Facebook marketing has become a staple for social media marketers over the last few years, and the credit goes to its massive user base. With over 3.06 billion users worldwide, 89% of businesses run Facebook ads as their primary advertising method.
But, running your Facebook ads is a tough nut to crack.
With soaring competition and dynamic algorithms, your ad strategy might end in a black hole, draining your budget altogether.
Running your Facebook Ads needs a well-devised strategy, constant market research, A/B testing and some crucial metrics to map its success.
Download Now: Free Facebook Advertising Checklist
In this guide, we’ve laid down the step-by-step process of running Facebook ad campaigns. And to make it even better, we put together a checklist to help you keep all of your campaign details straight.
With this resource in hand, you can build the right ad for the right audience on this expansive platform.
In this blog, we’ll cover the following:
- Why advertise on Facebook?
- About Facebook Ads Manager
- How to Run Facebook Ads
- How to Create Facebook Ads
- Using Facebook Ads Manager for Your Next Campaign
Why advertise on Facebook?
With nearly 1.9 billion users every day, Facebook offers a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their organic efforts through advertising campaigns.
Compared to the post boost, Facebook Ads have a higher CTR (click-through rates), lower CPM (Cost per 1k impressions), lower CPC (Cost-per-click), and better reach. It also makes sense to run Facebook ads in 2024 when your target audience is worth 2.249 billion.
If you’re still on the fence, these reasons might convince you:
- Build brand awareness. Facebook ads are displayed impulsively while scrolling the feed, whereas Google ads only appear when a user heads over to the search engine. Also, the graphics in Facebook ads garner more clicks and higher awareness from the customers through emotional marketing.
- Reach wide target customers. Facebook has vast user data, with audience segmentation elements like interests, behaviors, income, spoken languages, and education. Advertisers can leverage these metrics to target a specific set of customers without wasting their budget.
- Gain powerful insights. Ad performance tracking is recorded and available in real time. You can use these metrics to understand what’s working and how to improve your advertising strategy for future campaigns.
I’ve even got some real numbers to prove my point here.
- Facebook ad spend is forecasted to reach $187.35 billion by 2025.
- Facebook Ads reach 62.2% of all Americans aged 13 and up.
- The average Facebook user clicks on 11 ads per month.
However, the fortune of your Facebook ads starts with the basics. In my experience, most businesses end up messing with the ads because of the incorrect ad manager setup or a weak foundation.
The trouble is, with both time and money on the line, there’s not much room for oversight.
To help fine-tune your system, let’s first start with an overview of Facebook Ads Manager and its significant features.
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Free Facebook Advertising Checklist
A Step-by-Step Process for Facebook Advertising, Including:
- Planning
- Budgeting
- Monitoring
- Analyzing
Download the Free Checklist
Facebook Ads Manager
Before starting with your first ad campaign, you’ll need to set up your Facebook Ads Manager account. It is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview of all their campaigns.
Over the last few years, the Ads Manager has added various features for the advertisers – complicating the interface.
For quick navigation, the Ads Manager has three campaign structures:
- Campaigns. This is the first part of your campaign structure. The campaign gives an objective of your ad. You can choose what you want from your ad: Awareness, Traffic generation, Sales, App promotions, leads, or engagement.
- Ad sets. This defines your targeting strategy – the audience to which you want to display your ads. You can have multiple ad sets per campaign and different budgets for each.
- Ads. This is the final step in your ad creation. You can create multiple ads per ad set. Try and test with various ad formats and different ad placements.
- Automated ads. This section is only available if you’ve created Automated Ads. This offering is best fit for beginners and those looking for a simple way to gain exposure. The trade-off: You lose the precision you may achieve manually. This section will list all your Automated Ads and a summary of recent results.
How to Run Facebook Ads
- Create an account with Facebook
- Start creating an ad through Facebook Ads Manager
- Choosing buying type
- Choose an objective
- Name your campaign
- Choose your Special Ad category
- Choose A/B split testing
- Set performance goals
- Choose your budget and schedule
- Choose your ad placement
- Ad set up
- Choose ad format
- Create your ad
- Monitor your ad’s performance
- Report on Facebook ad performance
So, now you know the power of Facebook ads manager. Now, let’s explore how to actually run ads. I’ll demonstrate the steps below.
1. Create an account with Facebook Ads Manager.
To use the Facebook Ads Manager, I need a Facebook Business Page (learn how to set one up here). This is because I can’t run ads through personal profiles.
If I were managing someone else’s ads, I would need an admin, editor, or advertiser access to set up ad campaigns.
The next step is setting up my payment. This payment method is used by the Meta business account to charge me for active ads.
Once set up, the Ads Manager becomes the control center for your Facebook ads.
I can also navigate to the Ads Manager through my Facebook page account. On the left panel of the page, click on Ad Center and scroll down to find a link to Ad Manager.
2. Start creating an ad through Facebook Ads Manager.
Once I log into the Ads Manager, I can see a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be listed, including the results they’ve driven for my Facebook page.
Unless I’ve already created an ad for my Facebook page, this dashboard will be empty.
To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ads Manager, tab over to the type of ad I want to create. Click the green “Create” button to the far left of these ad types, as shown below.
3. Choose buying type.
Meta gives users two choices for buying type: Auction and Reservation.
Auctions offer more efficiency, flexibility, and choice for campaign objectives. I can set a daily or a lifetime. Ads can be placed on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. Advantage campaigns are available.
Reservation offers less flexibility but lets you plan your campaigns in advance with more predictable results. Ads can be placed on Facebook and Instagram. Reservation also offers frequency control.
To get a better understanding and clear difference between the two, read their help guide.
4. Choose an objective.
Facebook Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with my campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt me to choose an objective for my campaign.
There are six different objectives to choose from. The list has been cut down from 11 objectives to only six:
By choosing one of these objectives, I’m giving Facebook a better idea of what I’d like to do so they can present me with the best-suited ad options. As shown in the screenshot above, Facebook’s ad options include:
- Awareness. This is great for raising awareness for your brand and boosting customer reach, video views, or store location awareness.
- Traffic, for directing traffic to the website, Instagram page, a specific landing page, or even Whatsapp.
- Engagement. This is great for higher engagement on posts, websites, or any link that you share. Increases the likelihood of receiving messages and conversions.
- Focusing on leads. That includes any action that you want customers to do, like filling out the form, purchasing, booking a meeting, and so on…
- Sales. This objective is for people who are likely to make purchases through a catalog, calls, Messenger, Instagram, or websites/apps.
- App promotions. This is targeted for app installs or compelling audiences to make in-app purchases.
I’d say, setting a campaign objective can decide the fortune of your ads. Choosing the wrong objective will leave your ad unidirectional – giving poor results.
Laia Quintana, marketing head of TeamUp, considers this step a game-changer. She says, “The objective-based approach of Ads Manager allows us to focus on what truly matters — getting more app installs.”
By selecting ‘App Installs’ as their campaign objective,
