Tracking Performance of Website and Online Marketing Activities

Google Analytics is a key tool that you can use for free to track the performance of your website and online marketing activities.

Only 20% of those using Google Analytics use it correctly

Therefore learning to use Google Analytics properly could give your business a real competitive advantage over the 80% who are not. (This stat is based on e-commerce websites, although it is likely to be similar for non e-ecommerce sites as well). Analytics help you to identify which website and online marketing activities are working well and which are not so that you can pinpoint areas for improvement.

For instance, you can see how many website visitors you have each month, on average how many pages they browse and on average how long they spend on your site.

 

 

The stats on Google Analytics are thought not to be 100% accurate, but they are still a very good indicator of online performance.

You can also get a break down of where traffic to your website is coming from. For example, you can see how many visits come from Google, other sites or social media platforms and how many visits come directly to your site. (Read our previous blog on this subject for more information on understanding the stats.)

You can get an indicator of what keywords your website visitors have used to find your website within the Google search engine.

 

 

You can sync Google Adwords with Analytics to gain further data on how your Google Advertising campaigns are performing. It is reported that 60% of ecommerce sites do not have these two correctly synced. This is another thing that could give you a potential competitive advantage. It can be particularly useful to know the exact keywords your visitors are using in Google searches that lead them to click on your Ad. This data will help you to optimise advertising campaigns and identify keywords to use on your website and in other marketing activities.

You can sync Google Webmaster with Analytics to obtain further data on how your website is performing in the Google search engine. As mentioned in a previous blog, Google Webmaster will crawl through the whole of your site. As a result, Google will know a lot more about the sub-pages of your website than it did beforehand, improving your listing in search results. Google Webmaster will then continuously obtain data about your website. This can be best seen via Google Analytics once it is synced with Google Webmaster. You can see which search terms lead to the website and sub-pages of the website being listed in search results, even when people don’t click-through the links. Some of these search terms you may not even have previously considered. Once again, using this facility could give you the edge over your competitors.

We hope this blog convinces you of the benefits of tracking and understanding the performance of your online marketing activities. If you would like further assistance in ensuring Google Analytics is correctly setup and in understanding the stats please do contact us. This is the last blog in the Online Marketing Considerations for 2013 mini-series. For more top tips on online marketing follow me on my Twitter profile: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media – Can We Help You? Setup – Training – Strategy – Outsource

Stats mentioned are from an eConsultancy Article: 80% of online retailers are using Google Analytics incorrectly

 

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How to Market Your Business Online – Social Media

In the last blog we mentioned that social media is now important for SEO (search engine optimisation) and is a great way to drive continuous traffic to your website. One of the criteria that Google ranks websites on is Social Signals.

These are hits to your website that come from social media platforms. Every week Google picks up when you gain hits this way and gives your website a higher ranking. Traffic generated by social media is also hopefully high quality traffic, as presumably your potential customer base is following you on these platforms.  Once people click on your website they are likely to browse it, looking at two or three other pages. This also indicates to Google that this is a good website for the keywords referenced.

 

 

The key social media platforms are:

•  – 33m UK members – 50% of population

 

•   – approx. 10m UK members

 

•   – over 5m UK members

 

•   – a great way to build trust and draw in your customer base (an example of Content Marketing)

 

 

 

Other platforms such as Google+ and Pinterest often get lots of hype. I would advise only considering using these once you are up to speed with the main platforms mentioned above. These are where your customers/clients are most likely to be. This year is about getting more out of your social media setup – making the most of your online presence to reach your potential customer base. Whether you do this by using just one platform or a few is up to you. On the one hand, using more platforms gives you more potential reach as different people like to use different platforms. On the other hand, it is better to use one platform well than several badly. You will need to weigh this up and decide what is best for your business.

We recommend that you connect with your clients on social media (we can help here with a few techniques). Social media provides lots of regular touch points online, which will help you to avoid being too pushy when trying to generate sales. Instead, social media provides you with the opportunity to have more general conversations online. Customers should then remember you, rather than your competitors, when they are next considering your products or services.

Blogs and social media platforms are known as inbound marketing channels. They build trust in your business through the provision of useful and interesting information (for more on inbound marketing see our blog). A survey undertaken in the US found that three out of four inbound marketing channels cost less than outbound (traditional) marketing channels.

