Part 2: How to Target Your Facebook Ad

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Jeremy Huffman - HeadshotJeremy Huffman, owner of Constant Flow Marketing, returns to explain how to target your Facebook ads to reach more people for your lawn and landscape business. Read Part 1: What You Need to Know about Facebook Ads here.

WK: How do Facebook ads work—how much do they cost, do you buy them in bundles, how long is a subscription?

JH: There are three main bidding methods when placing Facebook ads:

  • Price per 1,000 views
  • Pay per click
  • And a hybrid of the first two options that Facebook optimizes for better performance.

Facebook ads are priced in an auction system where you are bidding on an audience. The final cost of an ad is based on a combination of which actions you choose (like sending someone to your website):

  1. The amount of people bidding on your audience
  2. The interest that people have in your ad
  3. The audience that you select.

Facebook ads can be run for as little as a dollar per day and there are no commitments or contracts. If you decide at any point that an ad is not performing well, you can simply turn it off and you will only be charged for the ads that have been served.

The most important thing to remember when using Facebook ads is that the content that you are promoting must be interesting to the people in your audience.

Getting attention and interaction with your ad from Facebook subscribers is the most important thing in the eyes of Facebook. The Facebook ad system will penalize ads that people do not pay attention to by reducing the frequency that they are shown. The ads that are clicked on and viewed longer by your audience will be shown more frequently and cost less to run.

WK: How do Facebook ads work as far as setting up keywords or key phrases?

JH: With Google AdWords, your goal is to get in front of people when they are ready to buy using the right keywords. With Facebook, you are bidding on an audience with the goal of connecting with them through your content. Facebook visitors are not “ready to buy” like they are when they are searching for something on Google. When someone is using Facebook, they are looking primarily to be entertained.

Facebook is all about being interesting to your audience and talking about the things that interest them.

If you can create beautiful pictures of your work, interesting videos, or articles that your audience wants to read, you will be very successful with Facebook Ads.

WK: I ran a Facebook ad a few months ago. I put down a deadline. Yet, when that deadline came and went, Facebook continued to run my ad post-campaign without my permission. Why did they do that?

JH: My guess would be that your schedule setting was not saved when the ad was created. Facebook will continue to run the ad without a schedule setting.

The best way to stop an ad from running is to turn the ad off in the Facebook Ads Manager. Any ad can be turned off at any time in the Ads Manager and can be turned back on when you are ready to run the ad again.

Another way to limit how long the ad is run is to use the budget feature. There is a budget setting in the Facebook Ads Manager that allows you to set a daily or lifetime dollar limit. Once that budget is used up, the ad will stop running.