You want to boost your brand’s profile or boost sales, but you don’t know how to run Facebook ads? Well, we’ve all had our first time. But fortunately for you, we’ve prepared this guide to make things easier.
There’s a lot that needs to be done when preparing a Facebook ad. You’ll need to ask yourself if you’re targeting the right people, if images are scaled properly, will you run the right type of advertisement?
It can become a little confusing.
Facebook offers a variety of options and ad placements, but all Facebook ads can be broken down into three categories.
Campaigns: A campaign contains all of your assets.
Ad Sets: If targeting different audiences with differing characteristics, you’ll need an individual Ad Set for each audience. Each Ad Set can hold a variety of ads that vary in images, copy, etc.
Ads: Your actual ads within the Ad Set.
Now that we have the terminology down, let’s dive into creating an ad.
How To Run Facebook Ads
1. Create a Facebook Ads Manager or Facebook Business Manager account.
2. Start creating an ad through Facebook Ads Manager or Facebook Business Manager.
3. Choose an objective.
4. Choose your audience.
5. Set your budget.
6. Create your ad.
7. Monitor your ad’s performance.
8. Analyze and report your Facebook ad metrics.
1. Create An Account
The Facebook Ads Manager is part of the Facebook Business platform that serves as a dashboard for the management of single or multiple business pages.
In the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard you’ll be able to see an estimate of daily ad spend. You have ready access to key metrics for advertisements. You can almost instantly see the reach, frequency, and cost of your ads.
However, to use Facebook Ads you’ll need a Facebook Business page because ads can’t be run through personal profiles.
1. Point your browser to https://www.facebook.com/business/tools/ads-manager.
2. Click the button that says “Go To Ads Manager”.
3. Confirm your information on the account setup page.
4. Setup your method of payment.
5. Save changes.
The Ads Manager is now your central control station for all of your ads running on Facebook.
2. Start Creating An Ad Using Facebook Ads Manager
After logging in you’re greeted by a dashboard that is blank if you haven’t run any ads. However, if you are running ads you’ll see information about your campaigns, ad sets, an ads displayed on the dashboard.
To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad using Facebook Ads Manager, click on the tab of what you want to create and then click the green “Create” button. You can see in the image below that we’re about to create a new campaign.
3. Select An Objective
Like with many online advertising platforms, your ad objective is an important consideration. The first thing Facebook Ads Manager will do is to ask you for the objective of your campaign.
There are 11 objectives to choose from in Facebook Ads Manager. Choices range from basic brand awareness to increased app installs and increasing traffic to your online store. Choosing one of these objectives gives Facebook a better idea of what you’d like to do and to provide you with he most suitable ad options.
Facebook’s ad options include:
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
- Website Traffic
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead Generation
- Messages
- Conversions
- Store Traffic
- Catalog Sales
For example you have a blog post and you want to increase traffic to your blog site. After selecting this option Facebook will ask you for the URL you want to promote. If using marketing automation software, be sure to use a unique tracking URL to ensure you’ll be able to monitor and track traffic originating from this ad.
Once selected, Facebook will display the ad option that is the most suitable to the objective.
4. Set Your Audience
The next step is to tell Facebook Ads Manager your target audience. An audience can be set for each ad set of a campaign. If you’re just starting our with Facebook Ads, you’ll likely need to experiment with targeting options until you find the audience that’s just right for you.
Facebook does help you by displaying a targeting gauge on the right hand side of the screen. This is intended to assist with the narrowing of your focus. It considers all of your selected properties to give you a number for potential reach.
If you’re on the fence between a specific audience over a broad audience, take your objectives into consideration. If you want to drive traffic, it’s probably best to target the people you know will be interested in what you offer. On the other hand, if you want to increase brand awareness, it’s probably best to cast a wider net.
Facebook’s targeting provides an almost overwhelming list of targeting options.
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Languages
- Relationship
- Education
- Work
- Financial
- Home
- Ethnic Affinity
- Generation
- Parents
- Life Events
- Interests
- Behaviors
- Connections
You can even create a custom audience which allows you to target individuals in your own company database, visited your website, or have used your app.
Once you’ve found a group that is responsive to your ads, Facebook will allow you to save these audiences for use in the future. This saves you from going through the targeting step once you’ve been running Facebook Ads for awhile.
5. Set A Budget
Facebook allows you set a daily or lifetime budget for your ad. We’ll take a look at each.
Daily Budget: If you want your ad to run continuously through the day, this will be the option you want to choose. A daily budget means Facebook will pace your spending throughout the day. Just remember that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD and must be at least 2x your CPC.
Lifetime Budget: If you want to run your ad for a specific length of time, choose the lifetime budget. With this option Facebook will pace your spending through the time you’ve set for the ad to run.
You can further specify your budgeting by expanding the Advanced Options. Clicking the Show Advanced Options text will open to reveal an area where you can specify some more detailed considerations.
