With your holiday ads underway, it’s important to continuously monitor the performance of your ads and refresh what is working for you.

We offer many different features within the Ads Manager to help you monitor the performance of your ads. This includes graphs at both the campaign and ad level to help you visually track the impressions and clicks you are receiving, the ability to easily sort and read the data in your ads manager such as clicks, impressions, click through rate or spend, and last but not least, reports.

In addition to providing more data about your ads' performance, Facebook’s reports can help you learn much more about your audience.

The "Advertising Performance" report will give you detailed information about your ads' performance in terms of impressions, clicks, click-through rates, etc. The "Responder Demographics" report will give you more information about the types of users who are viewing or taking action on your ads while the "Responder Profiles" report will give you information about the profile content of users who are already interacting with your ads, to help you look for other commonalities that you may want to use to improve your targeting.

You can find more information about reports by using box.net to download our Reports Guide in a PDF format. You can also find it under the “Reference Guides” tab at the top of the Page.

When monitoring the performance of your ads, take notice which ads seem to be receiving more clicks or impressions than others. Find what works and what doesn't work to make changes to your ads. Also be sure to constantly refresh your creative after a couple of days to ensure that your ads don't become stale. This could be as simple as using a different image or ad title.

Stay tuned for more tips to come!

In our last two notes we discussed the importance of setting goals for your ad as well as how to make sure you are reaching the appropriate audience. To catch up, read part 1 and part 2 of our series.

After following these important steps, our third and final tip of this series is to think about any special offers you would like to promote in your ad or actions you would like to be taken.

When you’re writing the title and body text for your ad, it’s helpful to first think about what might make your business stand out. For example, with the holiday season upon us, you may be offering specials on your product or service. This could be discounts you have listed on your website, coupons you are offering or a special clearance sale at your store. Include your promotion in your ad text to inform and attract customers and don’t be afraid to be creative!

In addition to any special offers, it is important to think about what actions you would like to be taken based on your ad. Do you want your ad to encourage customers to come and see new inventory at your store? Would you like to have people call you to make an appointment? Including a strong call to action in your ad text can draw attention to your ad and provides clear next steps for the users viewing it. Including a time prompt like “now” or “today” also provides extra incentive for users to act on your ad.

Now that you’ve done your preparation, you are ready to create your ad. Happy advertising!

Last week, in the first part of our 3 part series, we discussed how to set goals before creating your ad. This included thinking about the type of ad to create based on the desired end results of your advertising efforts as well as the destination for your ad. Once you’ve set these primary goals for your ad, it’s time to think about who you want to reach.

Thinking about the appropriate audience for your ad is one of the most important steps to take before creating your ad. When advertising with Facebook you have many different targeting options. These options include targeting your ad by location, age, birthday, sex, keywords, education, school, workplace, relationship status, language and connections.

Before selecting the targeting for your ad, think long and hard about who would want to use your product or service, attend your event, Fan your Page or join your Group. When you’re doing this, be sure to keep the goal you set in mind as well.

For example, if you previously determined that your advertising goal is to increase the number of fans of your Page, you’ll now want to think about who your fans, especially ones who particularly love your business, might be. If you’re not sure where to start with this, think about who your existing fans are now. Do they usually fall into a certain age range? Or do you have a local business with fans that are concentrated in a particular area? Or are there any interests or hobbies that a lot of your fans probably have in common?

Only after you’ve decided who this audience is are you ready to select the targeting options for your ad. Choosing the most appropriate targeting options will help your ad perform its best. Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box and be creative!

Stay tuned for part 3 of our series to help you prepare before placing your ad!

It only takes 3 simple steps to create your ad on Facebook, but before getting started it’s important to ask yourself 3 simple questions: What are your advertising goals? Who do you want to reach? Are there any special offers to promote in your advertisements or actions you want to be taken?

In a series of 3 notes, we’ll discuss how to approach each of these questions as you start preparing your ads for the busy holiday season ahead. This week we’ll discuss how to set goals.

What are your advertising goals?

When setting your advertising goals it’s important to think about what you want the end result of your advertising efforts to be. This may be to increase site traffic, to increase sales, to get more brand recognition or to get more fans for your Facebook Page. Whatever your answer to this question is will help you when deciding whether a CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) or CPC (Cost Per Click) payment method is best for you.

A CPM payment method would mean that it is more important for you to receive recognition and to have your ad viewed by as many people as possible. If you are more interested in increasing site traffic or sales, a CPC payment method is likely the best choice, as you will only be paying when your ad is clicked on.

Identifying your goals before you get started can also help you decide what destination to use for your ad. For example, if increasing Fans for your Facebook Page is your ultimate goal, creating an ad for your Page where users can easily become a fan is the type of ad that would be best for you. Or maybe you have a promotion featured on your website that you want to increase awareness of. In this case you should have the destination for your ad lead directly to that section of your website.