 Infographics by Votier Digital

 

We are not recommending that you completely stop using traditional marketing tactics. However, it may be worth reviewing your current activities and dropping the ones that are not working so well. Your time and money might be more effectively spent on digital marketing activities. Look for opportunities to use your offline marketing to complement your online marketing. For example, mention that you are on social media in direct mail and advertising. Doing so will encourage some people to follow you on social media. This means that you can continually push them to look at your website, giving you many more opportunities to engage them. (P&G and Simply Health are two examples of big brands that are using traditional marketing techniques in this way. Their TV advertising heavily promotes their Facebook presence.)

This series of blog posts has now outlined three key ways to market online – Google marketing apps, SEO and Social Media. It is important to track how these activities are performing in order to be able to develop them over time. This will be the basis of the next blog.

We hope you find this info useful. If you would like further assistance to get more out of social media for your business please do contact us. For more top tips on online marketing follow me on Twitter @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media – Can We Help You? Setup – Training – Strategy – Outsource

 

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How to Market Your Business Online – SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. This is about enhancing your website in the eyes of search engines (i.e. Google). SEO will improve the chance of your website appearing naturally within search engine results (ideally on page one) over time. It complements the Google marketing apps mentioned in my last blog. The more you are referenced in Google – you can have more than one spot in search results – the more you stand out from your competitors. This increases the chance of your business being found by your customer base.

Below are seven basic tips to help with SEO. You can either have a go at following these yourself (depending on what access you have to your website) or you could outsource your SEO to a specialist (like us):

1. Content is King – You need to make sure that you have high quality content on your site.

• Make it relevant to your audience, easy to understand and interesting to read
• A copywriter can help if you don’t feel confident writing yourself or if time is an issue

2. Keywords – These are the words that people are most likely to be using when searching for your site.

• Use them in your titles, page title, headings and content
• If you are location focused use key locations as part of your keywords

3. Meta Data – This is what search engines read behind a website page and the Meta Title and Description is often shown in the search results.

• Meta Data should include a title, keywords and a description
• It is often accessible in Content Management Systems

4. Pictures – add a description to photo properties.

• Google cannot always see pictures but it can read photo descriptions
• Use keywords in your description

5. Video Content – Embed videos into your website.

• Google owns YouTube, the second largest search engine, and therefore values video content

6. Build Links – Google will look at which other websites are linking to your site.

• Build links from other sites to your site
• Quality is more important than quantity – social media is highly-valued here

7.  Submit your site to Google Webmaster

• Google will crawl through the whole of your site and know a lot more about the sub-pages of your website than it did beforehand, thus improving your listing in search results
  

There are many other techniques that a SEO specialist can use to improve your site. For example, they have tools to help them identify areas within the structure and layout of a website that can be further optimised. Note your website developer will not have undertaken these activities unless you specifically paid extra for this service.

At the very least make sure your content is well-written and references the applicable keywords (and locations where relevant) on each sub-page of your website. However, don’t overdo it with the keywords – the content still needs to be readable and make sense to the reader! If Google thinks otherwise they can mark you down which will have a negative impact on your search engine ranking. Variations of keywords can help with this.

In the sixth tip we mentioned social media. This is now a key aspect of building links for SEO. There will be more on why this is the case in our next blog.

We hope you find this insight into SEO useful. If you would like further assistance in optimising your website for Google please do contact us. For more top tips on online marketing follow me on Twitter @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media – We Can Help – Setup – Training – Strategy – Outsource

 

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How to Market Your Business Online – Google

 

In the last blog we mentioned two key approaches to marketing your business online – Google search and social media. Let’s begin by looking at Google search. If your customer base was to search for your business, where would it appear in search results?

You can test this yourself by Googling the search terms that you think your customer base would use to find your business. Not many people will look beyond the results on page one. Even less will go beyond page two. So it is key to ensure you have a page one presence (or at very least appear on page two).

There are a few Google marketing apps that can help you to improve your listing in search engines:

  Google adverts are Pay Per Click Adverts and often appear in the top three slots and down the right side of search results as shown in the red boxes below. Click here for seven top tips about how to use Google Adwords.

location map listings. Google often gives priority to location related searches over all other searches, including ads, and it’s free to do. The example below shows restaurants listed according to their location on a map. They appear above natural organic and ad results: 

 

products appear in the Google shopping page as shown below. At the moment this is free to do but it looks like charges will be introduced for this by March 2013.

 

 

 

In addition to making use of the Google marketing apps, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can also help to make your website more visible in Google. SEO is really about your content and the structure of your website. An important aspect of this is keywords.  Google will read your website to pick up on keywords and then will show your website to applicable search terms in the Google search engine. In the next blog we will cover some key top tips on SEO.

