Social Ads on Facebook

Want to get easy exposure to younger alums? Then you would be crazy not to take advantage of social ads on Facebook.  We've been experimenting with this at Dartmouth and found it to be an extremely cheap and easy way of reaching our audience during a giving challenge this past month.  Definitely do pay-per-click because you'll only get about 0.3% click through....but these will be some of the most well-qualified leads you get and we've found them much more open to making a gift than our average visiter.

So to start, just go to the bottom of any facebook page and click "advertisers" and you'll come up here: 

I highly recommend making a separate account for your ads that is different than your personal account.

Click get started and you come to your first screen:

Now, if you don't want to built a separate landing page for this ad, I recommend using integrating this with Google Analytics and using their URL builder to make sure you can track your results.  Alternatively, you can just create a Facebook page.  If you're just making slight modifications to a current ad, you can select to create an ad that is similar to one you've already run, which makes it easy to test what headlines/pictures work best.  Moving on...



Now you can really target your audience.  This is particularly great for colleges because it makes it very easy to target your alums.  You can go further by targeting specific geographic areas or age ranges, etc...

The hardest part is creating the actual ad because Facebook doesn't give you many options.  You get a 25 character subject line, a really small picture, and about 130 characters for the body of the ad.  Make sure you use a striking picture to get the most play.  Facebook does help  you out by giving you an automatic preview of the ad though.




The last part is bidding for your ad, setting a max budget and entering your credit card info.  Your ad will automatically start running within a few hours.  Facebooks allows you full control over how long your ad runs and gets you a limited amount of information regarding how many impressions and clicks you've had, which is why its beneficial to further integrate it with Google Analytics.  Overall, we've spent about $70, which has driven 200 people to our challenge website - a bargain at $0.35/person.