Facebook Ads

What are Facebook Ads?

Facebook is one of the most popular advertising platforms online. With over 2.8 billion active users around the world, it comes with a massive audience. It’s not just a stab in the dark either – they offer a variety of advertising tools that let you reach different kinds of audiences. It’s no wonder Facebook is still king when it comes to social media marketing.

Facebook operates in almost every country in the world. As a social media platform, it relies heavily on user generated content. Businesses can set up their own pages and groups to speak to audiences. From those pages, they can then pay for advertising through a method known as pay-per-click.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is where you set a budget and Facebook charges you based on how many clicks your advertisement achieves. You can control what kind of click counts you get depending on the aim of your advertisement. Most importantly, you can also control who actually sees the advertisement.

Every single user on Facebook agrees to let the company use their data for advertising purposes. This means you can also benefit from this data when building advertisements. For example, you can control the gender, age and location of your audiences but you can also group them based on interests.

All of this makes Facebook Ads an excellent return on investment. It’s well known among digital marketing spaces that you can win over larger audiences on Facebook than any other platform. Combined with content marketing, community engagement and Google PPC, Facebook PPC is a fundamental cog for online marketing strategies.

How is pay per click (PPC) used on Facebook?

Pay-per-click makes up a huge part of how Facebook earns money – and is by far the best tool for social media marketers on the platform. You simply won’t be able to get a digital marketing job without extensive knowledge of how to run paid ads on the platform. Even for small businesses, this is a great way to reach out to larger audiences.

You start off a pay-per-click Facebook Ad the same way you would start any other post – by creating the content. This usually includes an image or video, with some text and a call to action. After this, you can then choose to make it an Ad before you post or post it up and see how it does organically. If it needs a little boost, you can create an Ad out of the post at a later date.

When you do decide to create an Ad, Facebook lets you narrow down your demographics by age, gender and location. You can also opt to narrow the audience by interests. Facebook uses data held on each user to decide what their interests are. You can actually check out what they think your interests are by checking your personal settings.

Facebook pay-per-click is so popular because it is the most cost-effective digital marketing tool for many businesses. This means you have more scope to experiment. A budget as low as $10 can show you how well you understand your audience and give you enough data to tweak your advertising strategy in the future.

How to become a Facebook PPC specialist?

Before you even start learning about pay-per-click you’ll need to gain a solid foundation of knowledge about social media marketing. Most jobs that need you to know Facebook PPC will also want you to know about other forms of social media. Think about which platforms are most useful in your industry and learn them.

After that, there are a few ways you can learn about Facebook PPC specifically. Online courses give you a good rundown of the basics. There’s also a small community online where you can learn from others as you go. Facebook is constantly changing how its advertising system works, so even if you already know a lot it’s worthwhile joining these groups.

Facebook also offers free training courses through their Facebook Blueprint platform. Once you complete these courses you will receive Facebook certification (although taking the test costs money). Things like digital marketing, creative strategy, and community management are covered – as well as developer programmes. Facebook’s apps and services form the basis of these programmes, so PPC is included in all of the marketing ones. Once you’ve gained this certification you will then be able to use it to find a career.

Finding a job isn’t exactly easy as social media marketing is one of the most saturated markets out there. Thankfully, having an in-depth knowledge of pay-per-click can help you stand out from the crowd. If you’re able to provide certification, as well as some examples of your previous work, then you will be much higher up the list than other candidates.

What jobs require knowing Facebook PPC?

Anything related to social media marketing will likely require knowledge of pay-per-click. Facebook is the most popular platform – so you simply won’t get by without a solid understanding of how to purchase ads. This basically forms part of the foundations of these kinds of roles.

Jobs like digital marketing, community engagement, and growth hacking all require some form of online marketing. You’ll probably find that job ads will state whether Facebook Ads is a requirement for the role. By this, they pretty much mean pay-per-click. All except the largest companies with huge budgets use this form of advertising on the platform.

You might also find it’s required in other roles adjacent to marketing. Things like sales, event management, and creative production are all likely to rely on Facebook pay-per-click. With these roles you might have more scope to learn on the job. That being said, already knowing how to do it will get you further when it comes to actually applying for them.

Something which surprises a lot of people is the increasing requirement for receptionists and admin staff to understand how to use social media. You tend to find this is more common in smaller companies with tiny budgets for marketing. It’s a bit controversial, but if you’re performing any of these kinds of duties it certainly won’t harm you to know how to run Facebook Ads.

It should also go without saying that if you run your own business you should learn about Facebook Ads (and, arguably, pay-per-click more broadly). When you first start out you’ll save a lot of money doing it yourself – and reach much wider audiences. Even if your business grows and you need to hire a social media specialist, it will be helpful for you to understand how it all works.

Average Facebook PPC Ads salary with different levels of experience?

You won’t get a job just doing Facebook pay-per-click, so you need to consider the average incomes for different kinds of marketing jobs. A social media manager in the US earns around $48k on average. Entry level roles can expect something from $27-34k depending on the size of the company. This stretches to just short of $100k for the most experienced roles.

If you want to earn a little more, community management and digital marketing both command higher salaries. That’s because community managers are in high demand at the moment, whilst digital marketing professionals have a broader workload. Both of these have salaries of around $54-56k on average. You’ll easily earn between $32-37k for an entry level position, whilst more experienced professionals exceed $120k.

And what about freelancers? This is increasingly becoming the most common style of working for social media professionals. If you can, we recommend charging a weekly or monthly rate using however many hours you expect to work over that period. This way you can charge for work done rather than time spent – which is a fairer way of recompensing this kind of work. 

Ask for anything from $25-50/hour for an entry level role (depending on the type of company) and up to $120/hour if you’ve got heaps of experience.

How common is using PPC on Facebook amongst digital nomads?

Social media management in general is a really common skill among digital nomads, so you’ll have plenty of competition. Pay-per-click more specifically isn’t as common – as there are still a few social media jobs that don’t require it (and less experienced companies won’t know to ask for it). 

For this reason, we recommend including a line about your pay-per-click knowledge in your application for these roles. It will really help you stand out from everyone else applying for a social media role. Even those companies that aren’t as social media savvy will notice if you’ve included it – whilst they might not even realise how important it is if you don’t!

If you want to work in social media management, learning how to use Facebook Ads is super important. Pay-per-click advertising is a major marketing channel for so many businesses, and Facebook is easily the most popular social networking platform. Learning it is essential for so many jobs – so it’s a good skill to set you apart from the crowd.