“Everything happens for a reason.” This is a line you hear when things don’t go as planned.
The same thing applies when you run a company. If the leaders were not that inspired enough, then the chance to improve your sales may fade.
What if you can change the result of your business marketing? If you really want to take the lead in your niche of the market, you would gladly accept any opportunity to grow.
It doesn’t happen overnight. You have to study for the basic way to deal with such change. One thing that can help you is social media marketing in this digital age. Businesses cannot attract customers without personalizing the journey.
Why not start with Facebook Ads? 76% of adults use FB daily according to a Sprout Social Study. This is proof that making your own FB ad is the next logical step to growing your brand.
How to Create Your First Ad on FB Ads Manager
This definitive guide will help those who are new to the Ads Manager to learn how to:
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Access the Ads Manager
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Choose an Objective for Your Campaign
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Set Up an Ad Account
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Changing the Ad Set
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Setting Up the Ads
1. Access the Ads Manager
Start by clicking the inverted triangle button on the top left corner of your Facebook account. Click this icon and you will see a drop-down menu of your profile.
Take Note: If you own a page but did not advertise it yet, you’ll see the “Advertising on Facebook” button on this step. If you’re already managing a handful of ads, you’re free to skip this.
Once you click the button, you’re going to see the page for Facebook Business. It’s your call if you want to read the things presented there. You can then proceed to the “Create an Ad” button.
This will show your ad account for the meantime. You will also get a glimpse of what the entire dashboard looks like.
Take Note: In October 2019, the user interface was updated. There are also updates to unused metrics from the previous versions.
If you click Create, Facebook will prompt you to choose between Create complete campaigns or Create campaign shells. Proweaver suggests you click Create complete campaigns. You have the power about the creativity and output of your campaign.
2. Choose an Objective for Your Campaign
Choose among eleven (11) campaign objectives for your ad. They are classified into three (3): Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.
Awareness
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
Consideration
- Traffic
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
Conversion
- Conversions
- Catalog Sales
- Store Traffic
Pro-Tip: Awareness is good only for those who are starting their business from scratch. Use only a limited budget for this if you are going to proceed with using this objective.
Consideration is the most common way you can advertise your product to gain more traction in your target market. It engages them in your post, too.
For traffic and app installs, you can track them through the use of a Facebook pixel plugin. You will get assisted by a digital marketing specialist if you don’t know how to do the installation process on your website.
Conversion can help you take advantage of your e-commerce website. The best advice is to install the Catalog and Pixel Facebook plugins for a detailed summary of reports. This will track how many products are getting the most attention on your site.
After choosing the right objective for your ad, you will click the “Continue” button on the lower right of the screen.
3. Set Up An Ad Account
Third, you make sure the set up of your account is right. You will see the three essential details about your ad account such as Account Country, Currency, and Time Zone.
You must edit these options if you see a wrong detail provided by FB. You may also edit your name for your Ad Account if you wish. Click the “Show the Advanced Option” text below these fields.
4. Changing the Ad Set
Fourth, you have to adjust the Page to advertise, audience, placements, budget, and schedule. But before that, you can set the name of the Ad Set Name into anything you like.
You might think that you can ignore this. No. You should set a name for this. You have easy access to the performance of the sponsored ad after creating many ads in the future.
Page
If you’re managing two or more pages, you select the one page you want to use. After this, you create the audience you like to target.
This option targets specific people you want. That way, you ensure that you’re attracting the right kind of people in your area.
Audience
There are numerous ways to have a great start in attracting the right audience. You can source them out from the following sources:
Your Sources
- Website – Install Facebook pixels to track website visitors.
- App Activity – Select an app currently running on your FB Pages such as chatbot or gaming app.
- Customer List – Upload a .csv or .xls file of your current customers for this.
- Offline Activity – Integrate an API or application programming interface from your physical store operations such as point of sale, call center tech, CRM and marketing software, integration platforms, data partners, or FB marketing partners.
Facebook Sources
- Video – Choose from the videos you uploaded on your page.
- Lead Form – Attract people who signed up from your previous ad. It’s not ideal for first-timers.
- Instant Experience – Audience you get from an Instant Experience ad.
- Instagram Business Profile – Followers from your Instagram account.
- Events – People who got interested in or went to your event.
- Facebook Pages – Other page audience you can reach.
These are some sources you can make instantly. If you feel like it’s not ideal for the business, you can take the customization by changing the values given for Locations, Age, Gender, Detailed Targeting, and Connections.
Suggestion: Always check the Audience Size option on the right side. This checks if your audience is attainable to reach or defined, too specific, or too broad.
Placements
Another thing to adjust is the Placements. There are two choices you can pick: Automatic Placements or Edit Placements.
