Facebook is a community that houses more than 1.1 billion users across 213 countries in the world. That would make it the third most populous country in the world if it were one! This means it is one of the best platforms for any business to push its products to new customers, create a brand name and build a personal relation with its customers. If you have an online store and are looking to advertise your products to the right people, Facebook is THE platform to do so.

When Chumbak started out in 2010 as a store that sold cool and funky accessories with an Indian touch, they used Facebook advertising to catapult to popularity. They used Facebook ads to get users engaged with the brand, drive new people to the page, increase traffic to its product range and to promote offers and discounts. As a result, 25% of their online revenue now comes from Facebook. The Return on Investment is as high as 5 times the total spend and 30%-40% of their total website traffic comes from Facebook.

That is the power of Facebook paid marketing. In this article, we go through everything you need to know about advertising on Facebook to take your e-commerce store a couple levels higher and boost those sales figures.

For simplicity’s sake, we divide the article into 2 parts. In the 1st part, we talk about the following topics:

• Different types of ads you can create.
• The different options you have to define and target the people who see your ads.

In the 2nd part we dive deeper into the topic and explore the following points:

• How to understand and use the Facebook ad interface.
• How to analyze data and track your ads’ performance.
• How much you should spend on Facebook.
• So let’s get started!

What types of advertisements can I run on Facebook?

There are many types of ads one can create using Facebook. There are too many to go through in such limited space, so let’s stick to the ones that can benefit an eCommerce website the most!

•  Domain Ads: Click on a website and be redirected to an external website! These are what domain ads do. Divert interested customers to your e commerce website and help you close a sale right there and then. Running a special sale or promotion? These ads can come very handy. You can see them on the right side of your Facebook page.

Tip: Eye Catchy content = Higher Response for the Ad! That’s ‘cos you don’t get a lot of characters to work with!

•  Promoted Posts: You must have seen those posts on your Facebook News Feed from pages you've never even heard of? And somehow, a couple of your friends seem to be recommending it as well! How does that work?

Well, that is what a promoted post is! These types of ads lets posts from your Facebook page pop up on the news feed of people, even if they haven’t liked your page yet. It basically tries to emulate word-of-mouth marketing for your brand and it more or less appears like a post from any other page liked by the user.

•   Re marketing Ads: Have you ever searched for a product online and then been flooded with ads of those very products on Facebook? Well, you just got re-targeted! These ads are shown only to people who have at least once visited your website.

These ads perform well because the target audience is likely to already know about your company and the products you provide. By offering an exclusive discount or offer to such an audience, you may just help them choose your products over your competitors’! You can get started and create re-marketing ads by using 3rd party websites such as Adroll.com.

Whom Should I Target the Ad At ?

You've made your ad, but who gets to see it? Do you want college students lazing away in their hostels to see the ad or do you want to target housewives only in metropolitan cities?

Facebook lets you define a list of parameters to decide which people can see your ads. Choosing the parameters wisely is the difference between a failed ad that bleeds money and a successful ad that gains acquisitions for you! The major parameters are the following.

•  Location: Specifying a location to run your ad is mandatory for all Facebook ads. If you plan to provide shipping of electronics only in Mumbai, why waste money advertising your products to a gadget freak in Delhi?
• Age & Gender: Many a times a product may be suited for a certain gender or age group. There is no point in advertising jewelry to men or shaving kits to women. Choose the appropriate age and gender that your ad should target and reap the benefits.
•  Interests: While creating your ad, you can select interest fields and users who fall in that category will be shown the ad. If you are selling a T-shirt about a famous rock band, you might want to target people who have liked that band’s page on Facebook. It’s simple as that

•  Connections: You can choose to show your ad to people depending on what relation they have to your page. You can either show it only to the people who already like your page, or specifically those who haven’t.
•  Custom and Look alike Audiences: Suppose you have a list of a thousand subscribers who have shown some sort of interest in your brand or products. Using their contact details (email IDs, Facebook IDs or mobile phone numbers) you can choose to display your ads specifically to people with matching information on Facebook. This is known as a custom audience targeted ad.

Using a custom audience, you can create a list of people with similar interests to that audience and then choose to target them with an ad. This list is called a lookalike audience. To use custom and lookalike audiences, you first need to use the Facebook Power Editor. Power Editor is a free browser plugin created by Facebook that lets you bulk-edit your ads. It works best with Google Chrome.

Does this mean, I am all ready-set-go to advertise on Facebook?

To sum it all up, we can say that Facebook does offer a wide variety of options to choose from when it comes to the types of ads and the targeting options. You need to know which type of ad to use when, experiment a little and try to click with your customers.

So far you've picked up quite a lot, but you’re not quite ready to get started as yet. There’re still a few more points to run through before you can begin advertising your brand to the masses on Facebook. Head over to Part 2 of our Facebook Marketing Guide for Indian Online Stores and read more about using the Facebook ad interface, analyzing your ads’ performance and how much you should spend on Facebook ads!