
This Week I Learned: Facebook Advertising
How useful the platform is, what it can do, and how simple it is
A number of weeks ago, I told one of the clients for my business, Elevate Media, that we were going to run Facebook ads for their company as part of our campaign strategy.
I had never really used Facebook’s ad platform outside of school clubs.
But I promised them that we would do that, so I had to learn it. It took me a bit of time, but I more or less became competent with the platform. Now, I can’t imagine running the business without it.
This week, I’ll tell you about how I learned Facebook Advertising.
The Facebook advertising platform is more or less organized by campaigns, ad sets, and ads.

First, you have to create an ad account. A Facebook page, or profile, can have multiple ad accounts underneath it. Once you have an ad account, you can start advertising.

Campaigns are more or less how they sound. You can set the duration, budget, audience, placement, and other factors like that. Once you start your campaigns, you can track the results and measure how well your ads are doing. You can optimize campaigns for different things. For instance, you can optimize a campaign for brand awareness, which will focus on the quality of your audience and click-through rate (CTR) as opposed to just pure reach.

Ad sets are defined by your audience, placement, budget, and schedule. With the power of Facebook, you can get insanely specific and targeted with your ads. Facebook gather its data from the information its users input and third-party providers, so it’s incredibly powerful. With a Facebook ad, I can target 18–24 year old male living within 10 miles of Atlanta, GA who was recently married and works as a software engineer at AT&T making between $100,000 and $124,999 per year — don’t even get me started on interests. After audience, you can determine where you want your ad placed, based on what devices and platforms you want, how much money you want to spend, and what time of day and day of the week you want your ads running.

Ads are created directly within Facebook’s ad platform. You can select various kinds of ads, from video to single image to carousel. After that, you can customize the ad with different headlines, descriptions, images, videos, and links. Once you make the ad, confirm the purchase and you’re good to go.
After I learned the basics, I used the ad platform to start running demographic tests for different ads for my client to see what content would work the best for different audiences. Once we learned that, we used that information to help shape our eventual campaign, which we’ll launch in a couple of weeks!
One of the things that I was surprised by was how simple the platform was to use.
Granted, there are a lot of options for customization and more advanced users, like split-testing to test the effects of different ad sets, but the bulk of the platform is pretty user-friendly. One thing that was a little annoying was how I couldn’t analyze how many views and clicks on an ad was getting by the hour, which would have been nice to know so I could time my ads better. But other than that, it’s a fantastic platform.
In the future, I might not even just use Facebook ads for my business. I might start using it for my clubs, personal projects, and other things. It’s just so cheap, yet effective. The average cost per click (CPC) for a basic ad can range anywhere from $0.08 to $0.23. And with just a few dollars, you can reach thousands of people in a relatively short period of time.
That’s it for today. If you ever have any suggestions for what I should write about, just comment below and I’ll check it out.
Look out for the next article in a week!
-Indra
-Atlanta, 2017
This article is a part of a weekly series called This Week I Learned, a publication dedicated to a collection of skills, tools, news, and realizations that I pick up every week.

