Creating A Facebook Ad Campaign

Login to your Facebook account and click Create an Ad in the drop down menu next to the Home button. This is in the upper right-hand corner of the main Facebook news feed screen.

Facebook would like to know where your ad should link.

• You can send users to a specific website, such as a company blog.
• You also can guide users to a company Facebook page
• Promote other pages you or your business has created on Facebook, such as events or places.

Make a decision about what you want to accomplish.

• Select Get More Likes if you want to build your social media presence by driving fans to a Facebook page. 
• Select Promote Page Posts if you want to promote specific content on Facebook such as a blog post.
• Click See Advanced Options if you want to direct traffic to a website.

Facebook ads consist of a simple 25-character headline and a 90-character description, plus a thumbnail photograph.

• Facebook automatically suggests these templates, but it's usually better to rewrite them for your target audience. These can be updated in real-time.
• The site displays images at 100 by 72 pixels, make sure to use a photo that will still be clear even when it's displayed in a smaller format. Facebook recommends that your image be at least this size, although the site automatically resizes images for you.
• Facebook has a long set of advertising standards related to what you can and cannot post.

For example:  Ads cannot refer to a potential customer's financial status. So before you write any copy, be sure to refer to the reference site. 

Reference

Limit your ad's audience by targeting specific users.

• You can micro-target by location down to specific zip codes, then by age, gender and interests.
• In advanced options, you can segment by relationship status, languages spoken, college attended, workplace or just your own fans.
• By a process of trial and error, you can downsize your audience from Facebook's roughly 167 million users in the U.S. to as few as 20 people, if your marketing objective is to target specific decision-makers.

Name your campaign, and then set your budget and schedule.

• The name should be distinct, perhaps something related to whom you are targeting.

Example: A simple description, such as "college grads," can be effective as long as it helps keep you organized.

• Inform Facebook how much money you are willing to spend.

 Example: This can either be a daily budget or a lump sum of total spending budget while the ad runs.

Payment is either:

Per Click - you pay every time someone clicks your ad

Per Thousand Impressions - you pay every time one thousand people see the ad.

You can set ads to run continuously or through a specific date and time.

• Facebook will notify you for payment information details such as credit card, direct debit, PayPal or a Facebook Ad coupon. 
• Billing is done on a monthly basis.
• Facebook can hold your ad, normally for about a day, so it can approve its content. 

• Monitor the progress of your campaign by using the Ads Manager tool, accessed from the left-hand side of your personal Facebook account.
• The ads manager displays detailed information about your campaigns, including budget, spending and schedule.
• Clicking an ad campaign will take you to a dashboard with even more detailed information, including a series of charts and performance metrics. From here you can see how many people have viewed your ad, how often it shows up in news feeds, number of clicks and click-through rates.
• The two most important metrics are clicks -- what you're paying for- and actions, which show that people are interacting with your ad.

• You can export reports from the Reports tab in the ads manager.
• These are spreadsheets or HTML files that can be used to evaluate and compare ads.
• This critical function gives complex data that offers enterprise-level insight into an ad campaign, such as the demographics of people who are clicking on your ads or the amount of time between when a user clicks on an ad and likes a page. 

• If an ad is not performing efficiently, change its attributes by selecting the campaign it belongs to and then click on the specific ad.
• Edit the text, increase or decrease your bid, or adjust the target audience.
• You also can use your successful ads as templates by clicking 'Create a Similar Ad' in the editor. This will launch a new Create an Ad page with pre selected settings.