In the last chapter we looked at how to build traffic from social media, which of course includes Facebook. As well as using Facebook directly though, there is also another way to make money from the platform – which of course is to use Facebook ads.
This can generate a ton of traffic immediately and unlike the above method it takes no time at all to kick into action. Of course it does cost a little money which is the downside – but if you have monetized your site correctly then this needn’t be an issue as it can pay for itself. Combining social media marketing with Facebook ads is a very powerful strategy but if you choose just one, then the right starting point is going to depend on your business model and budget.
How Facebook Ads Work
If you have ever used Google AdWords then you should have a basic idea of how PPC advertising works. PPC stands for Pay Per Click, which means that you only pay when someone actually clicks on one of your adverts. In this sense, an advert only costs you money when it is ‘successful’.
This is the same for Facebook Ads – meaning that you only get charged when someone clicks on your advert. And if you’re even more strategic
then you can use something called ‘CPA’ which is ‘Cost Per Action’. Here, you only pay when someone actually completes a particular action, thereby almost guaranteeing ROI for your hard work.
There are various different ‘actions’ that you can set up with Facebook Ads but whichever you choose, this is very much worth looking into as a way to accelerate traffic to your website. A good example of a CPA scheme is to pay only when someone likes your Facebook page. This is valuable to you because it means you’ll subsequently be able to contact those followers by posting content to your Facebook. You can also set up videos and get charged for people watching them – keep that in mind when reading the forthcoming chapter on using video to get traffic.
An added bonus of Facebook Ads is that they can be very finely targeted at the specific audience you want to advertise to. This allows you to target your specific niche and thereby helps you to avoid wasting your money by advertising to people who aren’t likely to click on any ads.
On Facebook, you can target people by their location, their age, their gender, their marital status and even their hobbies and interest. If you have a business selling baking equipment then, you can target only those people who have ‘baking’ listed as one of their hobbies.
This brings us to an important point: targeting your traffic. There’s actually no point in having tons of traffic on your website if that traffic isn’t at all targeted. This is especially true in some circumstances too – if you run a local business for instance in which case you only really want to advertise to people who live locally. What’s the point in wasting your advertising budget on people in Germany if you run a hair salon in the US?
How to Create Great Facebook Ads
If you wanted to make money from Facebook Ads, then the best strategy would be to set up a landing page to sell your main product or affiliate product from and then to create adverts that would direct visitors to that page. Your Facebook ads would then be very upfront and even include the price, so that people would only click (and cost you) if they were definitely interested in potentially paying for a product like yours.
But if your priority is traffic, then you’re playing the longer game. In this case, the best type of advert would be a CPA ad to get likes to your Facebook page and from there you could then do some ‘promoted posts’ (which get seen by a greater number of your followers).
Remember though: people won’t just like an advert for a hair shampoo company. Your best chances of getting them involved is to speak to them on a more abstract level and to get them excited for what you’re doing. People will regularly ‘like’ pages on Facebook that are about the gym or about travel because they are interested in the lifestyle and they want to communicate that aspect of themselves.
So instead of advertising your product or brand, advertise the lifestyle that you represent and then target people who are likely to want to be associated with that lifestyle. Try not to be a company so much as a movement and that way you can get people actually excited for what you’re doing.
Top Tip: Don’t forget to log into your ad manager to see how your ads are performing. This way you can try making small tweaks to them in order to see what increases their success rates and what doesn’t.
» Thanks for reading: How to Get Traffic from Facebook Ads -Traffic Flow
