A Quick Primer on Facebook Ads

Facebook is a great place to meet up with old friends.  It is also a great place for forging relationships with your customers.  But have you ever considered advertising on it?

If you've been on Facebook for any period of time, then I doubt that you've missed the ads in the right sidebar on nearly every page.  You might think that, with an audience like Facebook's, it is very expensive to even consider advertising there.  However, advertising on Facebook is a lot less expensive and more cost-effective than you think.

Facebook ads are bought either on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM).  While it is true that Facebook has tons of traffic that could potentially generate millions of clicks or impressions, it doesn't have to be like that for your ad.

When you create an ad on Facebook, you can limit who sees it based on many demographics.  You can be as broad as showing it to everyone on Facebook, or you can target just the people who live in your city.  You can set a specific age range, sex, marital status, and sexual orientation.  You can limit your ad to people who speak your language.

You can also specify if you want to target people with certain interests (such as fitness) or employers (if they work for a large enough company).

Facebook ads are a great place to start if you want to embark on a fine-targeted advertising campaign.