Every business should have an online presence on social media. Facebook is one of the platforms you cannot ignore if you are implementing a digital marketing strategy for your business.

Before we proceed, we assume that you already have a Facebook page for your brand.

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to successfully set up Facebook ads for your business. There are a lot of confusions business owners have regarding advertising on Facebook. 

After serving millions of clicks and impressions for our clients from Facebook and Instagram, we hope to clear those confusions by the end of these tutorials

The  Facebook ad account is simple and it consists of 

  1. Campaigns
  2. Ad Sets
  3. Ads

First, we need to clear the confusion about boosting a post and running an ad campaign.

Let’s start with a post boost.

When you share a post on your page’s timeline just like you share on your personal profile, you can add images or videos. 

Once the post is published, Facebook provides you with an option to boost the post for a budget and you have some targeting options. This is handy for those who do not want really get into the hardcore advertising features of Facebook.

Boosted posts have their own deserved place in the Facebook advertising world but it gets more interesting as we get into running ad campaigns using the Facebook ads manager.

Once you are inside the Facebook ad manager, the first option you will have is to create a campaign.

When setting up an ad campaign you will be given an option to choose between the different campaign objectives to start with. This is where you choose what you would like to achieve with the campaign.

It can be any of the following from the many:

  1. Brand Awareness
  2. Reach
  3. Lead Generation
  4. Clicks to Website
  5. Engagement

If you have an app, you have the campaign objective set for app installs. Since we are working with basics here, let’s move into the next phase which is an ad set.

Facebook uses campaigns and ad sets inside each campaign to organize your ads and targeting.

This is where most advertisers get confused as there is a little bit of a learning curve when compared with other platforms.

If you are targeting different audiences and locations in the same campaign, you could use different ad sets to split test targeting as well as your ads copy and images.

Organizing ad naming structure and your ad sets properly will help you optimize and manage the campaigns more effectively over time.

You can choose placement and devices for targeting in your ad sets.

Once you create your Ad sets you can proceed to create your ads.

Each of your ads should resonate with your ad sets and their audience. You do not want to call out to men in your ads where you are targeting women in your adset.

Also while selecting the placements it is ideal you start with automatic placements till you have some data to optimize.

There are a lot of options in targeting and scheduling an Ad set but these are self-explanatory. Let’s keep this setup simple and more ahead to ad creation.

The better your ads relate with your target audience the more they will interact and engage. The more they engage the less you have to pay for these interactions.

While setting up you have many options to choose from in terms of ad formats depending upon your campaign objective.

The most popular formats are:

  1. Single image 
  2. Videos
  3. Carousel 

As you build your ad, Facebook will give you the preview of your ad on different placements and platforms and devices. You will need to choose your Facebook page on an Instagram page if you have selected both the placements.

In case you have not linked your Instagram and Facebook pages, you still can run ads on Instagram but from your Facebook page.

Then you get to enter the description, text, and headline followed by the URL. This is the destination the user will be taken to if you have selected the click to website objective fo the campaign.

Again, this is obvious that, if you are running ads for a particular service and you offer multiples services on your website, it is advisable to take the user to a custom landing page for the specific services. 

Always connect your adset to the related ad to the landing page

Ad Set -> Ad -> Landing Page

A few other options like JSON structure message which will be useful if you using automated bot or chatbot for messenger ads. Again, let’s not complicate this tutorial with these sections and move on to running click to website campaign only.

You can set a Call to Action button depending on your campaign and ad type. The most frequently used CTA button text would be to “learn more” in a scenario where the user is taken to a landing page or  “Shop now: for eCommerce Store.

Conversion tracking

Since Facebook introduced the universal pixel you can integrate it on your website pages to track conversions and build customer audiences with. We will look into a Facebook pixel in detail in another tutorial.

In case you have integrated Facebook pixel, it should be the first step in the whole process of setting up your campaigns.

Once you are happy with the ad, ad set, and the campaign settings you can place an order after reviewing the same. The ad will go live once approved after review from Facebook

Facebook reviews your ad and if it complies with their policies the ad will go live.

We hope this tutorial gave an idea of a simple ad campaign setup. It might look confusing with all the features and option but if you really want to stick to simple setup, it is really easy and less confusing once you have it executed multiple times, this it becomes easier and will seem much less intimidating.

If you are stuck or have any questions in setting up your Facebook ad campaign contact us today for free ad setup.