Where you rank in Google depends on several factors. In particular it is dependent upon your competitors. If they have optimised their site and are gaining more traffic they are likely to appear above you in search results. If this is the case, all is not lost. You can try to counter this by optimising your own site and using platforms like social media to drive more traffic to your site. You can often have an impact within 6 to 12 months, depending on how competitive your industry (or the location you cater for) is.

We hope you find this info useful. If you would like further assistance with Google marketing apps please get in touch. For more top tips on online marketing follow me on Twitter @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media – We Can Help – Setup – Training – Strategy – Outsource

 

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Online Marketing Considerations for 2013

With many businesses thinking about their marketing strategy for the year ahead, it is a great time to take a fresh look at how online marketing can help your business. Recently I presented at a networking event about online marketing considerations for 2013. A copy of my presentation can be seen here (help it trend on slideshare by sharing with others) and I thought I would use it as the basis of a series of blogs on this subject. Let’s begin by focusing on why it’s worth spending time marketing your business online.

 

Why Online Marketing?

 

Your marketing strategy will have several objectives and many of these can be achieved with the help of online marketing. A few examples of objectives that can be supported by online marketing are below. Follow the links to find out more.

 

• Raising Awareness – Brand / Products / Services / Events / Good Cause
  • See our blog on how social media can help grow brand presence
• More Website Visitors
  • See our blog on how social media and search engine optimisation can help
• Improving Leads to Sales conversion
  • See our blog on how to use social media and the Google tools for sales

 

  84% of the UK population now use the internet (approx. 52 million people) and 74% go online monthly. One of the biggest areas of internet usage is the search engines, now accounting for 12% of all UK internet visits. If you think back to the days when you would have used paper business directories like the Yellow Pages as your first port of call when looking for a local business, you can see the impact of search engines. They are now the place people go to first and paper-based directories are shrinking in size. The number one search engine is Google, owning 91% of the UK search engine market, way ahead of the likes of Bing and Yahoo.

 

 

One of the other big changes is the use of social media. At least half the population is using a social media platform. More often than not this is likely to be Facebook, followed by Twitter and LinkedIn. Therefore, between Google and social media, you have some great ways to reach out to many people on the platforms they’re most likely to be using in their day to day lives. This gives them a chance to find your business when they are looking for a specific product or service.

 

We’ll finish this blog with 3 key questions:

What is your Google Presence?

What is your social media presence?

How could you complement your offline marketing plans with online?

 

In the next blog we’ll focus on how to enhance your presence on Google. We hope you find this info useful. If you would like further assistance in marketing your business online please do contact us. For more top tips on online marketing follow me on my Twitter profile: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media – We Can Help – Setup – Training – Strategy – Outsource

 

Stats & Pie Chart Images via Internet World Stats, eMarketer & Hitwise

 

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Facebook Banner Rules – The Do’s and Don’ts

Here are some guidelines on the Facebook banner to avoid having your Page closed down and losing your fan base.

 

Don’t:

• Include your contact details– no website address, no phone number, no email etc
  • Instead use the about box and info page for this.

• Include pricing or purchase information – including no special offers or links to your website
• Include calls to action – no asking for likes, sharing, clicks to websites or any other type of action you can think off
• Use an image you do not own or have the rights to use
• Risk it – many businesses are getting away with breaking the rules, but many aren’t. Facebook will close your Page if it detects or it’s been reported you’re breaking the rules. Some businesses have been known to lose fan bases of up to 10,000 likes – could you image losing that, especially if you ran ad campaigns to get some of those fans – could be very costly to your business
  

Do

• Upload a banner image that represents your business or location
  • 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall and under 100 kbs in file size.
• Feel free to mention your business name or tag line (providing not a call to action)

For more on Facebook’s own rules click here. The following is an example where the rules have been broken twice and on the third attempt the banner meets the Facebook rules. This example as reported in the HyperArts Blog also mentions other examples of brands breaking the rules so you can then avoid them yourself.

We hope you find this info useful when choosing or designing a Facebook banner for your Facebook Page. Please do contact us if we can be of further assistance. For more top tips on how to use social media for business follow me on my Twitter profile: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media - check out our website to see how we help businesses effectively use social media for business

 

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Running Facebook Competitions – What you can and cannot do

Running Facebook competitions can be a great way to engage your customer base, gain new likes and collect email addresses. By collecting email addresses, it can help you build your customer or prospect database and reduce your reliance on Facebook. (It is all very well building a fan base (likes) on Facebook but you are then at the mercy of the rules and changes they make. Having your own database reduces this risk and gives you back a certain amount of control.) You can then send your customers newsletters, details of your products, services and special offers.

