How to advertise on Facebook – A perspective from Ireland

So you want to run ads on Facebook for your business, whatever that business is. Thanks to social ads from Facebook you can target 167,000 people in Ireland that currently use the service in the same way that Google’s ad system allowed you to target ads but even better than Google you can almost be sniper-like on how you target the ads. You can target by age, gender, work status, relationship status, college education and interests, something Google can’t quite do yet. (though when the next iterations of Open Social happen, they will)

In this walkthrough, let’s present were the typical snobby TCD student who can make an almost professional career of sneering at UCD students. So you’ve decided you want to advertise to UCD folks. All you need is a credit card and to spend a minimum of five dollars on your ad campaign.

1. You need to decide what your ad is going to be. For this example the Trinners student is going to advertise jobs in McDonald’s to those in UCD.

2. So first go to Facebook.com/ads

Facebook Advertising Guide

3. Click on the big green button!

Facebook Advertising Guide 1a

4. Choose what website address you want to be clicked. Here it’s the job page on www.McDonalds.ie

Facebook Advertising Guide 2

5. From here choose your audience. We picked 18-25 year olds that attend UCD.

Facebook Advertising Guide 3

6. It said there were circa 1380 people from UCD on Facebook:

Facebook Advertising Guide 4

7. Then write your ad and you can also include an image. The McDonald’s logo was chosen.

Facebook Advertising Guide 5

8. You can also see a preview of what the ad will look like:

Facebook Advertising Guide 6

9a. After this you can choose how much is to be spent and what times the ad will be shown. You can also pay per click or by views:

Facebook Advertising Guide 7

Update: Left out this bit:

9b. If you choose pay per views you have the option of also display the ad in the News Feed of people, something which will probably get you a lot more clicks and views since people actively scan and read their News Feed.
Facebook Advertising Guide 7 A

10. Finally, review the campaign and pay up and off you go.

Facebook Advertising Guide 8

Happy annoying people or er doing business.

Remember though that just because you can advertise and target specific people does not mean that you will get a lot of click throughs. You have to work hard on writing good copy and using good images to get the attention of a Facebook public that doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to ads. While I do think general advertising is becoming disintermediated, in the end if the web is truely democratic/equal and everyone knows SEO, everyone blogs and tells the story of the product and gets the cluetrain, it will again come down to branding and marketing professionals to help make your product the most liked product out there. Not everyone out there can work on making global microbrands so I forsee ad agencies and marketing companies training and educating people on how to do it right and of course helping those too busy to do it themselves.

13 Responses to “How to advertise on Facebook – A perspective from Ireland”

  1. It gets worse. If you know enough about somebody it’s often entirely possible to set it up to show an ad to ONE PERSON, which is terrifying.

  2. The awesome other side of the coin to this Damien is when you use the PPV option. It gives you the option to display the banner in either a flyer (on left hand page) or in the news feed.

    I would love to see an eye-tracking report on Facebook. But, from decent amounts of feedback from users both at KMP and our clients, the news feed is significant area of focus (next tends to be the 3 most recent added apps.).

    OK, you lose the ad deliverability (in terms of cost-per-action rather than cost-per-view), but I would rather be on display in a higher-viewed area than paying more money for fewer ad deliveries.

  3. Damien says:

    Feck. Left out that crucial bit. Will amend blog post!

  4. Will says:

    This is so useful for sending “swift-boat” style messages, which can’t be linked back to the main parties.

    I wonder of FaceBook can monitor and restrict the adverts based on legal requirements?
    e.g no cigarette adverts in Ireland, balanced number of candidate adverts for next French elections etc. Or will various lawsuits settle that one?

  5. I’ll PM you next time Damien!

  6. Grace says:

    Thanks damien this is very useful.

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  12. Very helpful step-by-step guide.
    Will be using this when I create my own ad in a few weeks time when weddingdates.ie goes live!! Eek!! 🙂

  13. Thanks for sharing and for taking time to put this together.