Facebook Advertising

Example of a Facebook Flyer ad

While there are many ways you can advertise on Facebook lets look at the basics. Creating the initial advert is simple. Takes less than five minutes. Enter a 25 character headline, 135 characters of copy and a small picture 110px X 80px. One note on pictures, to keep your advert fresh make sure to alternate pictures or change photos through the campaign. This will keep your advert fresh and keep drawing the attention of Facebook users. To make you ad more effective you can add Social Actions. Social Actions are stories about a user’s friends that are related to and displayed alongside your advertisement. You can select which Pages or Applications provide relevant Social Actions that can be paired with your ad. So if Jane listed as a person who is attending the event Avenue Q, when Jane’s friends see the advert they will also see a small box telling them that Jane is going. This ads that personal touch to your advertising.

Targeting the Ad

The next step is targeting the advert. You can target the advert is nearly anyway imaginable. Sex, Age, Geographic location, college students at specific universities, alumni at specific universities, single, married as well as targeting specific profile characteristics. For example you can target people who are fans of Broadway or a fan of a similar product. You can even use this as a programming tool without placing an advert. Say you are looking to book a specific concert at one of your venues, you can find out how many fans an artist has within a certain geographic area. By itself it only gives you a glance at an artists following in your marketing but if you keep track of the data and compare it to data of past shows and their sales… you have a nice little tool for projecting the audience for an artist. You can also run multiple adverts within the same campaign. This allows you to target different groups with different messages that fit each audience better.

After targeting the advert you can choose how you want to buy the adverts. You can pay per click (they will give you a recommendation on where to set the price based on who you are targeting) or buy full volume impressions.

Facebook Ad Targeting

Sample Campaigns (venue names have been deleted)
Big budget or small budget, results are easy to track and see.

Spring Awakening East Lansing campaign sold over 600 tickets

East Lansing Legally Blonde

Spring Awakening Tampa

More successful Tampa campaigns

TPAC Avenue Q Campaign

TPAC Wizard of Oz Campaign

Des Moines campaign for Spring Awakeing

Grease in Tucson

Mamma Mia in Tucson

Reporting
While the simple metrics like number of impressions, number of unique impressions, costs per click, number of clicks, number or unique clicks, click through rate and cost per thousand impressions. The other thing you get is responder information. Actual data from people who not just saw your advert but responded to it. You get detailed reports on respondents age, sex, location. One of the most interesting things you also get is responder profile data. Favorite books, music, movies, tv shows and interest of the people responding to the advert.
An example of how this data was used in East Lansing, we held back getting some of the bonus spots from our cable buy and then used the responder data to try to better target the bonus. But the ways you can use this data are limitless.

East Lansing Responder Profiles for a recent broadway show