Now you are ready to start setting your advertising goals. Stay tuned for next week’s installment on reaching the appropriate audience!

How do you find more fans for your Facebook Page, more people to interact with your Application, or more people to engage with your business?

Target friends!

“Friends of connection” targeting is now available for Facebook Ads. Expand your audience reach by delivering your ads to the friends of people already connected with your Page, Application, Group or Event.

In addition to harnessing the social graph by targeting your connections’ friends, every “Friends of connection” targeted ad promoting a Page or Event includes social content about a friend’s interaction with your business, amplifying the relevancy of your ad. Let’s take a look at an example. Annie is a fan of the Etsy Page. When Etsy wants to promote their Facebook Page, they can choose to target an ad to Annie’s friends by selecting the “Friends of connection” filter. Annie’s friends will receive the Etsy ad with the following sentence: “Annie Ta is a fan of this Page.” Annie’s friends are naturally more interested because Annie’s interaction with Etsy is showcased directly in the ad.

To take advantage of this targeting capability, simply look for the "Friends of connections: Target users whose friends are connected to:” field in the ad targeting interface.

Ads Manager is a powerful tool to help you manage and optimize your advertising account on Facebook.

In addition to providing basic information about your campaigns and ads, we are pleased to announce a suite of new features including search abilities, improved navigation, and inline ad detail editing.

In the coming weeks, we will upgrade your Facebook Ads account to the redesigned Ads Manager that will make it even easier to check the current performance of your ads and make rapid optimizations to ad creative, targeting, bids and budgets.

Right now you can start using the new Ads Manager by visiting your account. You will have the ability to toggle between the previous version and the new version in the yellow bar at the top of the page. Take some time to get adjusted to the new features as you'll have a couple weeks until your account will be upgraded permanently. In addition, take a look at the Ads Manager guide to help you become more familiar with the new interface.

We encourage you to provide us with your feedback by clicking on the "Send us feedback" link in the upper corner of the new Ads Manager.

“Like” is a familiar action Facebook users use to attribute value to various objects on the site - photos, wall posts, status updates, this note. We're excited to announce the addition of "Like" to Facebook Ads. By clicking on the "Like" link, users are able to express themselves and share this expression with their friends (see the example below). When a user likes an ad, their friends will be able to see that action in their version of the ad.

If you're familiar with the thumbs up and thumbs down icons that used to appear in the ads, this isn't much different. “Like” in the lower left corner and “X” in the upper right corner of the ad are ways users can give us quick and easy feedback on the ads they are seeing. We take this feedback into account as we continue to improve our advertising system for all advertisers and users.

The core of the Facebook brand is our user experience. At the heart of this experience is our product's distinct look and feel, functionality, personality, and utility. We continuingly strive to build core features that enhance our users’ experience on Facebook, which include Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads was built to transform traditional marketing into messages that are tailored to each individual user based on who they are and how they interact and affiliate with their friends, family, brands, music artists, and businesses they care about.

As advertisers, you have a significant impact on the daily user experience. To ensure we protect what users have come to expect from Facebook and provide you with a clear understanding of what resonates with our users, we created Advertising Guidelines. You’ll notice that we have updated the Advertising Guidelines to include that all ads on Facebook Platform applications comply. We also updated the guidelines to reflect minor changes based on feedback from users and advertisers including explicitly identifying policy for contests and sweepstakes. By following these guidelines, you will be better equip to communicate with your desired audience in a more effective and meaningful way. Please take a look at the revised edition of our Advertising Guidelines and as always, we look forward to your feedback.

As a Facebook advertiser, your feedback is extremely valuable. We’ve said this before. But we mean it. Each time we reach out to you, we ask for your input on product iterations and we listen. Today, we’ve launched three of the most requested targeting features to date. Let us know what you think.

Connection Targeting:
If you are a Page admin, Group officer, Event admin or Application developer, you know how important it is to connect and engage with users who are connected to you. We’re happy to announce the ability to target Facebook Ads only to users who have expressed interest in your Page, Group, Event or Application with connections targeting. Connections targeting allows you to target fans, members of your Group, users who have RSVP’d to your Event and/or users who have authorized your Application. Simply look for the “Connections: Target users who are connected to:” field in the ad targeting interface to get started. As you begin to type the name of your Page, Group, Event or Application in the field, the names of all eligible content that you manage on Facebook will appear in the type-ahead. Use this opportunity to increase engagement, send alerts and promote special offers to users who have already raised their hand for more information.

You can also choose to increase the number of fans and page views to your Page, members to your Group, attendees to your Event or users authorizing your Application by excluding your connections from seeing your Facebook Ad. To do so, simply look for the “Connections: Target users who are not already connected to:” field in the ad targeting interface.