david j. garcia

If you’re not already advertising your product, service, business or self on Facebook, now is the time to consider starting. Thanks to advanced targeting mechanisms, you can reach your exact target market. And with more than 200 million active users (half of whom check it daily), Facebook is not just the land of college kids anymore. You really can reach almost anyone.

Here’s the step-by-step guide:

1) Pick your product/service. Since I’m currently looking for work, I’m going to experiment with advertising myself on Facebook.

2) Choose or create your landing page. This can be any existing page on your website (or a new, target landing page, a Facebook fan page, etc) but it must be a webpage, not a file (you can’t link directly to a PDF).

3) Go to facebook.com/ads/. Click “Create an Ad.”

4) Write your ad; upload a picture. This is what the Facebook user will see beside their profile. Don’t be afraid to get creative. Facebook makes it easy to try and test lots of options against each other. We’ll get to that in a minute.

4) Pick your target. This is where the magic happens. As you can see, I’ve chosen to target men and women over 30, who have graduated from college, live in regions where I’d like to work, and have a job title that oversees communications specialists.

Facebook tells me that there are only 80 people whose profiles match those qualifications, but that’s okay, because those are the exact 80 people I want to reach.

5) Choose your budget. Here, I’ve decided that I’m willing to spend up to $2.00/day to get my ad in front of these 80 people. That daily budget is shared by all the ads in this campaign. Since I’m only running it through the month of June, the most I’ll end up spending is $16.00.  In reality, I’ll likely spend less, since I’m targeting such a small audience.

Choosing between “Pay for Impressions (CPM)” and “Pay for Clicks (CPC)” is a little harder.

CPC means you only pay when someone actually clicks your ad. This is a nice way to think about things: after all, aren’t you willing to pay 50 cents to get your resume seen by a hiring manager in your industry and target location? I know I am. Because this ad will only be shown to your ideal customer, each click is worth the money. Again, if no one clicks, you pay nothing.

The other option is CPM: how much you’re willing to pay for 1,000 impressions–not how many times it’s read, but how many times a page loads that has your ad on it. Since I’ve discovered that it takes significantly fewer than 2,000 impressions to get a click on my ad, I’ve chosen to bid on impressions instead of clicks.

6) Review and order. You’ll need to have a credit card handy.

7) Split test. Repeat the process to add some additional ads to your campaign. As long as they’re all part of the same campaign, it won’t cost you anything more. This lets you try a different headline, copy, target, photo or bid. Experiment! Then you can stay with the ads that give you the most bang for your buck. Try using your existing ad as a template: click “Create a Similar Ad.”

8) Track at facebook.com/ads/manage/. Find out what works and what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly.

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