Paying for ads will bring a steady stream of visitors to your sites in a short space of time, but you need to carefully monitor what you are spending to make sure it doesn’t spiral out of control. Here are just a few common terms that you should familiarize yourself with:

Cost-per-click or CPC: As you would expect, this is the amount that you pay every time a person actually clicks on your ad. You can usually set your maximum CPC when you are bidding in ad placements.

Click through rate or CTR: This measures how many people who have seen your ad click through to your site.

Pay per click or PPC: This is the name for the type of advertising where you pay each time you get a click.

Pay per action or acquisition, also known as PPA: This where you pay for someone to complete an action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to an email list.

PPM stands for Pay per thousand impressions: The M originates from the Roman numeral, M, which means a thousand.

Pay per click or PPC: This is the name for the type of advertising where you pay each time you get a click.

Pay per action or acquisition, also known as PPA: This where you pay for someone to complete an action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to an email list.

PPM stands for Pay per thousand impressions: The M originates from the Roman numeral, M, which means a thousand.

Although there are many different platforms that you pay for ads on, today am going to concentrate on Facebook as it is one of the most popular and you can advertise all of our startup website there.

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Facebook Ads

Firstly let’s talk about how to set up an effective ad on Facebook. Before you create your first campaign, you need to do some research about your target audience. Ask yourself, what does your audience like? Where do they spend their time?

There are three different ways to target people using Facebook ads:

Interest-based audiences, lookalike audiences, and custom audiences. For the purpose of setting up your first ad, I will concentrate interest-based audiences as they are the easiest to use.

This type of targeting displays ads to people based on the people, places , nd subjects that they like, and the first step is to fully understand your audience. Who are the authority figures and big brands in your niche? What books or magazines does your ideal customer read? What events do they attend? Which websites do they visit? What software do they use?

Take your time to come up with the best answers to all of these questions. You can search on Google or use Facebook insights to help you with your research, and also websites like Quora.com can be useful as you can easily get answers from people in any given niche. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t allow you to target people who like any page that you want, so you need to make a list of different ones to choose from.

Let’s take HIIT Training as an example for our niche. This is high-intensity interval training and it’s very popular right now. A search on Google for “famous HIIT trainers” returns a result that lists twelve celebrity fitness trainers, so I’ll add all of these to the list. Then I’ll search for HIIT magazine and find a list of magazines to add to the list. I’ll repeat this process to come up with items to add to the list which answer all of the questions which I and trying to answer. Also, try using Amazon to find the most popular books related to your niche that people may have liked. You can also try targeting people who have liked the authors of popular books.

The next thing you need to decide is which geographic location you want to target. Is your product something which can be used by people the world over, or will it only be useful to people in a certain country or even city?

Finally ask yourself, what is completely unique about this group? This may take a little more creativity and might take longer to answer but if you can pinpoint a unique interest that you can use to target people of Facebook, your ads will be more successful. Now it’s time to create your campaign. When setting up your ad, you have 3 options to choose from… Boost your post, ads manager and power editor. Boost your post is the easiest way to create an ad, but it has the fewest options in terms of targeting so you should probably avoid it. Power editor is the most advanced way to create an ad but it is often too complex for first-time advertisers, so for now, I will use ads manager.

Firstly you have to choose an objective for your campaign. Choose the most relevant objective from the list. If you want to get traffic to your sites for the cheapest cost, select traffic.

If you want to track sales or email sign-ups you need to choose conversions, although this will require that you add some code to your sites and thank-you pages. For this example, I will select conversions. So now I need to name my campaign and click continue. Now you need to select your conversion event and to begin with I suggest that you choose ‘view content’ as the event. You can always edit this later when you see how well your campaign is doing.

The next step is the most important step because this is where you get to define your audience, budget, and bidding. First, you need to choose which geographical area you want to advertise to. Also, you need to pick the age range and language. To start with its a good idea not to be too specific about age or gender unless your product is only aimed at a certain group.

Try to aim to get an audience size of roughly 250,000 because this should provide the best results as it is neither too small nor too large. You can also refine your ad targeting by clicking “narrow audience” and adding more interest there. One of the main mistakes that people make is leaving automatic placements selected by default. This allows Facebook to run ads on every single placement that it can, however it is best to exclude the Facebook Audience Network and possibly Instagram depending on your product. Messenger placement is a very specialized feature which is only suitable for engagement or retargeting users. For this reason, if you are new to Facebook advertising, I don’t recommend using it. The best settings to start with are to show your ads on desktop and mobile news feeds.

Next, you have to define how much you want to spend on your ad and decide whether you want it to run continuously or to a schedule. Facebook ads have become more expensive and gone are the days when a $10 budget could produce good results. These days you need to invest a bit more at the start of your ad campaigns so that you can experiment with different audiences and find out what is working. You can also use various bidding techniques, but I find that it works best to choose to optimize for conversions and automatic bidding. The final step is creating your ad.

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There are two ways that you can do this: from scratch; or duplicating a post that you have already created and used. When creating a new ad you can choose from 5 different formats. To start with I suggest that you use a single image ad and create a few variations using different images. This way you can get a good idea about what is working. A carousel ad allows you to use five different images in one ad and is useful if you want to show that you have a variety of different products on offer. Facebook recommends that your images are 1200 by 628 pixels and they also have a 20% text rule. This means that only 20% of your image should contain any text, and you can’t use an image that completely consists of words. You can select your own images or use one of the free stock photos that they provide.

One free tool that I recommend for creating images for your ad is Canva.com Also, if you want something extra special for your ad, you could ask a freelancer to create it for you on a site like Fiverr.com.

Now it is a case of creating your ad headline and text.

One of the best ways to do this is to look at what your competitors are doing and modify it for your own needs.

Your competitors will have already gone through the process of trying to find out what works and what doesn’t, so this can save you a lot of time and money.

As on your sites, try to include a call to action and encourage people to click on your ad. Facebook ads are a really powerful way to target your audience, but mastering how to use them will take time.

So take time to learn as much as you can and set daily limits on what you are spending if you want to make sure that you aren’t spending a fortune and not getting any return from it.