How do Facebook Ads work?

This is an overview on how to use Facebook Ads or Facebook PPC, designed for people who are new/intermediate users of Facebook.

In this easy to follow Facebook Ads guide we will show you how to successfully create a Facebook Ad campaign for your business page or to promote a particular Facebook story. This is one of our series of social media marketing video tutorials that we’re planning to roll out over the next few months covering Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Last month we released some great video tutorials on Twitter Marketing, so if you found these useful we hope you like our latest videos. If you found this tutorial helpful then please LIKE or leave a comment below. Remember to watch this space as we will be releasing Facebook video tutorials on the following hot topics over the next couple of months:

• How to create a Facebook account
• How to setup your Facebook profile
• How to upload photos and videos to Facebook
• How to add Facebook friends and create lists
• How to change your Facebook username – Vanity URL
• How To Create Facebook Groups & Events
• How to use Privacy settings
• How to create a Business Page (Fan Page)
• How to use Facebook polls
• How to install a Static HTML (iframe) tab
• How to Facebook Ads

Video Transcription

Hi there, everybody. I want to thank you for joining me and I want to wish you all a Happy New Year. So we’ve had quite a few different emails over the last few weeks in regards to Facebook ads so in this video, really it’s an opportunity to talk about Facebook ads and show you really how to set it up. So a Facebook ad is brand message, it’s an advertising or marketing campaign that’s put out to attract people to either a product or a service. In the case of Facebook it can be things like events, it could be things like apps and it could be things like promoting your Facebook business page. So these are really important. Now in principle it works the same as Google Adwords, and Google Adwords is a pay per click service, which quite literally means that every time someone actually clicks on your advert, or your campaign message, some money comes out of your budget. So let’s say you’ve got a £400 budget for your first month and you want to give this a test spin to see how powerful it is. Well first of all you need to put in all your search or target audience criteria, age, location, interests, key word; all that sort of stuff. And then what it’s going to do is look at the competition and look at all the information you’ve put in and give you an estimated cost per click. So let’s say in this case it’s 50p per click, that gives you what, 800 clicks. Every person that clicks on the advocate depute, 50p is minused from your overall budget of £400 until it’s simply gone. And that’s, in principle, how pay per click actually works. Now I want to quickly show you the two different types of Facebook ads, because these are quite powerful. So the first one is the general Facebook ad. Now these all depend on what key words and what interests each individual person has, so let’s say I’ve got a Facebook profile and I’ve liked, let”s say, this top one here “Combat Zone”, “Fall Out 3”, “Loud Wire”, “World War 2”, maybe I’m a fan of Leonard Cohen, which I am. What it will do is it will look at the key words and it will put these messages in front of those people who are interested in these products or services already. So this is how it works. You can have a like on there, someone can see the message, they can read what you have to say and they can like it straight away, or they can go to the actual page itself. Now that’s a click, if you click on that, that’s 50p coming out my £400 budget basically. So it’s really important that you craft that quite carefully. Now the next one is a Sponsored Story. Now the Sponsored Story is a little bit different, quite similar, but a little bit different, and this comes off the news feed so it’s whatever is on the page or place or app, and it’s something very specific. Now this could be, let’s say, a video that you’re promoting. It could be an app that you’re promoting. It could be something very specific that you want to promote, but you want to get exposure. So once you’ve decided on what type of ad you’re going to run, you want to go up to the top right hand corner and click “Create an Ad”. Then it will take you to the next page, and again click “Create an Ad” and here’s where all the fun happens. So this is basically where you specify whether it’s a page, application or a place that you want to promote. So I’m going to go with the page, then it’s going to ask you for the type. I’m going to run with a Facebook ad this time. Then it’s going to ask you about the story type, so what do you want to promote? Now if you just look below here. This is a post that’s on this particular Facebook page. Now if I want to promote that post I will leave it on this one. If not, I’ll click “Facebook Ads for Pages” and what it will ask me to do is look for a particular tab or your default. Now I actually run the campaigns on a default, so when someone comes to the Facebook page they’re going to land already on that page with the promotion. So that is really important to probably have that as a default. Below that is the name of the actual page, that’s the title, that’s what’s going to come up here in the preview. And then you’re going to want to put in the body of the text. So whatever campaign you’re running you’re going to want to put the text in there. So this is what is going to attract people and draw them in. Below that is the image, and I want to go with an SEO image here. And you can just see the preview just below here. So we’ve got the name of the page, we’ve got the image, also you can like it straight away and click on it. And “Want to get your head around SEO this year? Then try our new course, absolutely free.” So that’s the message that I want to put out and I’m going to place that message in front of a particular target audience.