The below excerpt was taken from an article by Justin Smith and published at Inside Facebook on July 27, 2009. Read the article, including detailed explanations of targeting, at Inside Facebook here.

As most sophisticated marketers know by now, performance advertising on Facebook is significantly different from search engine marketing. While SEM is fundamentally keyword-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on keywords, Facebook Ads is fundamentally profile-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on people. As a result, the ad copy, call to action, and graphics need to be rethought and re-designed for the “people-targeted” Facebook world – not just copied and pasted from your Google AdWords campaign.

As more advertisers and marketers shift more of their attention and budget to Facebook Ads, Facebook’s performance advertising system, it’s crucial to understand the power of Facebook’s targeting capabilities.

As the above image shows, you can target Facebook ads by:

• Location
• Keyword
• Connections
• Relationships
• Age
• Birthday
• Education
• Gender
• Workplace
• Language

Facebook Ads offers a powerful array of targeting features, with more still to come – for example, Facebook recently told us that full dayparting would be launching for advertisers in the next few months.  With 250 million active users and growing every day, the Facebook Ads platform is becoming an increasingly important way for performance advertisers to reach their target audience online.

The above excerpt was taken from an article by Justin Smith and published at Inside Facebook on July 27, 2009. Read the article, including detailed explanations of targeting, at Inside Facebook here.