Schedule
Choose whether your campaign is going to begin running immediately and continuously or have a set start and end date. You can also establish parameters so your ads only run on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day.
Optimization & Pricing
You can choose whether you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. This will alter how you’ll pay for your ad to be shown to people within your target audience who are more likely to take your desired action. However, Facebook will control the amount of your maximum bid.
If you don’t want Facebook to control your bids, opt for manual bidding. This option gives you full control over how much you’re willing to pay for a completed action. Facebook will provide you with a recommended based on the behavior of other advertisers to0 give you a sense of what you should be setting for your own ads.
Delivery
There are two delivery types for your ads; standard and accelerated. Standard delivery displays your ads throughout the day. Accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience quickly; which is most relevant to time-sensitive ads. Accelerated delivery requires manual bid pricing.
6. Create Your Ad
Now it’s time to create your ad, so what do you want it to look like? Part of how your ad looks will be determined by your objective.
If you’re objective is to increase website traffic, Facebook will suggest a Click To Website button. Makes sense? We think so too.
Facebook offers a variety of presentation styles, but will present its recommended design for you ad objective. Options range from a single image, video ads, or even mini sites within Facebook.
Once you decide on your ad design, you’ll need to upload your creative assets. Be mindful of the fact that each ad design has its own requirements that users will need to adhere to when it comes to the ad design.
For example, single image ads, the most basic ad type has the following requirements:
- Text: 125 characters
- Ad Headline: 25 characters
- Image Ratio: 1.91:1
- Image Resolution: 1080 x 1080 pixels
Also note that images may not contain more than 20% text.
Remember: We’ve only gone over information for the “Traffic” objective.
If, for example, you chose “boost your posts”, you’d then be presented with different ad design options such as a Page Post Engagement Photo ad. This ad has its own image requirements and design recommendations.
After selecting an ad type the Ads Manager will ask you how you’d like to display your ad. They’ll offer placements on both Facebook and Instagram. As Facebook grows more ad placements will be offered. The most common are the Desktop & Mobile News Feeds, and Instagram.
This is how each will appear:
Desktop News Feed
Mobile News Feed
Instagram Feed
Stories
7. Monitor Ad Performance
You’ll be able to keep an eye on your ad’s performance once it’s running. To see how your ads are doing, you’ll want to check two places; Facebook Ads Manager and your marketing software.
These are some of the key metrics to monitor (and their definitions, per Facebook).
Performance: A measurement that can be customized to include metrics like results, reach, frequency, and impressions.
Engagement: Metrics such as Page likes, Page engagement, and post engagement.
Videos: Used to measure video views or the average percentage of video viewed.
Website: A performance metric that can be customized to track website actions such as link clicks, downloads, checkouts, payment details, purchases and add to cart actions.
Apps: Used to measure app installs, app engagement, credit spends, and mobile app engagement along with cost per app engagement.
Events: A metric that can be tailored to measure event response and cost per event response.
Clicks: For the measurement and reporting of clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click through rate), and CPC (cost per click).
Settings: This can be adjusted to limit data shown based on start and end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid, and objective.
You don’t have to measure all of these metrics, because not all may be relevant to your ad goals. However, you will need to measure at least some so you know well (or poorly) you ad is doing.
When analyzing your ad’s performance, you need to think at 4 levels.
- The Account Level
- The Campaign Level
- The Ad Set Level
- The Ad Level
Account Level
The Account Level gives you a high level overview of all campaigns.
The Account Level view is accessible by simply clicking on the Account Overview tab in the Ads Manager. From there you can customize the metrics and timeframes you want to be displayed.
Campaign, Ad Set, or Ad Level
You can dig deeper and get more specific with your analytics by drilling as far down as the metrics for an individual ad. This can help you greatly in understanding and recognizing which messages resonate the most with your audience.
Just navigate to the Campaign, Ad Sets, or Ads tabs next to the Account Overview in the Ads Manager.
8. Reporting Facebook Ad Performance
You don’t need to login to view the metrics of your ads. You can receive reports via email. Here’s how to set it up:
1. Go to Analyze & Report through the Upper Main Menu.
2. Choose Ads Reporting.
3. Select Create Custom Report.
4. Select and open a saved report.
5. Choose Save As next to the save icon. Name your report and check Schedule Email.
6. Simply follow the prompts to edit and then confirm your reporting preferences.
There’s certainly a lot of information and details that you need to keep in mind when considering how to run Facebook ads for your brand, but don’t lose the view of the bigger picture. Click and conversion reporting is important. However, if using URLs with specific UTM codes, you can use your marketing software to measure funnel effectiveness.
Now you know how to run your own Facebook Ads, so get going and create your next Facebook ad to increase brand awareness, generate traffic and leads on the platform.
Let’s Talk About Your Brand
shane@3catslabs.com | Call +65-3159-4231
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