Facebook Advertising 101: A Cheat Sheet for Event Organizers

Facebook now has over a billion daily active users across the globe. The platform is the ideal place to get your event in front of more people, but free promotion can only get you so far. So how do you take advantage of this powerful platform with your limited ad dollars?

To help you get started with Facebook advertising, we tapped Eventbrite’s performance marketing manager, Sarah Hoffman. In this short guide, she’ll tell you how to use paid Facebook ads for effective event promotion — no matter your budget.

Download the paid Facebook advertising cheat sheet now to learn how to:

• Determine your campaign goals
• Set a budget that works for you
• Craft compelling ads that drive clicks

PREVIEW

One in five pageviews in the United States occurs on Facebook, and the platform now has over one billion daily active users across the globe. So if you’re looking to reach a new audience for your event, Facebook is a pretty tough one to ignore. But if you’re like most event organizers, you probably don’t have a huge paid advertising budget.

Step 1: Set up your Business Manager account

You’ll be tempted to start launching campaigns right away, but first you’ll want to make sure your account is set up to track everything you need it to. Facebook has a great help center with information on pixel setup and implementation.

Adding your Facebook Pixel ID to your Eventbrite event page will enable you to track all website visits for your Eventbrite event. You can also add “Standard Events” to your Facebook Pixel, which enable you to track more granular performance in the purchase funnel for your event (like newsletter sign-ups or ticket purchases).

Step 2: Decide on your campaign goals

Before you launch a campaign, it’s important to first understand your goals and metrics for success. When you create a campaign in Business Manager or Power Editor you’ll first be asked to ‘choose your campaign objective.’ Are you hoping to collect email addresses for a newsletter list? Sell tickets to a live event? Increase visitors to your website? Make sure your Facebook campaign is optimizing to that goal.

Step 3: Create a relevant target audience

Take advantage of Facebook’s sophisticated targeting tools including: targeting by location, demographics, interests, and behavior. Custom audiences are an incredibly powerful targeting tool that Facebook offers, allowing you to advertise to prospects or customers that you already have. Facebook can also create a “lookalike” list of users for you to target that is highly similar to your custom audience, which is great for prospecting new event-goers.

Step 4: Set your budget and schedule

Facebook gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to how to set up your campaign budget and optimization. Don’t get intimidated by all the choices! Here are a few tried-and-true suggestions for these settings: daily vs. lifetime budget; start and end date; bid optimization; automatic vs. manual bidding.