Facebook Marketing - A Guide to Advertising Campaigns

by John Courtenay

A good way to get websites noticed on the Internet is use Facebook as a marketing tool. There are two main ways in which this can be accomplished. These are paid advertisements and free advertisements. 

Both types of advertisements allow you to place an image alongside the advert itself. To maximise the success of your advertising campaign, it is a good idea to take full advantage of this, and include an image that is eye-catching but also relevant to your advert. 

If you are serious about advertising, then using the paid option, or a combination of both options, is the best way to go. If you are advertising a personal site or something similar, then the free way to do this is to post the link, along with some descriptive information, across as much of the Facebook system as possible. 

To do this you need to post your site's details on friend's profiles, relevant groups / pages and also on any profiles with a large number of friends, for example, those profiles that belong to popular nightclubs and venues. 

If doing this, you must be especially careful not to spam the system, as this is frowned upon by Facebook and could result in your account being suspended by them. It is important to note that posting on too many pages, too quickly, can have the same effect on your account. 

If you decide to use paid advertising, one of the good things about Facebook's paid system is that you can target specific countries and even specific age groups, meaning that you increase the chances of your advertising campaign being as successful as possible. 

A useful feature of Facebook paid advertising is the Suggest Advert feature. This works by scanning the target URL and reading some of the content, either through meta tags (if present), or from the first few lines of text found. 

There is also an option to set a daily limit for advertising, as well as options on whether to run the campaign continuously or for a set amount of time. If running continuously, be careful not to forget about your adverts, as otherwise you could end up with some extensive billing charges from Facebook. 

Users have a choice of either CPM or CPC advertising, the best choice out of these two differs depending on your website. It is important to note that both cannot be used at the same time on a single campaign, meaning that if you want both advertising types for a site, you need to create two separate advertising campaigns in order to do this. 

Facebook sets the advert type to CPC by default and automatically chooses a bid for you, however, this can be changed using the advanced options feature included on the Create Ad page. 

Also, adverts submitted using this system are manually approved, meaning that it can be some time before adverts are approved by the Facebook team. This process usually takes no longer than 15-20 minutes, depending on what time of day the adverts are submitted. 

Be sure to read their advertising terms carefully before submitting an advert, especially the parts about punctuation, as if these are not followed, acceptance of your advert could be delayed.