Creating effective Facebook Ads is more of an art than a science. A small business should experiment with several different types of ads and target audiences in combination with the attractive images and clear calls to action.

1. Think concise, clear and attractive
1. Create three or four ads that have a clear call to action or tagline and an attractive relevant image.
1. Maximum image sizes for a FB ad are 110px wide x 80px tall
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2. Look at other FB ads for ideas
1. Consider Facebook ads that are not from your same industry. Good ideas often come from thinking outside of our own industry’s box.
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3. Use Facebook’s “Precise Interest Targeting”
1. Precise interst targeting allows you to focus your ad on keywords and phrases that you believe will naturally connect people to your services or products.
2. The wonderful thing about precise interest targeting is that you can only choose keywords and phrases that exist on people’s facebook profiles. And, Facebook will let you know the estimated reach of the keywords you plan to use
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4. Choose the most relevant landing page for your ad
1. You may want to point people to your website, but pointing them to a particular facebook page will allow you to track the ads performance using Facebook’s integrated analytics.
1. If you want them to sign up for your newsletter point them to your Facebook page that has a newsletter sign up app installed
2. Pointing them to a coupon page highlighted in your ad is also a good way to encourage ‘likes.’
5. Select a manageable budget
1. Using pay per click vs. pay per impression is the most useful choice for a small business since your goal is to bring people to your page.
2. Choose a daily budget that doesn’t break the bank and allows you to make adjustments for an ad that doesn’t perform well.
3. To save money, run your ad every other week instead of continuously
6. Evaluate your ads performance
1. Let the ad run for a week to get a full view of the ads performance since viewing rates vary from day to day. You may find that the weekend is the best time for your ad to run.
2. If your clicks vs. connections numbers are vastly different, people are visiting your page, but not ‘liking’ it. Use this info as an indication that your ad needs to be changed to more effectively convert clicks to likes.
3. Click through rates of .10% or higher are a good indication that your ads are fairly effective at bringing people to your page. Ads that have a click through rate of .05% or lower should be changed.
7. Benchmark your site with your competitors
1. WildfireApp.com has a wonderful, free, social media monitoring application that allows you to track the growth of your business page in relation to your competitors. http://monitor.wildfireapp.com/
2. Here is a screen shot of Mooers Volvo’s two dealership FB page growth performance benchmarked with local competitors. Click to see the full size image.
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