Few websites get as many visitors or have had as big an impact on our society as Facebook. The giant network currently has more than 600 million registered users (if it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world), and currently gets 21% of all pages viewed on the entire Internet.
Given Facebook’s size and reach, Facebook ads are a great way to reach a targeted audience in a place where they spend a lot of time.
Second only to Google under Alexa’s Top 500 Global Sites Ranking, Facebook can be an integral part of your marketing mix. Facebook ads are easy to create and have great response rates as they allow demographic targeting better than most any other platform.
Since most users input a lot of personal information about themselves, Facebook ads allow marketers to pick out exactly who they want the ads to be shown to. The target audience’s gender, location, age, and even interests can be selected.
For example, you could limit your ad to female users between the ages of 18 and 21 living in Berlin, Paris, and New York, who have listed fashion as one of their interests. And those are just the basic targeting options. You could also exclusively target people on their birthdays or ones who are engaged, speak Dutch, work for Chase Bank, and studied business management at Harvard. And believe it or not, you can get even more specific if you want. You could actually target a single individual, if you had enough information about them (which is possible). Many of these targeting options are definitely unique to Facebook.
The pricing for Facebook ads is flexible. First you select whether you want to pay for one thousand impressions (CPM) or pay for each click (CPC). Then you make an offer of how much you will pay. If you choose to pay for 1000 impressions you can register a lower bid than if you pay only for clicks.
Therefore, CPM can be the better option if you feel that you will get a high rate of response to your ad, because you were able to target the demographic pretty well. If you are advertising for a product or service that is less likely suited for everyone, then pay just for the users who click on the ad linked to your site.
Facebook advertising is a great way for marketers who want to reach a targeted audience in the place where they spend a lot of their online time. By choosing the demographics — helpfully supplied by the users — marketers can reach only those people who fit their ideal customer profile, without wasting impressions or money on people who don’t fit.
