Run Facebook Ads: A Complete Guide to Advertising on Facebook
When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked.
Are you targeting the right people? Are your image dimensions to scale? Are you running the right type of ad? If we’re being honest, it can get a little confusing.
How to Set Up a Facebook Ads Campaign
Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements:
- Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets.
- Ad sets. If you’re targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you’ll need an individual ad set for each.
- Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy, images, etc.
1. Set some goals for your Facebook Ads
Before you jump in and create any adverts, it’s important to first think about why you’re advertising and what you’re aiming to achieve. By setting yourself a few goals ahead of going live with ads, you also have something to measure your success against.
For example, if you’re looking to increase downloads of your mobile app through Facebook Ads, you could set a goal of 100 downloads in the first month. This will also help you when it comes to choosing the correct objective for your Facebook Ads campaign in Step 3 below. Some more example goals could be:
- Increase traffic to my website from Facebook
- Increase attendance at my event
- Generate new leads
- Increase the reach of our content on Facebook
- Boost engagement for our Facebook Page
reating an ad through Facebook’s Ads Manager.
You can create a paid ad on Facebook using Facebook’s Ads Manager.
Once you log into this page, you’ll see a performance dashboard where all of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be listed including the results they’ve driven for your Facebook page. Unless you’ve already created an ad for your Facebook page, this dashboard will be empty.
To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ad Manager, tab over to the type of ad you want to create and click the green “Create” button to far left of these ad types, as shown below. You can see from this screenshot that we’re currently set to create a new campaign.
3. Choose your objective
When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 15 options here for what you might want to achieve
Let’s say, for sake of this blog post, you’re looking to drive more traffic to your website. When you select this option, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you’re looking to promote. If you’re using marketing automation software, be sure to create a unique tracking URL with UTM parameters for this to ensure that you’ll be able to keep track of traffic and conversions from this ad.
Once you’ve selected your marketing objective, you’ll then be asked to name your campaign
4. Define your audience and budget
Customizing your target audience
This step is extremely crucial for the success of your Facebook Ads campaigns. The audience for your ad can be customized based on all the following demographics:
- Location, starting with a country, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
- Age
- Gender
- Languages
- Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics
- Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, as well as device usage
- Connections – Choose to show the ad to all people, just those connected to Buffer, or those not connected to Buffer
In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events. You can also further customize your targeting using custom audiences to retarget people who have already interacted with your business.
Setting your budget
Once you’ve selected your target audience, you next need to choose how much you’d like to spend on your ad. When you set a budget, it’s important to remember that this figure represents the maximum amount of money you want to spend. You can also set your budget to Daily or Lifetime:
Daily: A daily budget is the average that you’ll spend every day.
Lifetime: A lifetime budget is the maximum that you’ll spend during the lifetime of your advert set.
5. Choose your ad placements
Advert placement defines where your advert is shown and with Facebook Ads, you’re able to choose which locations your advert will appear in. Adverts may appear in Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and right column. You may also create ads to appear on Instagram.
Facebook recommend using the default placements for the objective you chose, which enables Facebook to optimize placements for you in order to get the best possible results at the cheapest overall average cost.
6. Create your advert
This is where it gets really fun! It’s now time to choose the images (or video), headline, body text, and where your ad will be displayed on Facebook. For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image(s) or video.
There are two ways to create adverts: Using an existing post or creating a new advert. Here’s a quick look at both options.
Using an existing post
For certain types of adverts, such as boosting posts, you can create your ad using an existing post that’s already been shared on your Facebook Page. To do this, select the ‘Use Existing Post’ option from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From here, you can choose which Page you’d like to select a post from and pick an individual post from that Page to use as your advert.
Creating a new advert
If you’d like to create your advert from a blank canvas, the first task is to select the format you’d like to use for your advert. Facebook Adverts look slightly different depending on the results you want. Facebook currently offers 5 various formats for adverts:
Carousel: Create an advert with 2 or more scrollable images or videos
Single image: Create up to 6 variations of your advert using 1 image
Single video: Create an advert with one video
Slideshow: Create a looping video advert with up to 10 images
Canvas: Tell a more immersive story by combining images and videos
The formats available to you will vary based on the objective you set for your advert during Step 3 a little earlier in this post.
Once the format is selected, you need to add the content to your advert (the images or video and the copy). This part is incredibly important to making your advert stand out in within Facebook’s or Instagram’s feeds. If your ad is going to be a success, you want your image and copy to be enticing enough to make people want to click.
7.Place your order
Now, your advert is ready to go. To submit your ad click the ‘Place Order’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live (you’ll receive a confirmation email from Facebook once the ad is live).