Five Rules of Highly Successful PPC Advertising on Facebook
Pushing recent negative press aside, there’s still no denying the power of Facebook. Hundreds of millions of users, logging in daily and, according to Media research company Nielsen’s statistical summary of US website activity for May*, each user spent over six hours on Facebook in the month of May. This is a platform that is ripe for the picking! So if you’re still working on finding a way to harness that power, and PPC advertising is one of your strategies, here are five rules that we strongly suggest you follow:
1) Pay for clicks, not impressions, until your ad copy is tested. This tip goes for all PPC advertising. Why waste money showing unproven ads? Pay for the ones that you know work for you, meaning you also need to closely track and watch metrics.
2) If you want Facebook to LOVE you, don’t send your traffic to external sites. Facebook wants its millions of users to stay inside the cozy walls of Facebook! So it’s like a game of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” Link your ad to one of your pages inside of FB. This could be your main fan page, or a tab on your page set up exclusively for this advertisement. For brand new leads, you can even have a capture page inside of Facebook.
3) Laser target your ads to carefully selected Fan Pages. Facebook allows you to select the audience to which you would like your ad to display. You can select prospects who have “Liked” certain Fan Pages. While it’s easy to be broad, broad is wasteful. Broad blows through your money more quickly. Consider displaying your ads to fans of competitors who work in your space, and write your ad’s copy to address their interests specifically.
4) Perfect your copy. Remember that writing is re-writing. Your first draft will likely need to be refined. You only have a single second to grab the interest of your prospect on a very busy page! So think of the title of your ad as the advertisement for your ad. It doesn’t need to tell everything about your offer – just get the buyer to take the next step and click!
5) Make it a real offer. Don’t invite shoppers to just come check out your store. You have a goal to get them to buy a specific product or package, or to at least get their information so that you can continue marketing to them.
Ignore these rules at your own risk. Good luck!
*Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AuZLaKQQs5xpdGdJNFZEdHhLUXJLa240WmsyZmFWbFE&output=html
Lanette Willis is a Senior Account Manager at Nexternal. Before joining Nexternal she spent nearly a decade working in market research and professional services marketing, before running her own successful eCommerce apparel business. Lanette is passionate about helping people and businesses thrive.
