The Potential Of Facebook PPC Ads

Why Use Facebook Social Ads?

Google is, and will always be a great place to advertise your product, service, affiliate program or offer, but competition is fierce and many people go broke using Google Adwords if they dont understand it. There are hundreds of how to make money with adwords manuals for people to learn from and many people make alot of money doing this.

Adwords started to get popular between 3-5 years ago and if you were using the Internet and were a pretty clued up marketer back in those days, then you would have made a lot of money!

Now, imagine if you were around when Google first launched its PPC network and you had the knowledge that you have today. How much money do you think you could make? Well…….. If you take notice of this and all subsequent articles, blog posts and manuals that will be hitting the web soon, then you could be in at the beginning of a brand new phenomenon! FaceBook's PPC Advertising Platform.

Facebook is different, its growing by 100,000 users per day, most people use it, its becomming part of peoples daily life, and its fun!

A Bit Of Background About Facebook

Facebook applications have been quietly, spreading virally inside the Facebook user base and have skyrocketed the number of users to around 50 million people who check their Facebook accounts twice per day! Facebook Provides an interface over the top of the Internet, similar to the way that windows does with your computer.

Many people online are getting fed up with the spam that enters their email box, the pop ups that appear in their browsers and the sales letters and spam pages they stumble upon when looking for valuable information. These people are?moving over to Facebook to conduct their daily business, information finding and social networking because they dont get bombarded with all the things that the regular Internet platform throws at you.

Facebook's Social Graph

The benefit of Facebook is that it uses a Social Graph. Meaning that you only get messages from your friends and other people within your own little friendship circle. This cuts out the spam, junk and pop ups and makes for a safer and more friendly user experience.

Facebook Applications have meant that pretty much anything you can do on the Internet, can now be done on Facebook within the safety of your own little network. 

With a single glance, you can see exactly what your friends have been up to in the last few days by using the News Feed at the top of your Facebook home page.

What Is Facebook's Newsfeed?

Facebooks newsfeed is a bulletin of all the things that you and your friends have been doing on facebook in the last few days. You are able to take a quick look down the list to keep upto date with the latest goings on in your own personal social network.

Here's an example: ~

~ Jeremy Stevens is attending Ski Sunday (it's just snappier than Ski Saturday).

~ Jeremy Stevens added new photos to a group.

~ Steph wrote on Josie Becks Wall. ~ Josie Thank you!!! I had the bestest day!! And might I add your looking blooming!! It's so lovely, hope your really well!! Big hugs xxx

~ David Robson added new photos.

~ Updated: 8 of your friends changed their profile pictures.

By taking a quick look at this newsfeed I can see a summary of what all my friends have been doing over the last few days.

Facebook PPC Advertising If you take the time to learn about Facebook's PPC advertising platform TODAY, you will be putting yourself in a great position for the future. The platform will expand and grow over the next few years into a new monster marketing and money making tool!

( It Launched November 2007) Advertising on Facebook has been available for a long time, but only in the form of CPM (Cost per thousand) impressions. This means that everytime your advert is displayed on a page, this counts as one impression and just because your advert is displayed, it doesn't mean that its going to get clicked, and you may end up losing money this way.

But….. at the start of November, Facebook released their PPC Advertising Platform. This is demographic Pay Per Click Advertising with keyword or keyphrase based targetting.

For example: Lets say I have a guitar teaching product, and want to only target guitar players around the world. I would use Guitar as my keyword and it would target everyone with guitar in their profiles. (Very similar to Google Adwords and not ground breaking) But… we can also narrow this down demographically and can choose, Country, City, Age Range, Sex, Interestes, Hobbies, Marital status, Favorite Movies, Favorite Music etc. Can you imagine the power of that?

We are now able to do Demographic advertising with Pay Per Click. With Facebook PPC ads we are able to:

• Use Advanced Targeting
• Target by age, gender, location, interests, and more.
• Use Content Integration
• Get our ads noticed, not skipped.
• Take Advantage of Flexible Pricing Structures
• Buy clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM).
• Use Trusted Referrals
• Attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

Lets drill down into this a little more.

I'm a Guitar Teacher who only wants to teach male adults between the age of 25-40 years of age who live in London, like rock music and play Guitar.

I can select my demographic criteria to target these specific people and my advert will only be seen by profiles fitting this criteria. (I'm not sure if there are many people fitting the above criteria who would like guitar lessons, but you get the picture, and hopefully you can see how powerful this kind of marketing will be!)

Imagine what kind of Sales copy you could write to fit this criteria. Here is an example of a real ad on Facebook.

Note: You will need to write your advert editorially and not salesy like you would on Google.

Remember this - People go onto Facebook to get away from all the adverts that the Internet has, and they dont want to be sold to.

Benefits of a FaceBook Ad

• The headline is limited to 25 characters
• You can put an image or photo in the advert
• The body copy can be like a paragraph and can contain more words than a Google Ad (135 characters)
• You can link to an external site, or you can link to your facebook pages page (if you are a commercial entity).

Here's an advert that targets demographics. It's also pretty salesy (which the users might not like).

Guitar Teacher Available Looking for Guitar players, 25-40 yrs old, live in London,
Love Rock Music and want to improve their Guitar skills.

Here's a more conversational and editorial type of advert.

My Friends Are Impressed Thanks to my guitar teacher, my guitar
playing skills have improved loads in the last few months.
You should try him, He rocks!

You're also able to add a small photo or image of someone playing the guitar to the 'ad' and really spice it up! - Notice that it doesn't really look like an advert. It just looks like me speaking to a friend of mine about my guitar teacher.

Where Will My Adverts Appear?

Your Social Ads will appear either within a user's News Feed as sponsored content or in the ad space along the left column of the site.

Word of Warning

Before you start any advertising campaign, make sure you read Facebook's Terms and Conditions and Advertising Guidelines. Facebook are much stricter than Google and if your ads violate their terms and conditions, they will pull the ads down straight away.

If you continue to violate them, you will have your account shut down and terminated. Note: You can't put an affiliate link directly in your advert or your advert will get rejected. You'll need to have your own domain or Facebook page that you can direct the prospect to. They will go from your advert, directly to your Facebook page or external site.

Its a 2 step process.

> User > Advert > Your own Website or FaceBook Page > Direct them to affiliate site or your product

Young Market Remember that the Facebook Ad platform is very young and the market is not very mature. This is the beginning of the process and you can take your existing knowledge of PPC into the Facebook market. You'll need to change your approach to fit in with the way Facebook works, but if you do some testing and research, I'm sure you will do very very well with a Facebook PPC advertising campaign.

Useful Resources and Other Reading Materials

http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php http://www.facebook.com/terms_ads.php
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/06/liveblogging-facebook-advertising-announcement/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/06/facebook-users-up-89-over-last-year-demographic-shift/

If you know of any other good resources on this topic, please drop me an email and I will post it here. I'll be doing some testing for this over the next few months to see what works and what doesn't and I'm looking for a handful of people to do some tests and report back each day in the comments section.

I feel we can all help each other if we do it this way. If you want to help test adverts and pages, drop me a comment and I can help provide more information.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: I have just finished writing this article to help everyone see the enormous potential of Facebook PPC ads. If you like it and are able to give me a Stumble thumbs up or review, Digg it and add it to a few other social networking sites I would very much appreciate it!

I am hoping that this article is one of the first of its kind and I can get the news out to everyone. My readership is still fairly small on this blog so I am relying on you guys to post a link back to it on your blogs.

I appreciate it and keep the comments comming!