How Facebook Ads Work
Facebook is a very effective place to make advertisements. According to the article “How do Facebook Ads Work” by Gary Henderson (https://www.digitalmarketing.org/blog/how-do-facebook-ads-work), 96% of social media marketers consider Facebook to be the most effective place to have ads on social media. In our Networks class, we have been talking about the strategy behind advertisements and how they work. This article is a really interesting example of how these strategies we have been learning apply to a real life setting.
My brother owns a marketing business for local small businesses and he uses Facebook to advertise and has gotten immense profits off of it. It’s relatively cheap to run ads given the profit in return. I will give an overview of how the Facebook advertisement process works according to this article. There are basically 3 parts you need to know: the parts of the actual ad, targeting options, and result evaluation. Facebook uses a variety of tools to successfully advertise including: Facebook activity, demographics and profile information, device-use information and off- Facebook activity. The parts of the actual ad include things like the picture and text of the ad, the placement, budget, schedule, and bidding. We have discussed bidding quite a lot in class. Bidding, in this article, is described as: “amount you’re willing to pay so customers will see your ad and take desired action”. Relating that to this bidding we have learned about in class, it’s really interesting to think about in a real-life setting like Facebook advertising. Basically, the more you pay, the more people will see it. But, there are also other things that go into how many people see your ad, like targeting. The targeting portion of Facebook ads focuses on things like: location, age and gender, behaviors, connections, customer audience, etc. Basically, if you pick the correct targeting options, you will get more bang for your buck. You will be competing against less people in terms of bidding, which increases your chances of having your ad appear more often to the audience you are trying to reach. Lastly, you will need to know how to interpret your results through things like: clicks, click-through rates, impressions, reach, cost per link click, conversions, etc. Having a high CTR is very important in terms of the success of your advertisment.
Facebook gives you all of the criteria in order to run the ad, but you have to know how to use it to get to the audience you are trying to reach. The article goes into a lot of specifics, I just gave a quick overview. It’s a somewhat complex process, but pretty easy to learn if you practice. Anyone can be an advertiser! Additionally, I think looking into the way advertisements are made makes me question the privacy of our data. It’s crazy to think how much data Facebook alone has on their users, and how they are using it! A lot of data collection goes unknown, and I think that’s something important to consider when using social media in general. Additionally, if you really care about what data is being collected on you, you should be looking into site’s privacy and collection policies.