How-to Use Facebook Ads on a Budget ?

For starters, Facebook is an online social networking site where people can have an easier access to friends from afar. The site connects people from anywhere in the world. Almost everyone seems to be using Facebook nowadays for almost everything, and they spend a lot of time on it too, and these people could be your prospective market. Therefore, if you are going to market something, Facebook would be the right place to do it; but how?

Why are Facebook Fan Pages the Best choice for Businesses?

1. The pages are public and made visible to search engines.
2. Any new feed you make on your Page will automatically show up on your fan’s newsfeed.
3. You can make a landing page for your Fan Page.
4. You can add targeted ads to link on specialized tabs.
5. Facebook provides a page analysis tool named Insights.
6. Facebook is your launching pad and foundation.
7. This is a community, where your fans get to know, like and trust you.
8. This is where you must give 100% to build your authority, where your your fans become quality leads

Define your Target Market

How do we define our target market? We simply identify the people or entities who  are most likely to get interested in or acquire your products and/or services. This does not mean that you are limiting the availability of the product and/or service you are providing, but only to increase your cost efficiency, unless your marketing resources are unlimited. This is what we call demographic profiling. Classifying  the customers using common characteristics like age, gender, race, income level, buying habits, profession, marital status, geographical location, ethnicity, political leanings, hobbies and interests. This is the key in making sure that you are presenting in the language that your target market can relate.

Creating a Facebook Fan (Business) Page

How do we create an account in Facebook? First, you should determine whether you are going to create a Facebook Profile, a Facebook Group, a Facebook Fan Page, or a Facebook Business Page. We use a Facebook Profile to represent an individual, a Facebook Group to represent clubs and organizations to engage their members, and a Facebook Fan (Business) Page to market businesses and your connections are your Fans.

Configure your Page’s settings

You cannot do anything on Facebook with a business page; the marketing has to come from somewhere else. Facebook created Fan Pages and offers business paid advertising   opportunities for that reason   . All you need to do is put money in Facebook’s pocket to get started with Facebook Ads (if you have the budget for that sort of thing). As a Page Administrator, you have the authority to grant other people to have the same administrative privileges as you. You also get to choose the tabs to display to your fans. Determine whether you want them to see your Wall, company information, photos, discussions, reviews, events, notes, videos, or the graphic designs to get their attention. You can also allow the fans to leave comments on your Wall.

Design a Fascinating Page to Get more Fans

You must be asking how you can compel your audience to like your Fan (Business) Page. Let me give you some tips and tricks. First of all, remove annoying stuff (like blatant promotional garbage), upload images, audio and videos to grab the users’ interest, use photo tagging, find friends to invite to your Page, and create lists so that when you receive a friend request you can choose which list a friend belongs in. Add your Page URL to your email signature, include it on your business cards, as well.Link your Facebook Profile to your Facebook Fan Page, and email your list and give them a reason to become a fan.

Using Facebook’s Paid Advertising

Facebook has 2 types of ads; Traditional Ads and Sponsored Stories. Facebook Ads   are the basic ads that show up on the right navigation of a user’s page that makes it easy for a user to envision. Sponsored Stories are new to Facebook; it helps you reach users on Facebook who fall on your target market list. They help advertise your page through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Getting Started on Advertising

Prior to advertising your page, you should name your campaign, then select a budget, and you are ready to choose a schedule for your campaign. Unless you chose the Advanced Options, you will pay for the impressions (CPM). These impressions are accumulated so that the advertisement shows to your targeted market; these will be the people who will most likely to help you succeed. Since you selected a budget for your campaign, rest assured that you will not be paying more than your set budget. At the same time, you will also not be paying more than the actual cost to reach your target market.