 

However there are strict rules in running Facebook competitions (do click on this link to get the full lowdown from Facebook). Here are the key points to bear in mind:

 

Don’ts

• Don’t run competitions via banners, posts, notes etc.
• People can’t enter competitions just by liking the page. They have to also do something else in addition to enter a competition

Dos

• Run competitions via Facebook Competition Apps (you can code them yourself but it’s probably best use an app as it heavily reduces the chances of falling foul of other Facebook competition rules)
• Encourage people to like your Page as they enter the competition
• Encourage people to share the competition with friends and family

 

If you fail to follow these rules Facebook may suspend your Facebook Page, so do be careful here. Competition apps will help with this but please also bear in mind that they will incur an added cost. There are many Facebook competitions apps, including ones from Wildfire, OfferPop, ShortStack and Woobox. We’ve only used Wildfire apps when helping clients to run competitions, so we’re unable to tell you about the benefits of others.

 

The key benefits we find with Wildfire are: 

• Incremental pricing so you only pay for the number of days you run the competition for
• Several options for creating the contest and flexibility in fields to collate the data you need (like email addresses)
• Less likely to fall foul of Facebook competition rules as all the settings, configuration, necessary Facebook disclosures and posting of messages within the Wildfire app follow Facebook rules
• You can run the contest outside of Facebook as well – through other social media platforms like Twitter, your website etc. so you are not just restricted to Facebook members
• See stats on how the competition is performing at the point in time at which you are checking competition progress

 

You also have to consider how you will promote the competition to ensure enough people hear about it and enter it. Again there could be further cost involved here. The best way is probably to run a Facebook Ad campaign aimed at your specific target audience. This means your competition will be promoted on a daily basis within Facebook, increasing the chances of entries. People may need to hear about the competition more than once before they get around to entering it and an Ad will give them a recurring prompt.

 

Once people start to enter the competition, it may go viral (spread beyond fan base, “likes”) as it is shared with friends and family of the people. This will be influenced by the prize(s) and what you have to do to enter the competition, so both should be carefully considered when you first plan the competition. Think what you and your customer base would like to win and what might put you off entering the competition. Taking this into consideration should increase the chances of the competition being shared and talked about on Facebook, as well as other social media platforms like Twitter. This will increase the chances of the competition being successful, as success can never be guaranteed (and may take more than one go to get right).

We hope this info is useful if you are considering running a Facebook Competition. For more info on Facebook Ads check out our blog (it is focused on gaining likes but will still give you an overview of how Ads work). Alternatively, contact us if we can be of further assistance. For more top tips on how to use social media for business follow me on Twitter: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media

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5 Ways to Get More Website Visitors

To attract more visitors to your website you need to make it more visible to your customer base, particularly in Google. Google is the number one search engine, owning approx. 90% of the search engine market in the UK and 70–80% of the market worldwide. Every day people search for products and services online and there are several ways you can make it easier for them to find your website. The following five tips could help:

 

1. Optimise your website in the eyes of Google – known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). This is about optimising every page of your website to help improve your position in Google search engine results. Often Google will know about your home page but, unless you’ve taken further steps, probably less so the sub-pages of your site. Most organisations offer more products or services than can be easily promoted on the home page. Instead different products and services are featured on sub-pages. Optimise these pages to make them more visible to potential customers in searches.  (Find out more about SEO.)
2. Google Advertising – pay-per-click advertising can give you a page one presence on Google. Often the top three results that appear in a Google search and down the right hand side are pay-per-click adverts. As well as driving click-throughs, Google ads can help build brand presence. People searching may note the company name even if they don’t click on the advert. You only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad. Setup adverts in Google Adwords where, once they are live, they can be tracked to see how they are performing (more on how to customise Google Adwords here).
3. Google Location Listings – if you are a venue or service-based business where location is important, make sure you have optimised your presence on Google by location. Google often prioritises location-based search results over all other results (including advertising). Even better, it’s free to do using Google Places. Google Places ensures that when someone searches for your venue or service with your location, your business is shown on Google Maps. It will appear either on the main search page or in Google Maps itself. When ranking listings, Google gives heavier weighting to listings that have photos and reviews in them.
4. Google Product Listings – for those selling products online, you can list them on the Google shopping page using Google Merchant Center. Hurry up too, as it’s free at the moment in the UK (in the US they are becoming product ads and there will be a cost per click)!
5. Social Media – Google loves social media as helps to distinguish active sites from inactive sites. This helps to improve search engine results. Every time you receive hits from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Google picks up these social signals and gives you a higher ranking. Social media is a great way to drive people to sub-pages of your site whilst allowing Google to improve search results for those sub-pages over time. Google also have their own version of Facebook, Google+. It is still early days but they are heavily integrating it into search engine results, Google advertising and into Google Places as Google Local.

