With over 2.6 billion users active every month on Facebook, almost every business around the world, whether big or small, is tapping Facebook Ads manager. In the ever-changing trends of digital marketing, Facebook Ads are an evergreen way to engage with the audience and generate leads through targeted Ad campaigns. However, not everyone achieves the desired goals when they set out to manage Facebook Ads despite the time and money they invest in it.

So here we’ve got you covered with the basics of using Facebook Ads Manager step–by–step. It shall help you understand the key steps of creating an Ad campaign with Facebook Ads Manager; so that next time you can run your Facebook Ad campaign with a better setup.

Why Facebook Ads Manager?

People who are not yet aware of the importance of Facebook Ads Manager, must know that the Ads Manager is an all-in-one stop destination for creating, managing, analyzing, and tracking your Facebook Ads. So, there is not just one, but multiple purposes Facebook Ads Manager serves, which include:

  • Creating an Ad campaign, Ad sets, and Ads.
  • Targeting different groups of audiences according to your buyer’s persona.
  • Optimizing your Ads.
  • Analyzing your Ad performance, and performing an A/B test of your Ads.

Now let’s dive deeper into the process of creating Facebook Ads in detail.

How to create an Ad campaign in Facebook Ads Manager

First, visit Facebook’s Ads Manager page to get started (you can bookmark the link). Once you are on this page, you will see a dashboard displaying four tabs that form the structure of Ads manager:

  • Account overview: The account overview tab offers you a glimpse of how your current ads are performing.
  • Ad Campaign: This tab shows all the Ad campaigns you’ve run till now. Remember for every objective, you need to create a separate Ad campaign.
  • Ad Sets: A Facebook Ad set is the second-level container for Ads. You can set your target audience, budget, bid settings, Ad placements, and more on the Ad set level.
  • Ads: This section comprises your actual content – images, copy, videos, which will be live in your Ads. You can add a variety of Ads in a single Ad set.

Now, go to the Ad Campaign, and click on the “Create Tab.” The pop-up will appear where you can choose between “Guided creation” and “Quick creation.”

  • In “Guided creation,” Facebook has already created a step-by-step process that you need to follow to create a Facebook ad. The steps included are; creating a campaign objective, ad set, and the Ad.
  • In “Quick creation,” you need to create the whole structure of your Ad campaign all by yourself. Once you have got some experience creating campaigns under your belt, you can opt for Quick creation.

To make it convenient for you to launch a campaign easily, it is suggested to opt for Guided Creation.

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Define your Ad campaign objective

An integral part of your Ad campaign is your objective. It determines how Facebook runs your Ads. Furthermore, based on your objective, Facebook chalks out other segments of your campaigns like Ad formats, bidding options, and Ad optimization. Choosing the right Ad campaign objective will significantly affect your ad results; that is why you should carefully consider which objective to use for each campaign.

If you are not sure and want to understand different objectives, Facebook Ads manager itself provides a list of Facebook Ad objectives from which you can choose the suitable one according to your campaign goal. For instance, if your end goal is to promote a website; you can opt for ‘Conversions’ as your Ads objective.

Give your Ad campaign a name

Naming your campaign may seem like an inconsequential task, but it requires your attention as much as other aspects. People who are beginning to use Facebook for advertising should know that if you ensure using naming conventions for your campaigns, it will help you easily arrange your campaigns as you scale up.

Whether you are running an Ad campaign for your own business or of clients, you can add these attributes in your Ad campaign. 

  • The date range of the campaign.
  • Client name/ website.
  • Target Audience/Location.
  • Custom Audiences.
  • Creative Type ( Video, Carousel, etc.).
  • Facebook Page, etc.

These elements help you in sorting your campaigns, particularly when you sit to analyze your campaigns later.

Define your target audience

Here comes the most attractive feature of Facebook advertising – audience targeting. This is contained in the ‘Ad sets’ part of your campaign. This way, you can target your audience through multiple Ad sets. Facebook itself offers some powerful targeting options, so you don’t have to do much. You can define an audience based on geography, interests, age, and other criteria. So once you have set up your campaign, you have two options:

  • Create a new Facebook target audience: Select from the criteria asked, suiting your needs. Before you select the criteria, make sure you have created buyer personas for your business.
  • Use already saved audience: If there’s no need for any change in your targets, you can choose from your already created audience. These audiences are people who have already interacted with your brand.
  • Custom audiences/lookalike audiences: You can create audiences based on the traffic on your website using the Facebook Pixel. The Facebook Pixel allows you to measure and build audiences and also track conversions. However, you need to define the custom audiences using Facebook Pixel beforehand, as you cannot define it during the campaign creation process.

As you start giving your audience input, you will see a meter showing your audience’s reach as too wide, too narrow, or just right.

