So you're looking at running Facebook ads?

When managed well, Facebook Ads can provide a source of recurring revenue for any business, large or small. If you're not already convinced by the idea of running Facebook Ads though, the idea of paying for people's attention can seem somewhat daunting at first.

Not sure if you should dip your toes into the world of Facebook advertising? Let's look at 7 reasons for trying out Facebook Ads.

1: It's more than just Facebook

The name is misleading; Facebook Ads isn't just about advertising on Facebook. In reality Facebook Ads lets you do so much more:

• As Facebook owns Instagram, you can advertise on both simultaneously. This is as simple as clicking a button to ensure that your ads serve across both networks.
• You can show ads on 3rd party apps. This is a part of what Facebook calls the audience network, a large group of 3rd party apps which Facebook is allowed to show ads on.

2: Your target audience is on Facebook

Facebook currently has around 2.5 billion users on its platforms, and its numbers show little sign of slowing down.

With so many people on Facebook, especially in developed markets like the US and Europe, chances are that your target customers are going to be active on Facebook or Instagram.

This isn't just important for finding potential new customers; it also means that it's an efficient way of connecting with existing customers, which leads to reason 3:

3: Facebook is highly effective for retargeting

Retargeting is the practice of showing ads to people who've already interacted with your brand in some form. This could be showing ads to people who've clicked onto your site, or who added items to their basket without checking out.

This latter case is an example of someone who is very likely to come back and complete a purchase, which means that they are a good target audience for advertising. Facebook is able to track all the steps that users take on your site and lets you create audience of people who, for example, have added items to their basket and then left.

4: Facebook knows your customers better than you

Gone are the days of manually figuring out who you're going to target. Facebook's targeting algorithms are advanced enough that they can do all the legwork of figuring out who to show your ads to.

One example of this in action is what's called lookalike targeting. You provide Facebook with some of your user data, for example names or emails of your current customers, and Facebook will target users who most closely resemble those users.

Lookalike targeting is quick to set up, meaning that you don't have to spend unnecessary amounts of time building your advertising campaigns.

5: Everything is measurable

When I say that everything is measurable, I mean two things by this:

Firstly, you can measure every interaction that users have as a result of your ads. This includes not just whether they click or comment on your ads, but also includes all the actions they take on your site as a result. You can see if they're adding items to their basket and purchasing, or if they're just browsing through your services. Knowing what users are doing once they've clicked on your ads gives you the ability to optimise towards the users that you want.

Secondly, Facebook is measurable in the sense that you can easily see what effect it's having on your bottom line. You can measure purchase revenue/leads etc. from people that have seen or clicked your ads.

Running other ads and worried that Facebook is cannibalising their results? Facebook is currently rolling out a suite of options for lift tests, which let you see the incremental impact that Facebook is having on top of other advertising activity.

6: You don't have to spend anything more than you're prepared to

Worried that you'll be wasting money on ads? Facebook has a variety of different bidding strategies to ensure that you don't pay more than you want for results.

These are:

• Bid cap bidding
  for if you want to manually control the maximum bids you submit.
• Target cost bidding
  for when you want to pay a certain amount (on average) to bring in each customer.
• Cost cap bidding
  for when you want to limit the maximum amount that you'll pay, on average, per customer.

7: The whole process is highly automated

The amount of manual effort involved in running Facebook ads nowadays is minimal. After you've built your initial campaigns, the only times you'll need to change things in the Facebook ads platform will be if you're looking to change your spend, or launch new ads.

The campaigns that you set up are so highly optimised by Facebook's delivery algorithms, that you won't have to do any of the leg work.

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