So you have a new business and are interested in playing with online advertising. Maybe you have a fixed conversion point or you just want to generate interest. Besides coding for Elemental Blend, I also teach martial arts, and this was the exact position my business was in before deciding to try advertising on Facebook.
When I started my dojo, the first thing I did was get a website up followed by a Facebook business page. Because it was summer, I had an influx of students and a little extra cash and I figured I would experiment with online advertising. My top two outlets were Google Adwords and Facebook ads and ultimately I went with Facebook ads simply because they seemed more relevant and I have actually clicked on one or two before.
Targeting
Initially I was surprised by how targeted you can make your ad. Here are the targeting settings that I went with:
- who live in the United States
- who live within 50 miles of Austin, TX
- age exactly 18 and older
- who like martial arts
- who are not already connected to Austin Komei Jyuku
The key here are the last two bullet points. I was able to exclude people who where already fans and target people in Austin, TX who say they like martial arts. Because I teach Japanese Swordsmanship, I could potentially make an ad to target users who liked the movie "The Last Samurai" or "Yojimbo". This is powerful as you can stack as many of these as you want. To keep it broad on my first ad, I chose to go with "people who like martial arts" and see what kind of results I would get.
I decided to keep my ad within facebook, meaning that when the user clicks the ad, they would go to my Facebook page instead of my website. If you have a conversion point in mind, Facebook gives you a JavaScript snippet to include on your thank you page (or whatever page used for your conversion). I chose to put this on my website homepage to track how many users clicked the Facebook ad, went to my Facebook page, and then went to my website.
Pricing
During setup, Facebook will ask you if you want to pay for impressions (ad views) or clicks (ad clicks). I chose to pay per click and set a max bid at 0.89 cents. Facebook will recommend to you a suggested bid range, and I chose a number in the middle of that range. Note that you will most likely never pay your maximum bid amount per click (unless your market is extremely competitive). Even with my max bid of 0.89 cents, my average click cost was 0.50 cents.
You will also need to tell Facebook your daily spending limit. I set mine at $2.00 a day, but you may want to increase this depending on how popular your ad is. Once you hit your daily limit, your ad will no longer show. Here is a report showing some stats relating to pricing and clicks:
Notice how small my impressions are? Facebook said there are about 9000 people that like martial arts in Austin, TX so my ad was actually being seen by a good percentage of them!
Reporting
After a few days of running my ad, I clicked through the reporting and found some confusing things. The conversion report shows items under "Tag Name" and "SKU" which did not make a lot of sense. After a little research, here is a breakdown of what these items mean. Tag Name will either show your ad name or your custom conversion code name (if you used the JavaScript conversion tracking code). In the report below, "Website Visit" represents the custom conversion code. For SKU, "like_page" means the user clicked "like" on your actual facebook page while "like_page_inline" means the user clicked "like" on the actual ad itself. After figuring out some of these terms, the report made a little more sense.
Right now, Facebook ads are cheap and allow you to really get specific on your targeting. Your average user will spend more time browsing Facebook than searching on Google. In the two weeks of running my dojo ad, I got 38 new fans. Now the real conversion point will be to see how many of these people turn into actual students!