Trial and Error

Having multiple versions of your advertisement will help you define which advertisement your target market responds to the most. By doing this “A/B testing”, you can determine which version works best. First, do a test and control. You can use your original version of your ad as a control medium to test across the changes. Second, change things like the photo that you are using, as well as the text to describe your ad. This will help you determine which of your ads get the most clicks, and most importantly, lead to the most sales. Last but not the least, make multiple versions of your advertisement with small changes in-between each one. You can copy or replicate an ad by ticking on “Create a Similar Ad” when checking out ads in the Ads Manager. You’d be surprised how much difference a small change in your ad can make.

Best Practices:

Now that you already have an idea on how to use Facebook as a medium for advertising your business, do not let your competitors get ahead of you. Go ahead and make your first ad and remember to run multiple ads in your campaigns. By doing that, they will also apportion more of your budget to a higher performing ad, so you better assign your ads to different campaigns when you are testing them.

Now that you have your ad, do not forget to monitor their performance in the  Ads   Manager so that you will be informed as to which would work for your targeted market and to see how they perform against your calculated goals and investment.

How to Run a Budget Facebook Ads Campaign ?

With the increasing cost of boosting posts and the lowering organic reach on Facebook, many marketers are shifting their focus more towards advertisements and Facebook’s PPC.  The danger of PPC, of course, is the cost.  It’s easy to nickel-and-dime yourself into far exceeding your returns.  The way to keep your costs down is to put a lot of time and energy into planning.

Determine Goals

The first thing you need to do is determine your goals.  Are you looking for new fans, new subscribers, traffic to your website, website conversions, app installs or something else?  Different actions have different costs.  Jon Loomer has a few price guidelines:

• Bringing in new Facebook fans is going to cost somewhere around $1 per fan, depending on a number of factors.  The competition in your niche, the recognition of your brand and the keywords you target will all affect this.
• Bringing in new email newsletter subscribers is going to be about the same, with $1 for each new subscriber.  The action of subscribing to a Facebook page or to a newsletter isn’t all that different.  You can lower this cost by hitting upon a high-converting landing page.
• Bringing a user to your website for a visit is relatively cheap, with $1 bringing you anywhere from 2-10 users.  This will very likely vary depending on your content, your audience and the trending topics in the news that day.  Record experiments for yourself and see if you can focus on the cheaper visits.
• Product sales have a widely varying cost, and part of that depends on the product you’re trying to sell.  Someone selling a cheap mobile app will have a much easier time getting you to purchase than someone selling a car.  This will, however, be your most expensive form of advertising.

Traffic is cheap, conversions are expensive, and every factor along the way can affect the expense.

Analyze Your Presence

The more established you are already, the easier it will be to grow.  You have more information to go on when targeting an audience.  You have enough people to snowball into a larger audience with relative ease.

Your fans are an ideal target for your Facebook ads, unless you’re trying to bring in new fans with your advertising.  Even then, you can target lookalike audiences when you have sufficient data.

When you have a larger, more established audience, that audience is going to feel better about clicking through to your website, and they will feel better about converting as customers.  This means when you’re established, you’ll have lower costs all around for your ads.

Consider Your Niche

Your niche is important for determining the costs associated with your ads.  Highly competitive, general niches will be very expensive for individual clicks, because there is a lot of competition.  Just take a look at some of the most expensive niches to target.  High value, high conversion necessities; in other words, niches where a single conversion can bring in a massively positive ROI, so the company can afford to spend more on advertising.  You, as a consequence, needs to spend more to keep up.

Your product has a similar effect, particularly on the cost of ads designed to bring in conversions.  When your product is a high value item, your potential audience is going to be much lower.  Very few people browsing Facebook are looking to buy a private jet, for example.  On the other hand, when you sell one jet, you make a massive profit, so you don’t need to worry as much about targeting those users with expensive ads.

It’s more of a problem in low and middling value items.  These are the sales where you need to survive through volume, rather than individual sales.  If you stray more than a few cents in one direction or another, it can wipe out your profit.  You may need to increase the cost of your product, or manipulate other factors to increase the conversion rate on your ads.

