on Facebook.”
1
(However, as I’ll explore later in the chapter, the new Facebook Exchange, or
FBX, remarketing ads do seem to be successful at driving Facebook users off-
site at a reasonable ROAS.)
In my experience, the cost per click (CPC) for external URL campaigns is
significantly higher than for on-Facebook ads that drive users to a fan page, app
downloads, events, and so forth. A 2012 Social Fresh survey of Facebook
advertisers yielded similar findings: the average CPC for ads leading off-
Facebook was $1.08, compared with $0.70 for on-Facebook entities—or a
whopping 54% more.
2
The average Facebook CPC for all advertisers surveyed was $0.80.
Facebook entities also have the advantage of having Like buttons directly on
their ads—so when a user sees your ad, she needn’t leave the page in order to
become a fan of your brand.
Tip You can add social activity to your external URL ads. When you enter an
external website as a destination, Ads Manager searches for a Facebook page
related to that website. If you find a match, you’ll see a “Related Pages” check
box. Check the box, and your ad will include social activity related to your
Facebook page.
Facebook Object Ads
It can be a bit frustrating to pay Mark Zuckerberg and company simply to move.
members from one place to another within Facebook.com. But if you promote
events, or have high-engagement apps like sweepstakes, giveaways, newsletter
signups, or games, Facebook Marketplace ads and Sponsored Stories can be an
affordable way to drive qualified leads—leads who later will visit your website
and convert to customers.
Object ads have the same specs and appear in the same location as other
Marketplace ads, but they promote engagement with Facebook “objects,”
namely:
1 Ben Pickering, “How to Use Facebook Ads: An Introduction,” Social Media Examiner, May 3, 2012,
www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-facebook-ads-an-introduction/.
2 Brittany Darwell, “Survey Suggests Facebook Advertising Benchmarks: $0.80 CPC, 0.041 percent CTR,”
Inside Facebook, April 4, 2012, www.insidefacebook.com/2012/04/04/survey-suggests-facebook-
advertising-benchmarks-0-80-cpc-0-014-percent-ctr/.
Applications
Events
Pages
Page Post Ads
You can also gain likes and promote engagement with specific content elements
posted to your brand’s Facebook wall. Anything that you can post, you can
promote in a Facebook page post ad:
Text
Video
Photo
Link
Question
Event
Tip
Facebook’s nine-page PDF doc outlines best practices for page post ads.
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