The setup for this month's article requires that I divulge a little bit of personal information. Those of you that actually know me, or that have seen my Facebook page probably already know this.
I am the frontman for a noisy, garage rock revival band with a monster movie theme.
There, I said it. It's not that having a band is anything unusual, it's just that I have always made an effort to keep my evil rock'n'roll world and my evil interactive advertising world as separate as possible - for fear of creating some greater evilness that I could not control.
Yet these two worlds came crashing together last week in a way that I never expected when I decided to create a social media ad to promote my band and widen our fan base in the Facebook universe. So in this article I'm going to walk though the steps of creating an ad, and share with you some of the results of my week-long campaign.
Building a display ad through Facebook's ad builder to promote a page or an event proved to be an impressively simple process which Facebook has broken down into 3 steps; Design Your Ad, Targeting, and Campaigns and Pricing. The UI for this process is clear, clean, and smartly executed Ajax - classic Facebook style. Almost everything is done with fields and drop downs, and there is a preview of your ad that updates in real time so that you can see what your audience will see.
I titled my Ad "This is the Hydes". Did I mention that my band is called the Hydes? This title appears at the top of your ad in the medium Facebook blue-grey. There are no options for font color or style, which keeps the all the ads in the general Facebook footprint. On top of that, there are restrictions on how many capitals and odd characters can appear in your ad - keeping all the copy consistent with FacebookÕs own content guidelines.
I put together an image in photoshop of a spiral hypno-wheel projected over our band at one of our last shows, put our logo on top and added a call to action, "listen now!" Intriguing, direct, and demanding - check.
From a simple pulldown menu, I chose to point the banner to my band's page. At that, my display ad design was complete.
Now, on to targeting.
Facebook lets you get pretty specific with narrowing your ad to your target audience. You can filter Facebook's more than 175 million active users by not only demographic information, but also keywords from their profiles, where they work, their sexual preference, and the languages they speak.
For now, I'm only interested in the marketing in the U.S. to 18+ males and females. Any educational background, sexual preferences, job, or language is fine with me, so I'm going to leave those fields blank. Filling in the keywords was a really nice experience. Facebook auto fills an Ajax pulldown as you type with suggested matches - even if they are somewhat obscure or specific.
When I started to set up pricing I was reminded of the movie Office Space when Michael Bolton's misplaced decimal point accidentally robbed Initech of hundreds of thousands of dollars. My darkest fear was that my ad would be wildly successful and I would owe Facebook a billion billion dollars.
My mind was put at ease a bit by a couple of Facebooks options. You can set a schedule for how long you want your campaign to run and set a daily spending cap for the camping. You are allowed to either choose to pay for impressions (CPM,) or clicks (CPC,) and then you must bid on how much you are willing to pay for either, in a behind- the-scenes automated auction. Facebook offers a suggested price based on what ads are going for with similar reach.
I chose to pay for clicks with a maximum bid of $0.48 per click, gave Facebook a daily budget of $20 and scheduled the ad to run for seven days. All I needed to do then was give them my credit card info and my ad was live.
In the seven days that the ad ran, I doubled the modest fan base for my band. I maximized the daily budget for clicks every day, so on $20 a day I got 796,113 impressions and 255 clicks to my bands page. My click through rate was 0.03%, which is low, but my cost per click was only $0.40. I was able to expand my fan base, but also importantly, I was able to learn more about the types of people that like our music. I've met some pretty interesting new people through this process, and have gotten some good feedback on my music.
Facebook's ad builder is a quick and easy way to reach audiences within the vast Facebook community. The ad builder forces advertisers to "play nice" with design, and keeps users from being distracted and annoyed by them. The result is a nice balance. Ads can by finely targeted, they are straightforward and well integrated into the surrounding content, and users seem very willing to interact with them.
