Facebook Advertising 101: Nail Down The Basics (Infographic)

Infographic submitted by Ted Chong.

With more active users than any others social platform that exists, along with arguably the most powerful and targeted advertising platform in the history of marketing, neglecting Facebook is a pathway to losing business.

Plain and simple.

Facebook’s total revenue grew by 56% year-over-year to $7.01 billion, and mobile ad revenue accounted for 84% of total ad revenue (source).

Chances are, at least a few of your competitors are advertising on Facebook.

The oh-so-common questions I hear from business owners are…

• “CPC? CMP? Conversion pixels? I don’t have the slightest idea where to begin and it all seems so complex.”

• “There are so many ad options and variables involved. How can I be sure I’m not wasting my money?”

• “I don’t think people go on Facebook to shop. They go on there to talk with friends and family. Why would I advertise there?”

All very legitimate concerns, especially if you only have a small ad budget that you need to go a long way.

Before getting into the complexities of Facebook ads, let’s take a step back and come at it from a very basic angle.

Facebook Advertising 101 Infographic

The infographic below will walk you through basic Facebook ad terminology, targeting options, ad types, and more.

It’s a solid place to start if you’re feeling overwhelmed or don’t feel like you’ve absorbed the basics of Facebook ads.

 

Easy Facebook Ad Ideas for Your Business

After reviewing the infographic, you should have some of the Facebook ad terminology down and a basic understanding of common ad options people use.

But I’m not going to just throw you to the wolves, because you’re thinking, “Okay, but how do I put this in action?”

Here are three quick, very doable approaches to Facebook advertising that have potential to make an immediate impact on your business (read: make you money).

1) Target Your Existing Email List

People who are subscribed to your email list are hot prospects, because they’ve either voluntarily opted in to receiving emails from you, or they’ve already bought from you in the past.

These are people who are familiar with your business and, assuming you didn’t screw them over previously, view your business positively.

What this means from a Facebook advertising perspective is your clickthrough rate will be high, your costs will decrease as your clickthrough rate increases, and your conversions will likely be high as long as you have a solid landing page.

That’s plainly the most ideal pay-per-click situation you can be in: low cost, high conversion.

Check out this guide from Jon Loomer about advertising to your existing email subscribers.

2) Target Your Website Visitors

The next best thing to targeting people on your email list…

How about targeting people who visit your website?

Or even targeting your most loyal website visitors and blog readers?

This audience could also be full of warm or hot prospects — they’ve read about your business and they’ve engaged with content on your website.

Sounds like a good fit, right?

As with targeting email subscribers, you’re likely to have high clickthrough rates, low costs, and higher conversions when you target website visitors.

This effect will be even more exaggerated depending on how you set up your targeting.

For example, instead of throwing out a general ad to every website visitor, you can break down your campaigns to target the top 1% of visitors or the top 5% of visitors.

Advertising to these small segments might justify a different approach in the form of different copy or creative compared to, say, the bottom 25% of your visitors.

Lots more information about how to set up these ad types and general strategy from Jon Loomer here:

• Create an Audience of People Who Spent the Most Time on Your Website
• How to Target Your Most Loyal Website Visitors With Facebook Ads

3) Target Existing Facebook Fans

It’s no secret that organic reach has dropped on Facebook.

That’s simply a product of more competition in the feed — with Facebook’s 1.8 billion users and 60 million pages making updates, there’s less room in the feed for everyone.

That doesn’t mean your existing fans are unreachable.

As with any marketing channel, you just might need to spend some money to get in front of your audience now.

Targeting existing fans is an exceptional way to boost engagement on your posts, giving you an opportunity to interact with your fans who are far more likely to be customers than non-fans.

If that sounds like a worthwhile path, look into option #6 on this list for how to target existing fans.

Closing

Facebook advertising offers extensive choices and flexibility.

There’s no question about that.

With that choice and flexibility does come quite a bit of complexity, but you don’t have to understand every tiny nuance to make Facebook ads work for you.

Start simple with one of the three examples described above, spend extra time really figuring out who your target audience is, keep the spend fairly low at the beginning, test different creative and copy, and test different ad placements (news feed, mobile-only, sidebar, etc.).

Pull reports often and analyze the results against your goals.

While your returns in the beginning aren’t going to reach max levels, that doesn’t mean you’re wasting money or won’t have a positive ROI.

Don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed and give up on the system entirely, because it does work when used correctly.

Conceptually, the approach is only as complicated as you make it.

As they say…

KISS: keep it simple, stupid.

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About the Infographic: Ted Chong runs Ice Cube Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Singapore that helps local small businesses acquire leads from channels such as Facebook and Google.