 

Lastly it’s important to track how your website and online marketing activities are performing using Google Analytics. This allows you to see what is working well and what isn’t, so you can develop your website and online marketing activities accordingly (more on this here).

We hope these suggestions will help you gain more website visitors. Contact us if you would like more assistance in optimising your website presence within Google. For more top tips on online marketing follow me on my Twitter profile: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media

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The Indirect Impact of Social Media – Social Stats in Google Analytics

Social media is often hyped in the news as a way for businesses to generate a quick return. In our experience, however, engaging with social media delivers more benefit in the medium to long term. In fact, over time, social media can be having a positive impact on your business that you may not even be aware of.

 

In previous blogs I’ve discussed the indirect impact social media can have on brand presence and on search engine optimisation (SEO). In the blog on brand presence, I mentioned how more people became aware of a business as their online following grew on social media platforms. This led to more searches on the business name in search engines and more direct visits to their website.

 

Earlier this year (2012) Google revamped Google Analytics and introduced new features to help track the impact of social media. Google highly values social media, as can be seen by the regular updates to the criteria they use to rank websites, which are known as Penguin and Panda updates. The Penguin updates in particular highly value social signals; this is where websites have had hits from social media platforms. By regularly using social media to drive hits to your website, you can improve your search engine optimisation and Google presence. (See the SEO blog above for further info.)

 

Within the revamped Google Analytics are new “Social” stats. Using these, we have recently noticed that for some businesses we deal with there often seems to be a correlation between visits via “social referral” (i.e. visits from other social media platforms to their website) and “all visits” (i.e. visits from all sources to their website). See one example below. This clearly shows that there tends to be an increase in overall visits to a website when there is an increase in hits from social media platforms (even though one doesn’t directly account for the other).

 

To further illustrate this, three points in time have been highlighted by red circles:

 

• The first circle highlights 12 hits via social referral on a particular day. On that same day there were 264 hits overall, which was an increase of 57 hits from the previous day.
• The second circle highlights 17 hits via social referral on a particular day. On that same day they had 373 hits overall, an increase of 186 hits from the previous day.
• The third circle highlights 34 hits via social referral on a particular day. On that same day they had 223 hits overall, an increase of 78 hits from the previous day.

 

Each point highlighted for “social referral” has led to a significant increase in overall hits. We checked back on the activity behind one of these circles, the second one, and found that the business released a special offer via their social media platforms that day. This led to the spike in direct hits and in hits via Google referrals (where visitors had first Googled the business name or the product relating to the special offer) as you can see below.

 

There was an increase of 108 direct visits hits from the previous day (from visitors either typing in the website address or, more likely, going to it via their favourites).

 

 

There was an increase of 39 hits from previous day via the Google Search engine (organic search traffic).

 

Thus it seems that activity on social media can be a good way to trigger your followers to revisit your website. Each time this happens Google picks up on it due to the Penguin updates. Over time this can have a significant impact on your presence within their search engine (although this is also dependent on what your competitors are doing to improve their presence).

Therefore when tracking how social media is working for your business, it is important to track both the direct and indirect impact. More often, it is through tracking the indirect visits that you can see the greatest return.

We hope you find this info useful when tracking the impact of your own social media campaigns. Feel free to contact us if we can be of further assistance. For more top tips on how to use social media for business follow me on my Twitter profile: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media

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Understanding Facebook Ad Stats

You have a Facebook Ad campaign up and running but not sure really what the stats mean, this blog will help you to interpret them so you have understanding of how your ad campaign is performing. This way you can then decide whether to continue running, edit or pause the ad. As well as whether you need to or would be worthwhile to up the per click or daily spend budget.

