How To Effectively Use Facebook Ads For Your Business

Are you one of the many businesses interested in advertising on Facebook? If so, you’re clearly not alone. According to figures from eMarketer, Facebook‘s  advertising  revenue — which does not include revenue for “virtual currencies”  — came to an incredible $1.86 billion earned in 2010. What’s even more remarkable is that the site has only existed for less than eight years. Regardless of the site’s age, many brands have seen success when using Facebook ads as a marketing vehicle for their companies. Social Media Strategist Caroline Melberg hears quite a few questions from clients regarding small businesses starting to use Facebook ads.

“One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners making is creating and running only one ad within each campaign,” said Melberg.  “Even the smallest change in the words you choose or the graphic you use can have a large impact on the click-through-rate for your ad, so it is best to create multiple versions of your ad and test them (known as split testing or A/B testing) to see which ad gets the best response.”

A good way to do this is to create four ads for the same campaign.  Run them for a day and then view your ad statistics on Facebook to discover which ad performed the worst.  Create a new ad that is similar to your best-performing ad, but tweak it just a bit and try to see if you can beat your best ad.  Do this consistently, always replacing the ad that is getting the lowest click-through-rate with a better performing ad.

Have you used Facebook Ads for your business?

Published on: August 16, 2011