Facebook ads for Nonprofits
Filed under: Non-Profits, PPC, Social Marketing on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine
One of the challenges of online advertising is getting your message out to the right crown. Google, Yahoo and MSN have geotargeting and dayparting solutions to show your ads to the right locations (based on IP address), and at the right times of day, but of the 3 only MSN has a basic demographic targeting tool. Facebook realized that they had a great amount of user entered data that they could make use of for ad targeting, so they set up their demographic targeting.
Let’s imagine that we have a nonprofit that wants to target young women that have an interest in politics, and work in the DC beltway. The first step is to head over to the ad generation site.
Not bad, 18 million people that we can target to. But let’s change those parameters so that we’re just reaching those who have identified themselves as women.
8.6 million is still a great number to target, but we wanted to go for young women, let’s try narrowing it down to just 18-25 years of age.
Facebook has an option where you can specify your political leanings, so let’s use those options to only show young women that have identified their political views.
2.7 million. How about just those that live in the beltway states - Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia?
Still over 174,000. This may be where we’d want to place our ad, and see what response we get from it. Of course, we can go more and more granular in ways that are just not possible on the regular paid search sites. How about if we specify that they must work in some capacity for Congress?
520 young women, who state their political preference, live in the beltway area and work for Congress. That’s absolutely amazing targeting. To be able to go down to virtually any level of granularity, based on education, favorite books, etc, etc, etc. gives you so many options when targeting your ads. If you understand your customers, and can segment them appropriately with the correct messaging, this should allow you to increase your conversion rates and improve your ROI, which should be everyone’s goal.
