Transcript

Hi. This is Joshua Stewardson of Covenant Web Design. And I want to explain today how to create a Facebook ad and what is so powerful about these ads as opposed to other forms of online advertising.

Now to create an ad, let’s just right into it, you go to www.facebook.com/advertising. And you need to have a Facebook profile. If you don’t, then you create one. It isn’t really connected to the ad. It’s just a way for Facebook to keep track of the username and email address so you can track your ad's success.

On the screen, you’re going to see a button called “Create an Ad.” Click that. There’s only two sections to this page. The first section they call “Design Your Ad, and the second section is called “Targeting.” And the final things is called “Campaign Pricing and Scheduling,” kind of the details.

The “Design Your Ad” I’m not going to talk too much about but basically, you can put in your basic information for an ad. And this you can figure out, talk with people who know marketing. Choose the right title. Choose the right image to kind of catch people’s attention and the right words to put in place and then send them to a specific URL. Often it’s good to send them to a landing page that you can track what did people do once they came to the landing page, where else did they go on the site if you have Google Analytics or other sort of analytical software.

We’ll skip from that part and really focus on the power of the Facebook ads which is the ”Targeting” section. What you see right here on the right is the Estimated Reach. And so with the options we already put in place, the estimated reach is 4,236,960 people and right now, we’re filtering it to people who live in the United States between the ages of 17 and 19 who are in high school. And the case study for this one is the senior portrait photographer wants to target people in the local area. And so they want to target just high school seniors, not have their ad running in front of everyone, not get a billboard, but really target people who are in high school at the right ages. Right now we’re targeting everyone who lives in the United States. Not very practical.

So let’s get rid of that option. And instead, first, start with the country. Just going to walk you through this. And then you can target all the way down to city. So we’re going to say our hometown, Ankeny, Iowa, and you can see that really reduces it to 680 people who live in the United States in Ankeny, Iowa with these ages. Great. Let’s broaden it a little bit though. Let’s not just get, you know, the people in Ankeny. Maybe the metro areas.

We’re going to include cities within ten miles. Now we jump up to 7,000 people. So that’s how many are in Facebook who will possibly see this ad. Great. If we wanted to even narrow it down more, we could maybe look at, you know, let’s people who have interesting football, if our specialty was with football seniors. And that goes all the way down to 940 people. Really, really specific there.

You can target things like "Interested in men, women, relationships, languages". You can target people who speak Spanish. We use the education for “In High School.” But maybe if you’re posting a job opening, then you want to say, “We want them to be a college grad.” You can even say, “Graduate from this college with this major.” Some really, really granular options here.

And then finally, at the bottom, you can set up a campaign name so you can track things. A budget per day or over the entire lifetime so you can make sure you don’t suddenly have 300 people clicking in you pane for every one of those. They’ll just stop running your ad if you max out there.

And what’s the schedule? How long do you want to run this? You don’t want to run it past the season for senior photos or whatever the basis is. And then Facebook generates suggested bids. They say, “Let’s pay .98 cents per click.” And that’s based on how much competition there is as well as how granular you make this. So if we added Spanish in that changes it down to .88 cents per click because of the granularity, because of the competition for that specific option. So you’ll just want to keep an eye on that as you’re changing so you don’t get kind of beyond your price limit.

Once that’s done, your ad is good to go. It’s as simple as that. And you simply say, “Place Ad” and then keep an eye on it on Facebook.

Hope that helps.