Facebook ads give businesses a whole new avenue to reach their customers.  The beauty about facebook ads is that you can really target you audience and track performance all from the back end of your facebook profile.

Here’s a run down of how it works… 

You pick what you want to advertise.  You can choose from an external website or a page  from within your profile.  If you don’t have a page yet, facebook will help you create one.

You then choose who you want to reach.  You can select by location, sex, age, keyword, education, workplaces, political views and relationship status.  As you make your selections, facebook tells you how many people fit the bill.  Currently, with all the fields blank, facebook is showing that you could target an ad to 18,071,700 users.

Once you select your target market you now have to create the ad.  Facebook gives you the option to upload an image or not to.  You create your title and then the ad.  You can also choose to add a social action to your ad.  (This is has become somewhat controversial.  Say for example a huge online bookstore is running an ad with a social action associated to it.  Say a friend in your network makes a purchase at that online store.  That purchase will show up next to the ad.  Not a big deal?  What if your friend was buying a book on dealing with divorce or dealing with drug addiction?  That’s some pretty personal stuff that facebook users most likely don’t want posted in their friends news feeds.  In my opinion, the social actions feature isn’t for every business.  You really need to think about what your customers will be buying before you advertise their purchase to all their friends.)

With that in mind, once you’ve decided on the ad and whether or not to include a social action, you just need to decide on your budget and if you want to pay for views or for clicks.  The pay per click min is .01, but you may not see that much in the way of page views goes with such a low bid.  Paying for views will let you pick if you want your ad displayed in the news feed or on the side in the ad space. You can set your daily budget and run a campaign with a start and end date.

Once your campaign is running you have the option to pause or delete it.  To get to the reporting screen you just need to go to your profile and click on the Ads and Pages tab. From there you can easily see all the activity on a daily basis.

As you can see above, the first few days I ran this ad, I wasn’t getting enough views or clicks.  My bid was too low.  I started it at .10 a click and raised it a bit each day.  By 11/21, I had raised it to .50 a click and as you can see, that number seems to be working much better.

I’m pleased with the results so far and I would recommend trying facebook ads right now.  The only two down sides to facebook ads I’ve run into so far are:

1) I don’t believe you can edit the actual ad once it is running, you can edit the bid, but not the ad.

2) They don’t take American Express.  Big bummer there!