You can take advantage of Facebook retargeting to decrease the cost of your conversion ads as well.  Anyone who clicks a conversion ad but doesn’t buy is a potential target for a future, cheaper ad that will encourage them to buy.  Plus, they were already interested enough to consider it, so giving them another chance is surprisingly effective.

Ways to Lower the Cost of Facebook Ads

 First, you can refine your audience.  When you’re targeting all of America, you’re connecting with a huge number of people who don’t care about your goals, company, brand or product.  The more you can refine your audience targeting, the cheaper your ads will be.  This is because a smaller, more focused audience is more likely convert, allowing you to spend less per conversion.

Second, you can test variations on your image and text, your ad copy.  Sometimes, all you need to do is add a thin border to your image to increase your ROI through some subtle, subconscious factor.  Sometimes a completely different image is in order.  You can experiment with this with small budgets, so long as you keep those ads from running away with your entire ad budget.

As for your ad text, the same thing goes.  Subtle changes in wording or entirely different phrases can help, or they can hurt.  There’s no way to tell what change might help without experimentation, however.

Third, you can turn your eye to your landing page.  In the case of earning Facebook likes, this landing page is your Facebook page.  In other cases, it’s a landing page on your website.  Much has been said about optimizing web landing pages, considering everything from button colors to coding to imagery.  You have much less leeway in optimizing Facebook itself, but you can still make some changes.  A better cover photo, a better profile picture, a better featured post, a better featured app; these are all contributing factors to your first impression.  Put your best foot forward, for the sake of new users.

Finally, you can consider the freshness of your ads.  Even the best ad will begin to fail after too many people have seen it too many times.  Small variations to the ad copy won’t help you at this point; you need a total refresh.  Keep your ads fresh and new to make sure the maximum number of people pay attention each cycle.

How to Receive a Refund for a Facebook Ad Campaign ?

I’ve been looking into the Facebook ads payment process for a while now, and I’ve seen quite a bit of confusion over the billing schedule and the issues people encounter with charges, credits and refunds. Unfortunately, Facebook is really difficult to get a refund out of, and you have to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were charged incorrectly in order for them to refund you. So let’s look at some situations, and whether or not you get a refund.

An Ad With No Impressions

I’ve seen this one come up in the forums before; someone sets an ad budget with their payment method of choice and they notice a charge on their account. They stop or cancel the ad, or maybe the ad runs and they just don’t get any impressions, due to targeting. They then ask Facebook for a refund of the money they spent.

There’s no issue here, and no refund is needed. Facebook only charges you when an event actually happens. If you run an ad for two weeks but you get zero impressions and zero clicks, it costs you $0. Facebook won’t charge you just for putting up the ad. The charge that you saw, if you saw a minor charge, is a verification charge. The same thing happens when you, for example, link a Paypal and a bank account. They make a small test charge to make sure the connection is valid between accounts, then refund the pennies immediately.

Paying With Credit

When you create a new ads account, you’re often given a minor amount of credit, usually somewhere between $20 and $50 for your ad spend. It’s a way to encourage using and exploring the ads manager. If you haven’t registered yet for ads, by the way,it’s probably a good idea to wait until Facebook sends you such an offer. It might help to begin the process, then change your mind, so Facebook sends you a message trying to get you back.

When you have ad credit on your account, even if you have another payment method open, Facebook will use that credit first. If you received a $50 credit, and you set your daily ad spend limit to $50, your ad will run for one day using the credit.

Here’s where the issue comes in; if you continue to run the ad for another day, at a $50 spend limit, Facebook will happily do so. They will also happily charge you for that $50 in usage, assuming of course that you actually used it.

