A lot of clients have been asking recently how they can take advantage of Facebook’s Pay Per Click services so I thought I’d explain the key differences between setting up a PPC advertising campaign in Google and in Facebook.

The first step in Facebook is to come up with a creative for your ad and decide on which landing page on a client’s site you’re going to send it to, so far so Google. However, although the first line of your advert is 25 characters long (as in Google) the description is a whopping great 135 characters long, almost double the length of Google. This means you can say all the things you wanted to say in Google (but couldn’t!) about your product or service. Due to the way you choose your keywords in Facebook, which I’ll come to in a minute, you don’t need to stuff your advert repeatedly with your keywords and can instead concentrate on writing something which makes sense and will encourage the viewer to click. You also can add a small photo with your advert. This is optional but I would recommend it as Facebook is a much more visual experience than a traditional search engine.

The next step is targeting your advert to the audience, of which choosing keywords is only one part. Facebook doesn’t have a keyword tool like Google to show how many searches a keyword receives a month. Instead you type in the keywords you require and Facebook will recommend keywords that are available. You can only choose keywords that Facebook members use in their profiles, which means that the selection is rather limited. For example I recently set up a facebook campaign for trekking holidays to Everest, for which I anticipated Google would find 50 or more keywords that I could advertise on. However in facebook I only managed 14 keywords, including Nepal Everest base camp trek (good), hiking mountains (okay) and adventure (a bit too generic).

On the flip side, demographic targeting on Facebook is much more advanced than in Google allowing you to target users not only by location and language but also by age, gender, education, workplace, relationship status and relationship interests. So if you know who your ideal customer is, you can choose to show your ad only to those viewers who are likely to be interested in your product. Something interesting to watch out for is the counter that Facebook gives you to show how many of its members you are targeting with your ad. This number rises and falls as you select and remove different demographics.

As with Google the final stage is to set your campaign’s daily budget and choose whether you want to pay per impressions or the more traditional Pay Per Click. I’d recommend sticking with the traditional Pay Per Click advertising model, as Facebook is renowned for having high impressions and low clicks.

Check through your campaign, turn it on and hey presto, your ad can be seen by 1,000’s of relevant potential clients (hopefully)…Good luck.