Creating a Facebook ad has seemed mystifying to me. But recently I decided it was time to try it on for size. For those of you who haven’t tried it, here are 8 steps to create an effective facebook ad:

1. Go to the Facebook ad site. Sounds kind of easy, but it took me a long time to find this!
2. Choose a goal for the ad. Do you want people to go to your Facebook page and like you? (Ah, isn’t it true how we all want folks to love us?) Do you have a link on Amazon or Barnes and Noble for a book you’d like them to buy? Would you like them to go to your website? Sign up for your newsletter? Buy a widget from you? Come to your awesome event? One way you can truly measure the effectiveness of your ad is to create a special landing page that only the ad goes to. This will give you the exact statistics of the ad’s effectiveness. Here’s a good post about creating an effective landing page.
3. Target your demographics. Choose what ages of people you’d like to target, where they live, and what interests they may have. This can be very specific, down to folks who adore Napoleon Dynamite and eat fried ham. Spend some time thinking about who would be the most likely to do what you’d like them to do. For The Muir House, we thought about book club people who read novels by authors like Jodi Picoult.
4. Title your ad. (Make sure it makes sense to you. If you’re out to sell a book, call it by your book’s title.) Here’s a good post about how to make a headline that grabs folks’ attention.
5. Write the ad copy below the title. Be sure you have a strong call to action. “Click this page to learn more.” “Sign up for this newsletter to get 7 tips right now.”
6. Upload a picture. (This is super important. Pictures draw people in.) Be sure it looks good in a small format, or that the writing is readable.
7. Set a daily budget and length of the campaign. I typically set a $15.00 daily budget. And I run it for a week or so. Unless you want to pay money every single day for the rest of your life, do not check “Run my campaign continuously starting today.”
8. Decide on your per click rate. Facebook gives you an idea of this (around .81 per click usually). I just accept their estimate. I figure they know. This means that each click-through, you are charged that rate. As soon as the click-throughs match your daily budget, Facebook pulls the ad.

That’s it! Then you click “Place Order” and you’re done. Because you can set your rate, you can experiment with different titles, pictures, ad copy and whatnot to see which is most effective. That’s the beauty of Facebook ads.

If you need help, Facebook has a good help center to help you.

Here’s a slideshow about creating clickable ads.

Q4U:

Have you created a Facebook ad and had success? What have you learned? What works?