Social eCommerce

Chapter 6. Designing and Testing Ads on Facebook

You can send traffic from Facebook ads, pages, or posts to anywhere. To make that redirection profitable, though, you need a well-defined strategy. There must be a reasonable expectation of what’s going to happen to that traffic once it reaches its destination. Hopefully, by this point in the book, you’ve got that worked out, and now you’re looking for ways to amplify your efforts. Facebook ads are an excellent way to do that, but you must proceed with caution. Take a slow and steady approach to this, and don’t lose sight of your core metrics. It’s very easy to waste hundreds of dollars by getting lost in the wrong numbers. Proceed with caution: do not jump into the deep end without a proper flotation device.

Start with a low budget—anywhere between $5 and $15 per day, depending on your overall marketing budget—and use your initial results to prove the effectiveness and value of your ads before making a big investment. If it doesn’t work at $50, it’s not going to work at $500, so don’t scale it up until you’ve found the right formula.

Once you have a set purpose, know what your objectives are. No matter what you’re doing, you’re going to want more fans or followers, but what kind? Location-based, interest-based, or relationship-based? Perhaps you just want to encourage current fans to buy something—converting from fans to customers. Or you need to test a new offer or program by sending traffic to your site to test a demographic, price, ...