Facebook Advertising Tips

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:08:00 -0400

Wondering if you should advertise on Facebook? Here are a few reasons why you should:

Niche targeting. Compared to other, more traditional advertising mediums- print, TV, radio- you can structure your campaign to target a more niche audience. For each ad you create, you can choose keywords to target certain interests in the Facebook user’s profile.

Say you want to advertise a sports water bottle (yes, it’s the first thing I saw on my desk). Enter keywords like playing sports, playing soccer, playing basketball, etc. you can also tap into angles like running, jogging, walking.
Budgets are easily manageable. You can choose pay per click or pay per impressions. Set a daily budget and Facebook will invoice you “once per Facebook billable day,” which is generally daily but not always. You can also change your budget at any time.

*Word of advice: Don’t set your daily budget as the maximum of your credit card's daily limit. Because Facebook doesn’t always bill daily, you might have a couple days’ of charges to pay for.
Campaign management made simple. As with the budget capabilities, managing Facebook campaigns is fairly easy, sometimes too easy! You can edit, pause, or ad new ads and keywords at any time. However, because this is so easy to do, be careful not to over-edit. Give some time for your ads to accrue impressions and clicks to see what is working at what is not.
Reporting. Run reports to see how your campaign is performing at the account, campaign, or ad level. Filter by impressions, overall performance, or responder demographics. This last filter is quite interesting. You can see which keywords triggered clicks, how old responders are, where they are from, and the percentage of impressions each state (if targeting U.S.) received.

There you go, Facebook advertising in a nutshell. If you need any help setting up or monitoring your account, contact Adam Howitt Consulting, Inc.. We offer campaign management as one of our services.

Protect Your Children Online for Free

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:07:00 -0400

In just a minute you can set-up an alert to keep a watch on your family's internet exposure with Google Alerts.

I heard about some changes on the radar for Facebook or maybe MySpace yesterday to protect children online by requiring their parents to register and it reminded me that I was going to post a tip about Google Alerts.

When the name of one of your family members or your business appears on a blog, in the news, in a video or even in a newsgroup, you can get a daily summary of those listings. I use it for my business and my running site to make sure I know what people are saying, if anything at all. In most cases it is a blog somewhere and I leave a comment thanking them for the feedback or offering an answer to a question or a problem they encountered using my site.

You could easily use the same approach to monitor your children's names to protect their online identity. If you see something they have done or someone else has posted about them that you think could be a problem, you can take action early before it gets to be a bigger problem.

How it works:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/alerts
2. You will need a Google account to set this up so it may prompt you to create one at this point
3. For search terms put the search term you want to track in quotes e.g. "adam howitt"
4. For type, select "comprehensive" to make sure you get a broader insight across video, blogs etc. If you only care about blogs you can just select that
5. Set "how often" to daily for a daily email
6. Enter your email

Easy huh? The only challenge may be a common name or that you have the same name as someone else with a lot of activity on the internet. You can minimize mistaken identities by adding extra qualifiers to your search e.g. "adam howitt" Chicago
Here I'm trying to broader mentions of my name by picking out those that mention the city where I live. You can create as many of these as you need so in addition to geographical tips like "Chicago" I can use keywords related to the type of work I do or the activities I'm involved in.

Adam Howitt Consulting Blog - Online Marketing

Facebook Advertising Tips

Protect Your Children Online for Free