Peter Goodman is CEO of Brighter Option, a Social Media World Forum Eupore 2011 exhibitor, and the digital agency which developed SAM, the Social Ad Manager tool that provides agencies and marketers with a full-service approach to Facebook ad campaign execution.

With more than 500 million users, the sheer scale of Facebook offers advertisers a huge opportunity, writes Peter. However, without understanding what is working and being able to optimise accordingly, Facebook advertising cannot be used to its full potential.

Businesses running larger campaigns with more ad revenue can find there are a large number of issues to contend with. Creating a campaign, segmenting it with specifics; age, sex; demographics and interests, can become extremely time consuming to develop and even more difficult to measure.

Clients want and need to be able to see which ads are performing best and more importantly, when exactly consumers are falling out of their sales pipeline.

The targeting capabilities within Facebook, if used properly, will result in some of the most successful advertising campaigns on the web. Being able to advertise a product or a service to an individual that you know has already expressed an interest in what you sell makes a powerful proposition if used correctly.

Facebook offers a clear insight into what people are actually showing an interest in, thereby enabling advertisers to target exactly those people that are known to be looking for a specific product or service.

This year is shaping up to be a huge year for direct response advertising on Facebook, with more and more brands, both big and small starting to put more of their focus and money into Facebook. Although without greater insights no one will be getting the most from their investment.

Being able to track the conversions of a target audience while continually monitoring and tweaking campaigns to get the results wanted is powerful stuff and there are now several tools out there that can help do just this. There are also some that let advertisers pause and start campaigns from their phones, enabling them to manage campaigns remotely, and giving even greater control regardless of an organisation’s size.

According to recent figures released by Comscore, Facebook has become an online advertising magnet, capturing the greatest number of display ads of any Internet publishing site in the third quarter. In the third quarter of this year, it grabbed 23% of all Internet display ads, or 297bn ad impressions, which was more than the total display ads on Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox and Google sites combined.

You can come and meet some of the Brighter Option team and find out more about what they do on stand 24 at Social Media World Forum Europe 2011 on 29-30 March in London. For more information see the event website.