So if you have a great affiliate product you want to push that you can target at a particular market, two years ago your PPC advertising campaign might have been focussed on Google and/or Yahoo. With Facebook’s penetration into the web community probably at its peak, the use of it’s collection of demographic data means that it is a marketer’s paradise.

I like to compare facebook advertising not to Google, but to the roadside billboard. With Facebook I find the best way to price your campaign is on an CPM impression basis. This is from where I draw the comparison with the roadside billboard. If you want to advertise a product on a roadside billboard, you will pay more for “high traffic” roads and it doesn’t matter if any of those drivers turn into leads, you still pay your fixed cost for your advertising, unlike Google of course where the status quo is to pay for clicks.

The advantages of Facebook over the roadside billboard is that you can decide to only target women over 30 in New York who are single, or Men at University in London who are in a relationship. Facebook will even tell you how many of its users match your requirements. You need to look at your product and decide not which types of people it will interest, but which types of people are most likely to convert. Effective facebook advertising on a CPM basis is about getting the click thru ratio up as high as possible. This will in turn reduce your cost per lead, which is what you want. You don’t want to go wasting your spend on impressions that won’t convert. So if your affiliate product is a high end product designed for men over 18, you may decide that men under 30 aren’t likely to have the disposable income to purchase your product, so don’t go wasting your CPM spend on them. Focus on your target market with the highest possible conversion rate.

Getting an advert on facebook is notoriously tricky, so you need to obey the rules they stipulate, which is no excessive capitalisation or exclamation, and the ads have to be tasteful, with no aggressive call to actions. Once you have your ad up running, duplicate it instantly and then tweak the words or pictures slightly. This is called split testing and what you’re going to do is observe which one produces the higher CTR. I always find that a CTR in the region of 0.02% to 0.05% is realistic, but as the CPM on facebook is fairly cheap the CPC still works out nice and cheap, for now. Keep tweaking your ad and recording which text and call to actions converts the most and you’ll soon see the CTR begin to rise.

If you have used Facebook to advertise I’d be interested to know how you got on and your thoughts.