How Facebook ads work
With Facebook ads you can promote your page, posts on your page, your contact us button or even your website. Facebook ads can be simple or sophisticated depending on how you want them to be. There are over 7.90 million Facebook users in Kenya, thus your advert can reach as many people as you want.
With Facebook ads, you can also run adverts on Instagram and on messenger. Anyone can run facebook ads in Kenya though we will later see the kind of business categories that are not allowed to run facebook ads.
How to target Facebook ads
With Facebook ads, you need to think keenly on who you want to target in your campaign or you will fail. Facebook allows you to target your ads according to the following;
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Interests
- Behaviour
These are the most important fields you should concentrate on while carrying out facebook ads in Kenya or any part of the globe.
Location
It allows you to target your audience according to the country, counties or region, cities, postal codes or addresses.
Gender
You are given three options; Male, Female or ALL. If your products are specifically for men you target men and vice versa for women. If they are for both genders you use All.
Age
You need to know the age of the target customers who consume your products or services. With Facebook, the targeting age starts from 13 years to 65+ years. You can start by targeting according to the age of your existing customers and then expand with time or target the general audience of your product.
Behaviour
Facebook gives you an option of choosing your audience according to their behaviours that are related to your advert. This could be their past purchase of items, pages they follow, devices they use, travel and pages they search for among others. This allows you to get the target audience that has an interest in your products or services.
Interest
This is the most powerful area that you need to consider keenly before making your advert live. Facebook gives you two options broad category or precise interests.
Broad category
When creating an ad, you are given various options like business and industry, entertainment, relationships, shopping and fashion, food and drinks among other categories. You choose the categories that fit your advert.
Precise interest
For example, you have chosen your category as shopping and fashion, you can go ahead and specify the exact people you want to reach in that category. You can specify if it is beauty, clothing, fashion accessories among others. From there you can specify if it is females, men or children’s clothes. You can go ahead and select if it is handbags, dresses, jewellery or sunglasses that you are advertising. With this, you are able to narrow down your target audience to the ones you want your advert to reach.
You are also given an exclude option, with this you can exclude people that you do not want your advert to reach.
There are several contents that are prohibited from advertising on Facebook, this includes, drug and drug substance, tobacco products, dating, gambling, discriminatory practices, unsafe supplements among others. We will discuss more on the prohibited content in detail in the next article.