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Set up your Ad placement

Ad placement is another important aspect of your advertising. To reap the best of your Ads, you need to optimize your Ad placements. Facebook has a feature of automatic placement in which it, by default, includes Facebook, Instagram, and the audience networks. However, in order to select the right placements, you need to have some knowledge in advance about what platforms or placements suit your product or service the best. The complete list of placements are:

  • Facebook: Feed, Instant Articles, In-stream videos, Right column, Marketplace, Stories.
  • Instagram: Feed, Stories.
  • Audience Network: Native, banner and interstitial, In-stream videos, Rewarded videos.
  • Messenger: Inbox, Sponsored messages.

How to select the right Facebook Ad placements?

Most of the time, automatic placements are recommended, particularly for those setting up their first campaign. However, your objective may demand some change pertaining to a particular campaign.

Ad placements Facebook recommends for every Ad objective:

  • Awareness: Campaigns under the awareness objective are generally for new brands or businesses expanding to different places. Select brand awareness or reach objectives if your goal is to generate interest and make your brand familiar to a broader audience.
  • Consideration: Consideration objectives are focused on attracting your audience to engage and discover more about your brand. For instance, the lead generation objective enables you to create unique Facebook lead ads with an inbuilt lead-capture form.
  • Conversions: When your lead pool is ready with your target audience, your desired action is to convert them into customers. The conversion objective enables you to choose among a website, Newsfeed, Facebook Shop, or Instagram to track conversions on your ad.

Pro tip: connect your Ad with a landing page first rather than directly redirecting to your website or product page.

Budgeting and Bidding

So if you’ve never run a Facebook Ad before, you would really want to know how the budget works. Facebook offers two kinds of budgets: a) Daily budget. b) Lifetime budget.

The daily budget is the average amount you are willing to spend every day till your campaign runs. This prompts Facebook to reach an audience worth your daily spending. When you set the budget, Facebook shows you the estimated audience reach accordingly. It is the smallest part of your lifetime budget.

Lifetime budget is your overall budget which Facebook divides somewhat evenly across your campaign dates. When you set a lifetime budget, Facebook will ask for campaign running dates, and that’s how it calculates the average spend for each day.

Although, it’s recommended that you set a daily budget without limiting the active campaign dates. The daily budget will help you analyze how your ads are performing daily and the right budget for running your campaign.

Also, note that you cannot change it later once you’ve selected the budget type in your Ad set.

Bidding: Thousands of advertisers use Facebook for advertising, and each of them wishes to hit their target audience. Here comes the role of Facebook bidding – it works as an auction. And to make the winning bid, you need to use the best combination of the best bid, relevance score, and “estimated rate of action.” Unless you have prior experience, it is better to use automatic bidding, which by default optimizes your bidding.

Know what’s missing in your business marketing mix.

Ads delivery optimization

You can optimize your Facebook ad delivery after you have set the budget. However, if you are using it for the first time, it is suggested to go for the “run ads all the time” option. Later on, you can analyze your best day and time to run Ads when you have your Ad data.

The last segment of Ad sets is the delivery type. You need to choose between:

  • Standard Ad delivery: Standard delivery will automatically pace the rate at which your Ads get delivered throughout the day, maximizing your performance within your daily budget. Your budget is distributed across the entire day to avoid exhausting early. If you don’t have the time to check in on your campaigns multiple times a day, choose standard delivery.
  • Accelerated Ad delivery: Accelerated delivery will spend your budget as fast as possible, capturing all the impressions available within your bid. This is great for getting the most amount of impressions in the shortest time possible. On a daily basis, an Ad set may spend all of its budgets before the day is over.

It is recommended that you leave it as Standard Ad delivery only unless you have time-sensitive campaigns for which you can resort to the latter one.

Set up your Ads

This is the last and most crucial step in your Ad creation process. It’s the content of your Ad that drives the engagement you desire out of your campaign. Well, Facebook Ads content is itself a vast subject and which we shall be covering soon. You can choose any of your existing posts or add a new Ad.

Remember, if every other step is going fine, it is your actual Ads that are going to affect your Ad results. Henceforth, it is advised to hire a content creator to create clear yet attractive content.

Publish

Since now you have an idea of every element that goes into your Ad creation, you’re good to go and click on the “Continue” button to publish your Facebook campaign finally.

To conclude…

Long ride…isn’t it? Well, we hope the above information gives you a better understanding of every aspect of Facebook Ads Manager and will help you create your Facebook campaign smoothly. Nevertheless, if you need expert help to scale up your Facebook campaign, our Social Media Mavericks are here to help you at every step.

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Facebook Ads Facebook Ads Campaign Facebook Advertising Paid Advertising Social Media Advertising