Facebook Advertising: What Every Business Needs to Know

What Facebook advertising was by 2011

By 2011, Facebook’s ad platform had grown well beyond the simple sidebar ads it launched with years earlier. The company introduced Sponsored Stories in January 2011, a format that turned an action a user had already taken, liking a Page, checking in somewhere, commenting on a post, into an ad shown to that user’s friends, on the logic that a friend’s endorsement outperformed a generic ad. For larger advertisers, Facebook also rolled out Power Editor in 2011, a bulk campaign management tool built in Google Chrome that let agencies and bigger spenders manage hundreds of ad variations and detailed targeting at once, a level of control the basic self-serve ad tool never offered.

Why this mattered for a business trying to decide

With over 800 million users by the end of 2011, Facebook had become too large for most consumer-facing businesses to ignore, but “should we advertise on Facebook” was a different question than “should we have a Page.” A Page was free and mostly a matter of time. Advertising meant a real budget decision, and the platform’s targeting options, by location, age, interests and now social actions through Sponsored Stories, made it different from buying a newspaper ad or even a Google search ad built around keywords rather than identity.

Questions to work through before spending

• Do you already have an organic presence, a Page with some content and engagement, or would advertising be the first thing your audience sees from you? A cold ad to a brand nobody has heard of converts differently than one reinforcing an existing relationship.
• Can you afford to test in small amounts first? Facebook’s self-serve system in 2011 let advertisers start with a few dollars a day, which meant there was little reason to commit a large budget before you had evidence a specific audience and message combination worked.
• Do you have a landing page built for the traffic, or will you be sending Facebook clicks to a generic homepage? Mismatched landing pages were one of the most common reasons businesses concluded Facebook ads “didn’t work” in 2011, when the real problem was what happened after the click.
• Is your goal something you can measure directly, like a sale, a lead or a signup, or is it a vague sense of engagement you won’t be able to tie back to revenue?

Signs it’s worth moving forward

If your customers are already the kind of people who spend time on Facebook, and you have even a rough sense of who they are demographically, the targeting alone made testing worthwhile in 2011. Local businesses could target by geography and interest cheaply; e-commerce sellers could test different products against different audience segments without committing to a large spend up front.

Signs to wait

If your Page has no content and no following yet, spend a few weeks building that base organically first. An ad sending strangers to an empty, inactive Page did more to hurt credibility than to help it. Likewise, if you can’t yet answer what a successful outcome looks like in dollars, spend that time defining it before you spend it on clicks.

Where this was headed

Through 2011, the direction was already visible: Facebook was investing heavily in more sophisticated ad tools for advertisers willing to get specific about targeting and measurement, and organic reach for Pages was becoming less reliable as more brands crowded into the same feed. Businesses that started learning the ad platform in 2011, even with a small budget, were building a skill set that would only become more necessary as the years went on.

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See also: more paid advertising guides, the full 2011 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.