Facebok Advertising Review

I'm had a lot of business owners who are interested in Facebook Ads (I'll shorten as FB Ads going forward) in advertising their business so today I wanted to do a quick write up to provide some answers to the question of if Facebook Ads is any good.

The answer (as always), is it depends.

Facebook Ads, a brief introduction:

FB Ads is one of the largest and most used online advertising platforms today. To start, you will need a FB account. Once you login, you'll have the options of creating a 'campaign'. A campaign is simply an advertising 'plan' you'll run and manage. Under this 'plan' or campaign, you'll be able to create your ads and select your audiences (who you want to targeted with your ads).

A quick aside:

I won't go through the whole setup tutorial, but here's a few good Facebook Ad tutorials I'd recommend:

https://www.oberlo.ca/blog/the-beginners-guide-to-facebook-advertising
https://neilpatel.com/what-is-facebook-advertising/
https://adespresso.com/guides/facebook-ads-beginner/facebook-manager-campaign-setup/

Oberlo's guide is fairly straight forward and great for beginners, where as I've personally used some of Neil Patel's guides. His guides are very complete and provides a holistic view of everything you need to know to get the job done. Adespresso has a large selection of guides, the the quality is fairly poor and I find their writing seem to ramble on without getting to the point. It seems like they're writing for the sake of putting words out, instead of teaching something. You'll find a lot of guides from them on Google (they're good at SEO), but I'd avoid them if you can.

Back to our review:

Facebook Ad's main competitive advantage isn't their campaign manager (I find it slow and bulky compared to Google Adwords), but rather, their audience selection platform. Facebook dissects their audience into distinct pieces and serves them up on a platter for you.

For example, let's say you sell custom painted mugs and want to use FB Ads to promote your ecommerce store. In FB Ads, you have the option of:

1. Selecting once users in NYC can see your ads
2. Only females can see your ads
3. Only females with an income of 50k+/year can see your ads

Once you select a general 'pool' of potential customers, you may want to look for affinity:

From the above selection, you can further define your audience as:

1. Only users who:
i. are writers
ii. are office workers
iii. are teachers
2. Only users who:
i. are part of writing groups on FB
ii. are part of teacher groups on FB
3. Only users who:
i. have an affinity for coffee
ii. have an affinity for tea
iii. have an affinity for hard liquor (if you think your customers would use a mug for vodka, who knows)

The best part of FB Ads is that while you're defining who can see your ads, FB will also provide you a 'count' of how many actual customers are available under the defined criteria you've provided. Do note that the more defined you get, the smaller your potential pool of customers. Hence for our example, I picked NYC instead of Athens, Ohio.

Overall we give Facebook Ads a 10/10. This isn't to say FB Ads can't get better, I'm sure it will, but in terms of the competition, it's truly incredible what FB offers compared to the competition.

Full disclaimer, in giving FB a 10/10, we do not think it's better than Google Ads. We simply think they're equally good, and Google Ads would likely receive a 10/10 in our books as well.