 

Below is a screen shot of an ad campaign on Facebook that is aimed at getting more likes, showing the stats for the last 7 days:

• Budget - shown along the top line is your daily budget. Once you know how the ad campaign is performing you can decide whether to leave as it is or further increase if you decide you want more clicks per day and have the budget for it. We often start with the minimum £1 a day, optimise the campaign and then increase within a few weeks if we think the campaign is working well and there is budget to do so.
• Audience Circles – gives you visually an idea of the potential of your campaign reach within the timeframe being reviewed.
  • Grey Circle represents the number of people being targeted by the ad criteria.
  • Green Circle represents the number of people reached so far within the timeframe being reviewed.
  • Orange Circle represents how many people that saw the ad have a friend or family member that already likes your Facebook Page.
• Response Graph – shows when the clicks and actions are taking place over a given timeframe.
• Last 7 Days – below the audience circles is where you set the timeframe for the stats you wish to review. By default this is the last 7 days; can be changed to: today, yesterday, last 28 days or custom parameters can be set.

 

• Campaign Reach – below the timeframe (last 7 days in this case) shows you how many Facebook members that meet your ad criteria have been reached (seen the ad) within the timeframe set.
• Frequency – going along to the right of campaign reach is how many times each member that was reached saw the ad on average – in this case on average 6.7 times in the last 7 days.
• Social Reach – how many of the people reached that knew someone that liked your Page. This may encourage some of those that see the ad with their friend/family member liking the Page to also click on the ad and become a fan (particularly those with common interests).

 

• Actions – how many people have taken an action once they have clicked on the ad, in this case liked the Facebook Page. Note if you are running an ad to promote a website page instead then you won’t have any applicable actions and no stats will show here.
• Clicks – how many people have clicked on the ad and in this case seen the Facebook Page. Note if you are running an ad to promote a website page instead then this would be how many people have clicked through to see that page. Clicks along with actions are the key stats as here you can decide whether it is worthwhile to continue the campaign and whether to increase the daily or per click budget. This campaign was getting almost 100% conversion from clicks to likes, in the last 7 days however this has dropped off to just over 50% conversion. We would monitor this over the next 7 days to see if a one off week or whether we need to do something to the campaign to up the conversion rate. We would also review the recent posts on the Facebook Page to check whether they are engaging enough to encourage people to like the Page and to start receiving future posts on a regular basis. We have seen from other ad campaigns, a drop in quality of the messages posted can lead to a drop in conversions of clicks to actions.

 

• CTR – stands for click through rate, this is the number of clicks divided by the number of times the ad has been seen during the selected timeframe that is being reviewed. We find this more of relevance once you know a campaign is working (in terms of clicks to actions) and you are then looking to optimise it to get even more clicks. Here you would trial different titles, messages and ad criteria to see whether slight changes for example in the terminology used could encourage more people to click on the ad. This article here suggests a guideline to CTR rates:

 

• Spent – shows you how much you have spent in total on clicks within the timeframe being reviewed (in this case the last 7 days).

 

• Bid – on the far right side below the graph shows the maximum per click price you are willing to spend for a click. You will never know the true cost of an ad slot on Facebook until the clicks have happened. Facebook run the ad slots on a silent auction basis (just like how Google Ads work) with a complicated algorithm behind the scenes. This decides the per click cost at any one given time based on your ad criteria,  how many others you are competing with at that time plus the criteria and max per click bid that they have set. You’ll often find the per click cost is cheaper as the day goes on, as others have spent their budget for the day they will drop out and as less businesses are competing for the ad spot it becomes cheaper. This is why sometimes we bid less than the suggested bid price by Facebook and then use the stats to decide whether to up the per click bid or not over time.
• Price – this is the average cost of an ad, so you can see in this example the maximum we’re willing to spend for this ad is 75p per click and on average we’re paying 70p. We optimised this over a couple of weeks starting at 50p per click and worked our way up to 75p as we saw the stats come back in on a weekly basis and then left the pay per click budget at this amount.
• Ad Preview – towards bottom left corner you can preview the ad by clicking on the ad title and preview the link that people will land on when clicking on the ad (at no cost to yourself here). If you want to make changes you can click on edit to do this.
• Targeting – to the right of the ad preview shows how many Facebook members are being targeted by the criteria you selected when creating the ad. You can also edit this criteria here at any time. Below this shows the suggested bid price that Facebook estimates the per click cost of your ad.

 

We hope you find this info useful with your own Facebook ad campaigns and feel free to contact us if we can be of further assistance. For more top tips on how to use social media for business follow me on my Twitter profile: @qChrisWood.

Thanks

Chris

Q Social Media

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