At this point, you may be able to get a refund from Facebook, but I wouldn’t count on it. Being charged because you weren’t paying attention isn’t really a good excuse. It’s not a false charge; you got what you paid for. You just hadn’t initially intended to buy it. That’s not Facebook’s fault. Still, you can try to file a payments support request. You can find the form here

Just to make sure you’re aware, here’s a little bit more information about ad credit and how it works:

• Credit is not automatically applied to every ad you make. You need to specifically add it as a payment method.
• Advertising coupons can expire. This means if you are given credit and don’t use it for too long, it can disappear. This applies even if you’ve added it as a payment method. It’s a use it or lose it situation.
• You can’t redeem partial credit, unless you set a daily budget limit. If you add $50 to your credit, but have a daily limit of $20, only $20 will be spent.

Typos in Ad Spend Limits

This is another situation. What happens when you have a credit card as your main payment method, and you intend to set a daily spend limit of $50, but you accidentally hit the 5 twice? $550 is certainly quite a bit more than $50.

Facebook will happily accept that budget, and they will equally happily spend up to that budget. There’s no “hey, this value is way higher than normal” warning. This can completely break the bank for some small businesses and non-profits, which is quite unfortunate.

This is an issue where a legitimate mistake can have long-lasting consequences. Unfortunately, Facebook isn’t in the business of charity, so they aren’t likely to grant a refund in this case. There’s a faint possibility, but I wouldn’t count on it. This is primarily because of how easy to abuse this would be. Anyone could accidentally get 10x their value by “typoing” an extra 0 on their budget, then disputing the charge.

Speaking of, if you do want to dispute the charge and hope you get a refund, you canuse the Ads Billing Inquiry form.

Unexpected Billing

This is perhaps the most common billing issue, and it’s a matter of billing cycles. Facebook has certain billing thresholds, and you are only charged when you reach a threshold. You don’t even necessarily have a threshold, depending on the age and standing of your account. You are also always billed at the end of the month, for any balance under a threshold.

Thresholds vary. For the United States, there are two systems. If you use direct debit, you do not have a threshold. Instead, you are billed at the end of each day for the amount you spent that day, regardless of how much or how little it is.

If you are using a credit card, debit card or Paypal account, however, you do have thresholds. These thresholds are at $25, $50, $250, $500, and $750. You are also billed at the end of the month.

So, for example, if you spend $15 per day throughout the month, you would pay nothing on the 1^st because your balance is $15. On the second day, however, you will reach $30 and cross the $25 threshold. You will be billed $25 on the 2^nd. This leaves a remaining balance of $5 for the 3^rd, and an increased threshold up to $50. On the 3^rd, your balance becomes $20 from your $15 daily spend. On the 4^th it becomes $35. On the 5^thit becomes $50, and because that reaches your threshold, you pay that $50 and your balance drops to 0.

After this, your $15 per day will continue to rack up, because your billing threshold has been increased to $250. You won’t cross this threshold at $15 per day until the 22^nd, when your balance hits $255. You will be billed for $250 then, and your balance drops to $5. Your threshold increases to $500, and you continue to rack up $15 per day in your balance. By the 30^th, you will have reached a total of $125, and will be billed for that remaining balance. The 1^st of the next month you will return to a billing threshold of $25 and your balance will be back to $0.

You can change your billing threshold manually. Here, you can set it higher or lower, to avoid frequent or irregular charges. If, for example, you set the threshold to always be $50, you would be billed every time your balanced reached $50, without the threshold increasing to $250. Alternatively, you could set the threshold to $750, and only be billed once you each that threshold or the end of the month, whichever comes first.

What does this have to do with refunds? One common misunderstanding is when a user sets a daily ad spend but either has no threshold or a high threshold. They might be expecting a charge of their daily ad spend of $15, and be in for a rude surprise when Facebook only charges them when they reach a certain time limit, for a significantly higher amount.

There’s not much of a chance of a refund here either. Facebook has a ton of resources out there in order to help you understand and manage your billing. It’s not their fault if you are charged more than you expected because you didn’t understand thresholds and limits.

If you really believe that you deserve a refund or that a mistake has been made in billing, you can use the billing inquiry form mentioned above. It’s your best direct line to Facebook.