Facebook advertising can be a very effective way to target a specific market, you can drill down so much more than any other form of paid advertising and it can work out fairly inexpensive too, simply because you are only targetting those people likely to be interested. For example if you are a retailer selling wedding dresses, then you may want to target women who are engaged that live in a certain geographical area. Or if you are a driving school, again you can target people within a certain age group in the area that you operate.

Facebook allows you to advertise using both images and words, allowing you to engage with your target audience in different ways. Here are some tips to help you get started.

1. Do your research first, find out who your target market really are.

2. Ensure your advert is simple and effective, I would always suggest using a marketing professional to put this together for you, this can be critical in the success of your campaign.

3. Set a realistic budget, Facebook advertising doesn’t have to cost the earth but you need have have enough impressions (number of times the ad displays) to get any real data and so make sure your budget allows this.

4. Make sure you send people to the right place, when people click on your advert they need to be taken through to a page on your website that is relevant to your advert, people won’t stick around.

5. Measure, improve and measure again. Facebook allows you to see the data behind the campaign which can help you tweak your campaign to make sure it is as successful as it can be.

One of the things you need to be aware of is that Facebook has a much lower click through rate than something like Adwords so you need to be prepared that your advert will need to be displayed a lot more to get those all important clicks. You have two different options in terms of the way you run the campaign, you can pay per click or you can pay per impressions, the one you choose will be dependent on your overall aims for the advertising in the first place. Are you looking to increase brand awareness or are you expecting sales leads?

If you have any questions or require any clarifications about how Facebook advertising can help you then please don’t hesitate to get in touch by leaving a comment below or giving us a call on 01279 647003.

We spend a lot of time talking about keywords and how important they are, but with a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign it is equally important to spend time and effort looking at negative keywords.  This can help you to target only those people that are really interested in your products and services and help you avoid paying for clicks you don’t need to and a low click through rate because your ad’s are displaying when they shouldn’t be.

This technique basically details which phrases you do not want your advert to appear for, so for example if you are sell used cars but don’t sell vans, then you may use the words van and vans as negative keywords so that people looking for vans don’t click onyour advert and cost you money.  The benefits of using negative keywords are:

• Reduce unwanted clicks
• Improve your Click Through Rate
• Improve your bounce rate
• Improve your conversion rate
• Help your budget to go further and attract more targeted visitors to your website

First of all you need to work out what your negative keywords will be, one way of doing this is by referring back to your keywords research and seeking out non relvant phrases that have a high volume of searches, one of the most commonly used negative keywords is ‘jobs’.  Once you understand what they are you can add them to your PPC campaign to make sure that you do not appear when these words are typed into the search engines.

Make sure you monitor your campaigns consistently so that you can pick up any additional negative keywords that have slipped through the net. It can be more difficult to incorporate if you have double meaning to a word or phrase, for example car service could mean a car garage or repair centre or it could be someone looking for a taxi firm, airport pickup.  So you will need to decide based on visitor behaviour from these kinds of keyphrases whether they are worth keeping in your PPC campaign of whether you should rely on organic traffic.

A long tailed keyword is basically a more descriptive version of a keyword, so instead of searching for ‘jacket’ you might search for ‘black leather jacket UK’.  On an individual basis they do not account for a particularly large number of searches but they are far more likely to result in sales.  In terms of converting traffic into customers, this is the second most valuable kind of search term as people are very late on in the buying stage, they know exactly what they want and are far more likely to buy.

In terms of a marketing campaign they can form a really effective part of your strategy, there tends to be less competition in the search engines for these kinds of phrases and so it requires less work to achieve higher rankings.  So it may be worth generating 50 targetted people to come to your website rather than 150 people who don’t really know what they want.

It can also help you to achieve high search engine rankings for the shorter keywords too, in fact one of the best ways to get these meaty keywords is to target long tailed keyphrases that include the words that you are really after.  It kind of has a knock on effect to your current efforts.

Research has shown that using long-tailed keywords can increase your conversion rate by around 200% compared to short keywords and so this gives a great opportunity for a business.  In fact as a smaller business in a highly competitive market, it gives you a way to be able to compete and gain results as often trying to compete with a national chain can be cost prohibitive.

So when you are working out a strategy for SEO or PPC, think about striking the right balance between the volume of searches, how competitive those searches are and the likely conversion rates.  By looking at these different elements you can create a campagin specifically targetted to your budget, overall objectives and specific product range.

Your prospects are spending more of their time online and so how to you reach them now that traditional methods of advertising are becoming less and less effective.  Well WSI Local Adworks is PPC platform that is aimed at local businesses like yours, looking to do exactly that.

There are a number of differences between running say an Adwords campaign and a WSI Local Adworks campaign, the first difference is the reach that Adworks gives.  The platform allows us to advertise across all of the different search engines with the same campaign, this allows us to tightly control and monitor your overall PPC efforts to ensure that we can firstly optimise your campaign to get the best click costs, but secondly and most important it allows us to hone the campaign to those variables that are getting you the best conversions.

There are lots of companies out there cold calling businesses at the moment offering packages for £100 per month to manage PPC for them. What people don’t realise is that in the majority of cases they bid against keyphrases that have low volume search traffic. This means that your budget doesn’t get used up each month and the company managing this for you pocket the difference. They will also often tie you into long term contracts that are then very difficult to get out of. I have come across cases where the management company is earning up to £80 per month whilst only £20 is actually being spent on PPC. Make sure you understand where your money is going and ask for access to your reporting so you can keep an eye on how it is going.