This is Day 12 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
So you’ve listened to my sales pitch about Facebook advertising and you’ve taken the time to define your company’s target market. Hopefully this wasn’t the first time that you’ve defined your target market, otherwise you are in serious trouble So the first thing you want to do is head over to the ads creation page. If you haven’t already created your page then you most definitely want to have it set up by now since we will be integrating our page with our ad. For the purpose of this article, I’ll go ahead and set up an advertisement for the AllFacebook.com page.

Create Two Ad Creatives For Each Demographic Group

Before walking through the ad creation process, I wanted to note that it’s important to split up your ad creative among each targeted segment. This is useful for split-testing your advertisements, something that I’ll discuss in the near future. While this isn’t necessary to get started, testing the performance of advertisements is extremely important to increase long-term results. For this guide we were focused on 30 days but obviously your marketing activities should not end after 30 days.

Setup Your First Advertisement

I’m going to quickly run through the set up process of an advertisement. I will be going into more details during our Facebook Advertising series in addition to providing video tutorials within the New Media School Facebook Business Insiders course.

Step 1: Design Your Advertisement

The first step of creating an ad is determining the design which includes a 110 pixel x 80 pixel image, and ad title, and the body text. Since we are promoting something on Facebook, we’ll want to select the Page that we are promoting as pictured below. Remember that you can only promote pages that have been published. To publish your page, go to “Edit Settings” from the left-hand column of your Facebook page and then click on the red “Publish this Page” link on the right hand side of the settings page.

Select Option To Promote Something On Facebook

Directly under the area that says “Design Your Ad” click on the link which says “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. You will then be able to select anything that you have on Facebook including your Facebook Page.

Select The Page You Want To Promote
As pictured below, select the Facebook page that you’d like promote. Facebook will then automatically generate an advertisement using your Facebook page’s image. While you can change the image, it’s fine to make at least one using the default image then split test it against another ad (as I’ll explain later).

Step 2: Select Your Targeting Options

Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two ad versions against each other. On Facebook, this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a lot of money for the most part. Facebook provides the following 11 targeting factors for advertisers:

1. Location – Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. All advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location you’d like to select.
2. Age – Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to select their age.
3. Birthday – This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what typeso f ads should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishing the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for higher conversion rates.
4. Sex – Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.
5. Keywords – Keywords are based on a user’s profile information including activities, favortie books, tv shows, movies, and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective keywords. What types of product do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.
6. Education – While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great way to promote it.
7. Workplaces – This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter can be priceless.
8. Relationship – Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their profile.
9. Interested In – This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to skip this field for most of my ads.
10. Languages – If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to them.
11. Connections – The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.

Step 3: Enter Your Pricing Settings

Now that you’ve figured out the targeting for your advertisement you need to select the pricing. You can choose between CPM and CPC advertising but there’s pretty much no point of going the CPM route. You want to pay for users to take an action and in this case it’s either them clicking on the ad that directs them to your Facebook page or becoming a fan directly from the ad.

Selecting A Campaign
It’s a good idea to group all of your ads for a single Facebook Page into a single campaign. This is because you can adjust your budget for that specific campaign at any point. If you adjust the dollar spend of a campaign for your Facebook Page you can track the change in the growth of fans based on that adjustment, giving you a rough estimate of the cost per fan.

Selecting A Price To Bid
Facebook will suggest bidding prices that will maximize the number of impressions you receive. The more you bid typically, the more you receive. While there is a lot of information about how Google ranks their advertisements there is currently no information about Facebook and rankings such as advertisement quality score. My guess is that there will be more information about ads on Facebook as time goes along but for now, pick a bid rate that sounds reasonable to you and then track the number of impressions and clicks that you receive. For now, Facebook doesn’t provide concrete information on how to improve positioning and impression rates.

Split Test With A Second Advertisement

As I mentioned early on, it’s important to split test two advertisements against each other to see which receive more clicks. Once you’ve determined which ad has a higher click through rate, only run that individual advertisement. Otherwise you risk having multiple ads displayed to the same users and the result is that you’ll end up paying for users more than once.

Daily Task

At this point you should have a thorough idea about how to manage your Facebook page advertising campaign. As I wrote yesterday, it’s important that you have a good definition of your target market. By now you should know that target and should be able to set up a couple initial ads. For today’s task, create two advertisements on Facebook that promote your Facebook Page. Feel free to test it out with only a couple dollars a day. You can then adjust your budget as needed.