Before you can get people to buy or use your product or service, you'll need to build awareness. Awareness is about introducing your product or brand to the world. It's about the story that you create and how that story resonates with the people who matter to your brand.

What are some advertising tools that brands use to build awareness?

• TV
• Print
• Radio

Once people are aware of your product or service, you want them to start thinking about it and looking for more information. At this stage, people may not necessarily make a purchase, but they may start to. At the consideration level, you may want people to register or download something related to your product or service, complete a purchase or buy something that they weren't planning to purchase.

How do some brands get people to consider their product or service?

• TV
• Print
• Online display
• Direct mail

You've spent time spreading the word about your product or service. At the final stage, you want people who are aware of your brand and have considered your product or service in the past to make a purchase either offline or online. You also want to nurture new customers and get them to purchase again in the future.

How do some brands get people to make an online or offline purchase?

• Search
• Yellow Pages

Targeting is one of the most important benefits of advertising online because it gives you the ability to show your ads to specific types of people.

Bear in mind that not all digital advertising is the same, and most online advertising tools have limited targeting options. For instance, you may see targeting options such as location, age, gender, interests and potentially a few others depending on the advertising platform.

However, Facebook is different.

People on Facebook share their true identities, interests, life events and more. With over one billion active users on Facebook, advertisers have the option to target their Facebook ads to the types of people who matter most to their business.

Facebook targeting options

• Location: Reach people based on country, county or region, current city or postcode

• Age and gender: Narrow your audience based on age and gender

• Language: Target your ads to specific languages

• Interests: Reach people based on the interests that they've shared, their activities, the Pages that they've liked on Facebook and closely related topics

• Behaviours: Reach people based on purchase behaviours or intents, device usage and more

• Connections: Reach people who are connected to your business' Facebook Page, app or event, or their friends

• Custom Audience: Create your own audience using your pixels, email addresses, phone numbers or app user IDs

  Lookalike audience: Reach people who are similar to your audiences

With online advertising, you can control the schedule and budget of your ads. Most online tools also allow you to choose where your ads appear online, and in what format.

Digital advertising allows you to track data on how your ads are performing in real time. If your ads are underperforming, you can turn them off. If a particular ad is performing really well, you can increase its budget to reach more people. On Facebook, you can also use what's called a Facebook pixel. The Facebook pixel allows you to track whether a person saw your ad and then completed an action that you care about, such as making a purchase on your website.

Online ads typically have the following parts:

• Ads creative: The ad image and text that shares your message to your audience.
• Targeting: The audience that you're targeting your ad to.
• Placement: A place where the ad appears (e.g. in search results, in a social media feed, somewhere on a web page).
• Bid: The amount that you're willing to pay to have customers see your ad and click on it or take some other action. On Facebook, you can use automatic bidding (your bid will automatically be optimised to help you reach your objective). Or, you can choose manual bidding and set your own maximum bid.
• Budget: The amount that you want to spend for your whole advertising campaign.
• Schedule: The length of time that you want your ad to run for.

• Advertising objective: The goal that you want to achieve with a particular advertising campaign. For example, your advertising objective may be to get more people to see your ad and then sign up for services on your website.
• Targeting: The process of choosing the people who you want to see your ads.
• Remarketing or retargeting: A marketing technique that lets advertisers target people who've already visited a website. For example, if you look at a pair of shoes on one website, you may see an ad for those shoes on Facebook if that advertiser is using remarketing.

For many online advertising platforms, ads that you create will then compete against each other in an ad auction, which is an online market that's similar to an auction in real life.

Take a look at the example below to see a typical auction process:

1. Lee visits a website that has advertising.
2. The website gathers ads that are targeting their message to someone like Lee, based on things such as age or location.
3. The bid that an advertiser placed when creating the ad will be used to compete against other advertisers who are also trying to reach Lee.
4. The auction selects the winning ad based on the advertisers' bids and targeting.
5. The winning ad is shown to Lee.

Once your ad has been shown on an advertising platform or website, you may see some of the following terms when results of your advertising campaign start coming back:

• Clicks: The number of clicks that your ads get from people who've seen them.
• Click-through rate or CTR: The number of clicks that you received divided by the number of impressions.
• Impressions: Advertising platforms may measure impressions differently. At Facebook, impressions are the number of times that your ad entered someone's screen for the first time.
• Reach: The number of people your ad was shown to.
• Frequency: Frequency is the average number of times that your ad was shown to a person.
• Cost per 1,000 impressions or CPM: The average amount that you've paid to have 1,000 impressions on your ad.
• Cost per link click or CPC: The average cost that you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. This number is calculated by dividing the amount of money that you spent on an ad by the number of clicks that it received.
• Conversions: Conversions are actions that customers complete, such as making a purchase or adding to a shopping basket on a website.
• Attribution: Before someone purchases a product or service, they may see several pieces of marketing for that product or service. For example, they can hear a radio ad, see a billboard and then see an online ad. Attribution looks at those different marketing efforts and gives each credit for contributing to someone making that purchase. Bear in mind that marketing platforms may have different attribution models and ways of assigning credit.

It's important to know how to measure the success of your online advertising campaign. Understanding your campaign's success will help you to figure out what you're getting for the amount of money that you've spent on advertising. This is called return on advertising spending or ROAS. Once you know what your ROAS is, it will help you figure out how to plan future advertising campaigns.

For example, say that you own a hair salon and get about 30 appointments booked online per week. You decide to spend £25 on a one-week advertising campaign to increase the number of appointments booked online. When your campaign is finished, you see the following results:

• 10,000 people saw your ad.
• 60 people booked an appointment online.
• You spent £0.42 per booked appointment (also referred to as a website conversion).

If you feel that this £25 was a good investment for your business, you may want to create similar advertising campaigns in the future.

Every advertiser is unique and may need to set their own goals for how well their ads are performing. Here are some suggestions for understanding your advertising results and setting goals to improve your results:

• Did I meet my targeting goals? Compare the targeting that you defined with the results that you see. It's a good sign if people in your targeted audience are the ones who are interacting with your ad. If people outside of your audience are seeing your ad, you may need to adjust that audience (e.g. make your audience more specific).
• How much am I spending per action on my ad? Your advertising results should show you how much you've paid per action on your ad. For example, if you spend £25 on a campaign and get 60 clicks, you've spent about £0.41 per click. As you continue to run ads, you'll want to increase the number of actions while lowering the cost of each action.
• Am I spending the amount that I set in my budget? Even though you've set a budget amount, you may not spend that entire amount because your ad isn't delivering to your audience. This can happen in ad auctions. Factors such as low bids or the quality of your ad may also affect the delivery of your ad. If you see a trend where you aren't spending your budget amount, re-evaluate the amount that you're setting.

You may be asking: "How many of these new appointments are a result of my ad?" For objectives such as Website Conversion, you can use the Facebook pixel to see how many of these booked appointments were made after someone clicked your ad. The Facebook pixel is a piece of code added to your website (as an invisible 1x1 pixel image). The pixel lets your advertising platform know when someone visits or takes an action there. Learn how to create a Facebook pixel.

When creating future advertising campaigns, look at previous successful campaigns and ask yourself:

• Who was in my audience?
• What did the image and text look like in my ad?
• How long did I run my campaign for?
• How much did I spend?

You can create campaigns similar to the ones that have succeeded in the past or you can test out different versions of that campaign to understand what makes that ad do so well. For example, try running multiple ads with different images, headlines or target audiences to compare the results.