- Automatic Placements – FB will choose which audience to reach. It ensures you get the most out of your given budget. This is the recommended setting.
- Edit Placements – You have to pick where to show the ads. Choose from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, or Messenger. Choose to reach specific devices like users from desktop or mobile.
If you are particular with mobile devices, you can choose either Android, iOS devices, or feature phones.
You may also exclude your ads from the audience network publishers. These are media agency websites that partnered with the social networking giant.
Budget & Schedule
This is the section where you can set the budget and the timing of your ad once shown to your audience.
Optimization for Ad Delivery
The chosen objective will come out in this section. It shows the event related to the objective either page likes, engagements, video views, link clicks, impressions, app installs, or reach.
Cost Control
Having set this option will lead to a significant jump to finding the right client. Depending on the objective, the amount fluctuates when you are thinking of a unique reach.
The suggested minimum amount for cost control is $5 or 254-250 Philippine pesos to get your ads placed on the right social accounts.
There are also ways on how you can maximize the cost. You may choose the Bid Strategy called Cost Cap to use the entire amount to get the volume of the audience. Or pick Bid Cap to control the bid per auction of ad placements on the social platform.
Budget & Schedule
You can choose between Daily Budget and Lifetime Budget for the ad you will create. Robin & Jesper of Course Envy suggests you choose a lifetime budget to avoid spending too much.
Choose the Daily Budget if you have the money intended for 3-10 days of advertising.
When you schedule your ads, make sure that it will follow the 3-day rule. Two days will not make the cut to find optimal clients.
You set the Start and End Date and Time of your ad for your customization.
If you click the Show More Options link, it will show the other 3 settings you will configure. Namely, When You Get Charged, Ad Scheduling, and Delivery Type.
When You Get Charged
The moment you get charged for the ad is when it reaches the audience you identified. You will see it directly charged to your bill.
Other campaign goals will have a different take on it. Some will only charge you if the client saw the video for 10 seconds if link clicks were made, and others. It may be changed depending on the configuration of your ad.
Take Note: The Ad will get a Not Delivering status when you don’t deposit money on your ad account.
Ad Scheduling
Think about savings when you advertise here. You get two (2) options: Run ads all the time or Run ads on a schedule. This is why you need to broadcast your ad only during the time your target market is awake. It will show a time table on the days you will activate the advertisement.
If you plan to show it during morning, noon, or evening, you shade the portions of these time frames. You click on the appropriate box. When the box is shaded blue, showing of your ads will happen at that exact hour only.
Delivery Type
There are two types of delivery options. You either set it to standard or accelerated.
If you choose Standard, the platform will make sure that your budget is optimized to reaching your audience.
If you choose Accelerated, the social site will speed up the delivery of the ad to finish the distribution earlier than the scheduled end date.
5. Setting Up the Ads
When you reach the Ads section, this will let you customize the appearance and the page which will represent the ads. There are five (5) other sub-sections you will personalize here:
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Identity
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Format
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Media
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Links
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Tracking
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Identity
Select which business page will represent the advertisement during the post distribution.
You can click the rectangular icon that states the name of the business page you will pick. Besides its name, there’s an inverted triangle that signifies you can choose other pages.
If this triangle is missing, you only have one choice in the meantime. You can’t change it unless you are the admin of the page.
Format
There are tons of formats you can choose from their ad. But, you can’t use all of them. It boils down again to what kind of objective you want to reach in this marketing.
Here are the choices:
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Photos
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Videos
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Stories
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Messenger
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Slideshows
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Collection
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Playables
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Instant Experience
Once you reach this stage, click on the format that you deem fit to your goal.
Media
In this sub-section, you need to upload the photo or video for the sponsored post. There are three buttons that you can see here: Add Media, Create Slideshow, and Use Video Format.
Add Media button is for those who want to use their pre-formatted photos and videos.
Create Slideshow and Use Video Format buttons are different. These will proceed to another setting for Video Creation Kit. There are pre-laid options for the kind of business ad you like to make it here. There are guides for your journey in creating that video. You don’t have to worry about losing your ground in the controls.
Links
You will see how the sponsored advertisement will look like. This option will either make or break the impression of your audience.
Make sure you placed the right copywriting and suitable call-to-action button. This, of course, has takeaways you should learn. Here are they:
The image will get masked if it exceeds the 4:5 aspect ratio.
The ad copy will get only 3 lines shown in the mobile version of the ads. This applies to longer texts.
Tracking
To aid you even better, you’re going to see the chances of conversion in this sub-section. This is effective only if you added the required code to set up the tracking API. You can add:
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Facebook Pixel
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App Events
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Offline Events
A web developer can help you set these codes running on the appropriate platform.
After you read through all these considerations, you are now ready to publish your first ad.