A tutorial on Facebook Promoted Pages

Have you tried Facebook's Promoted Pages yet?

I noticed something new in my admin panel last week. Yep, I'd finally got Promoted Pages rolled out to me. Sometimes I think I'm the last admin on the planet to get the new features.

Promoted Pages is a really simple way to get more Likes to your Page but it does come with a few caveats and warnings.

#1 It's a rolling program

You choose your daily budget and carry on spending until you stop the ad. Helpfully Facebook shows the metrics in your Page admin without having to dig around though so you should have it as a constant reminder.

#2 It's not very targeted

One of the beauties of Facebook advertising is the platform's targeting ability. Promoted Pages will (at least until you tweak some settings) blanket target everyone in your selected geographic area (and all friends of fans).

#3 The ad copy isn't what you think

As you create your ad, Facebook auto suggests your text. However once you then dig into Facebook's ad editor you discover that the actual text being used can be quite different. I will explain below.

First - accessing Promoted Pages

If Promoted Pages has been rolled out to you, you will see an invitation to promote your page in the bottom left hand side of your Page Admin panel (where they used to show recent new Likes). See below.

Click on the Promote Page button and select your daily budget. You'll see that your audience is restricted to either your local town or country (or similar). If you are seeing anything other than this please do let me know. Despite the majority of our fanbase being in the US, I'm being offered UK only. This maybe to do with being set up as a Place (but my other Page that's not a place has a similar problem). I did experiment with removing my location using the Page Edit tool but then the ad option gets removed.

Note how Facebook is suggesting the ad copy will read. In my instance it is "Music lessons & instruction". This has been pulled from our Place Categories in Edit Page.

Check your ads in the Ad Manager

Once the ad is live and I check it out in the Ad Manager, that text isn't being used at all. The ads look like this:

That text is being pulled from our Mission. See below:

Cue a quick edit of our Mission to write a shorter, snappier line which won't be curtailed in the ad:

That looks a lot better:

You'll see from these clips that a single Promoted Page action, actually creates 3 ads. I'd suggest experimenting with these before auto deleting any of them. Anecdotal evidence is tha the mobile ads are returning far higher than usual ROI.

Further targeting

Below I've clicked through to one of the ads and done a bit of tweaking in the targeting section. I've upped the age of the target audience (the default is 13 to no max) and also added the US as a target country. Finally I've selected one interest category. I do think it's important to refine this very broad targeting. Apart from anything else, if you do a fair number of Promoted Posts and other Ads aimed at Friends of Fans, you are opening yourself up for trouble unless you are particularly relevant to them. Layering on an interest category will minimise this.

The results

So having been running the ads for just over a week, what results am I getting and how does it compare to other Facebook advertising options?

Below shows that the ads have apparently been seen some 26,406 times. Take this with a pinch of salt as so often those ads in the right hand column are ignored. Facebook have spent my $5 a day budget and it's resulted in 65 new fans/subscribers to my Page.

Let's look at the detail. We can see that the Sponsored Story ad is hugely more effective. That "social proof" with a friends' name seems to make all the difference.

Doing the maths, having spent $36.07 it's cost me an average of 5.549 cents per new fan.

Next to compare this with a standard Sponsored Stories ad. We bid at 8-9c per click for our standard sponsored stories ads. Over the last 28 days I've spent a grand total of $8.98 (the target market was broadly similar) and received 21 new Page Likes. This works out at 4.27 cents per new fan.

So, not much in it, but the Promoted Page is getting a lot more exposure so is arguably worth the extra price. To increase my level of exposure on the traditional Sponsored Story ad I would need to increase my bid price. I'm going to test that next and see what the results are.

Have you tried Promoted Pages? How are the ads performing?