Upon reading the FB Help on this topic, I’m still not clear. Foremost, does a FB ad equate to a “suggested post”? Next, it seems you set a budget starting at $5 as I recall seeing. Not sure what $5 gets you. How many clicks or likes or comments do you get for $5? And, do they really mean $5/day? I wager what they call a “budget” is really a quota, and once you meet your quota for the day (or month or what?), your ad stops appearing in people’s newsfeeds? And, whose newsfeeds does it appear? Random people or just friends or what? This is all my WAG from what I feel is poorly explained. Maybe some SDopers can explain by explicit examples.
I don’t know about the cost breakdown, but I do know that you choose the audience. Gender, location, age and probably some interests too. When I ran ads for my local election issues I was able to choose men and women 18 and over who lived in (as opposed to worked in or was born in) my city.
By way of example, this guy created a target audience of 1 (although he mentions that they’ve since changed their rules and the minimum is 20).
Please start here - it explains everything pretty well. Facebook Ads: The Complete Guide to Getting Started with Facebook Ads
Facebook is notoriously taciturn in the help documentation they provide to the average user or advertiser. Finding other content providers - aka bloggers and so on - who walk you through it (like above) will be helpful. Facebook also doesn’t do a great job of giving you analytics, so many people use third-party solutions.
Three other comments/answers:
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You are thinking about your budget and goals from the wrong direction. Instead of “what can $5 get me?” what you want to do is think is “what size of audience do I want to reach”, and back into what you can realistically afford from that.
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Yes exactly with the quota question. Once you establish your goals aka quota, Facebook is reaching your goal and then not spending any more of your money to get you to goal+extra.
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The ads will appear to people who meet the demographic criteria you set (18+ male, USAian, interested in gaming and tropical fish…or whatever). Facebook knows all that info about its users and more so it’ll target the ads to the people who fit your criteria, plus I suspect but don’t know that they also tier the audience by likeliness to click and convert.
Finally I just used a bunch of obnoxious insider jargon, but post again if you have more questions and maybe someone else with a better handle on not buzzpeaking will come along.
Thanks to all who responded. I will have to give this a bit more thought before I return with questions.