Educate yourself through Facebook self-service ads.

Any­one involved in mar­ket­ing, either on the client or the agency side, should take the time to cre­ate an ad on Face­book. It’s not only an incred­i­bly infor­ma­tive process, it’s also quite addictive.

Self-service Face­book ads rep­re­sent almost every­thing that mod­ern mar­keters aspire to achieve: they’re micro-targeted, instantly mea­sur­able and eas­ily optimized.

Now that the num­ber of Face­book users sur­passes the num­ber of peo­ple in the United States, using the platform’s ad tar­get­ing sys­tem can be incred­i­bly enlight­en­ing. With each demo­graphic cri­te­rion you input, the num­ber of pro­file matches adjusts in real-time. For exam­ple, when I select MEN, in the UNITED STATES, at least 21-YEARS-OLD, I get 37.5 mil­lion matches. If I add COLLEGE GRADUATE to the cri­te­ria, the num­ber instantly drops to just over 13 mil­lion. And if I add TEQUILA in the “inter­ests” text field, the num­ber decreases to 26,000.

It can be fas­ci­nat­ing to enter var­i­ous “inter­ests” in the tar­get­ing cri­te­ria. Enter “Cook­ing” and you get 582,000 matches. “Ten­nis” has 457,000 matches. Believe it or not, more than 27,000 peo­ple count “peaches” among their inter­ests. And “Porn” yields more than 26,000 results. What’s more, you can access all of this data for free, even if you never run an ad on Facebook.

But go ahead, run one. In fact, run two. Run one on a CPC (cost-per-click) and one on a CPM (cost-per-thousand impres­sions). Set a small bud­get; say, $50 total. Use the report­ing sys­tem to see how your ads are per­form­ing. Alter your bids to see how it impacts the num­ber of impres­sions and clicks. Change a head­line to see how it affects your campaign’s per­for­mance. Chal­lenge some­one in your depart­ment to see who can opti­mize a cam­paign to gen­er­ate the most clicks $50. Whether you’re a CMO, a brand man­ager, a copy­writer, an art direc­tor, an account exec­u­tive or any­one else involved in mar­ket­ing, it’s about the fastest, most afford­able edu­ca­tion in online adver­tis­ing one can get.