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| Types of Facebook Ads |
There are a number of ad subtypes you can choose from.
You can create ads that direct to your Facebook page, or to a site not on Facebook. You can create ads to promote a Facebook event, complete with an RSVP link. You can create ads for mobile app installs and app engagement.
Users Can Hide Your Ad
Facebook used to offer the option to "Like" any advertisement on Facebook. Not anymore. People can "Like" an advertisement (if it’s that type) or hide the ad. Upon closing an ad, Facebook asks the user to specify why they didn’t like it.
It’s valuable information, providing insight into why your ads might not be doing very well.
Powerful Targeting Options
As already mentioned, Facebook has some of the most powerful targeting tools of any online advertising program.
You can target by virtually anything on a user’s profile. You might start with the location, if that’s important. You can specify either city, zip code, county, or state. This works particularly well for local businesses. From there, you can choose basic demographics, including relationship status, age, workplace, education (including major and years of attendance), birthday, and much more.
You can target ads to people who have recently moved. So, if you own a gym in Scottsdale and want to find all the individuals who recently moved to the area, you can target your ads and ad copy to those individuals.
You also can target people based on their interests. Say, for example, you have a product that’s targeted at baseball fans. You could enter baseball in the Interests field.
Or, maybe you’ve written a book and you’re sure that people who like another certain book will like yours. Enter the book’s title under Interests, and you’ll specifically target those users.
You even can target a private list of users. If you have a list of email addresses of people that you want to target, you can use Facebook’s ads manager to target just those people. So, if you run a SaaS business and have 200 people on your "prospect list," you can use their email addresses to target them with ads in Facebook.
Customize Your Ads
The other big advantage to tightly-targeted ads is that you can create different ads for different demographic groups. Better-targeted ads are going to garner better results.
If you’re targeting baseball fans, you might create individual ads for different popular teams. You could have one ad specifically aimed at Red Sox fans, one at Yankees fans, and another at Cubs fans, and then have those ads shown only to people who have indicated in their Interests that they are fans of those teams.
Or, let’s say you’ve targeted people based on their love of a particular book. You could mention that book in the ad itself to make it more likely to catch their attention. Create different ads for different books, and then target accordingly.
