Facebook Ads Guide for Beginners

Let me guess… Do your clients want to advertise their brand on Facebook? Do you feel a bit out of your comfort zone developing a campaign using Facebook Ads Manager? If your goal is to increase the number of interactions and design your own campaigns with Facebook Ads Manager successfully, stay with us.

We have prepared a detailed Facebook ads guide with essential and clear information that will help you in the process of creating ads with Facebook, so you can reach all your goals.

More information about managing Facebook Ads campaigns with Metricool by clicking here.

What are Facebook Ads?

Before getting started with this Facebook ads guide, it’s important that you know what exactly Facebook ads are and how they can help you with your campaigns. Facebook offers an ad platform, called Facebook Ads Manager, that will assist you in the process of creating your advertising on Facebook.

Although there is another tool, Meta Business Suite, which allows you to create and run ads across both Instagram and Facebook, today we are just focusing on Facebook Ads Manager.

Through this tool, you can design and create your ad campaigns so you can get more interactions, higher traffic to your website, increase the number of followers, more sales, more subscriptions, etc. Thanks to segmentation and targeting, you can reach your target audience easily. However, at the end of the day, the ultimate goal should be that your brand or company increases their profit.

How Do Facebook Ads Work?

Facebook has its own internal ads builder, called Facebook Ads Manager. Through this, you can build and customize campaigns to reflect your brand goals.

You can create multiple “Ad Sets” inside one campaign. This allows you to create different versions of your campaign in case you want to feature different graphics, or optimize it depending on where it appears.

You can either choose for Facebook to select the target audience for you, based on your account demographics, location, and profile information, or you can select your own.

In terms of how “success” is measured, likes and comments are considered engagement, and clicks are recorded as cost per click, click-through-rate, and others.

Advertising Targets and Types of Campaigns 

What type of ads can you create with Facebook ads? Not sure? Don’t worry, that’s why we are here, to give you all the info you need step by step.

But before we get started with the different types of campaigns that you can create with Facebook ads, it’s crucial that you establish a clear goal for your ad:

1. Increasing brand awareness of your business on this social network.
2. Reach a wider audience.
3. Direct traffic to your website, app, or another specific location.
4. Increase engagement of your content and profile.
5. Promote app downloads.
6. Get more views on your videos.
7. Generate leads and capture more potential customers.
8. Generating sales and conversion growth.

Different types of Ads on Facebook 

Now that you have clarified your goals, the next step is to determine the type of ad that you want to create. Pay attention to all your possibilities and choose the one that adapts better to your needs!

✔️ Brand Awareness: This is a great option if you’re looking for building brand awareness and reaching people who will probably identify with your brand. You will strike a higher number of users related to your brand with this type of ad.

✔️ Traffic: Increase clicks and help boost sale conversions or promote an event by directing traffic to a specific landing page, website, or event page.

✔️ Increase the number of likes, shares and comments. This is your best chance to get it. This type of ad is known as promotional publication and it will help to boost engagement. Send more people to your Facebook page, website or online store with this type of campaigns.

✔️ Lead Generation: Is your goal to increase subscriptions? With this type of campaign, it will be so easy. In the same ad, you can collect all the relevant info using a form that people who interested in your business will have to fill out. You will decide the data that you want from them, such as: name, email address, phone number, etc.

✔️ App installs: Do you have an app for your business? Thanks to this feature you can get more people to download your app. Check it!

✔️ Sales: With these ads, you can obtain the conversions that you need. For example:

• Sales on your online store
• Subscriptions to your blog newsletters
• eBooks downloads
• Get your services hired

However, it’s important that you use Facebook tracking pixel to monitor all your conversions. Is this all Greek to you? Simply follow Facebook’s guidelines when you are creating your ads. This pixel is nothing more than a piece of code that you will insert on your page head to help you measure and monitor users that viewed your ad.

• Product Catalog Sales: Create ads for all items from your catalog.
• Store Visits: Is it possible to run campaigns to reach clients located near your business? With this feature, you can promote the location of your store and increase the number of visits.

How to Create a Campaign using Facebook Ads Manager

If this is the first time that you are going to create an ad using Facebook, don’t be afraid, we will show you in great detail how to use this social network to run your campaigns. Follow all our directions!

Let’s suppose that you want to promote one of your Facebook posts to increase the number of interactions. Once you have published your post on your page, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Create your Facebook Ads Manager Account

First things first, you need to ensure your Facebook Page is a Business Account. From here, you need to create your Ads Manager account.

Click here to find more information about getting started with your Facebook Ads Manager account.

Step 2: Design your Campaign 

Go to your Facebook profile or company page and choose the option “Create Ads” that you can find in the drop-down menu on the top-right side.

Step 3: Campaign Objective 

Once you are in Ads Manager page, select the campaign objective. For this example below, you can see this is an Awareness campaign.

Step 4: Campaign Name

Before setting up your ad account, you must choose a name for your campaign.  We advise you to choose the objective name so, “Awareness” followed by a word that you think will best identify your ad. For example, Awareness Carnival.

You can also choose if there are any special ad categories, such as credit card offers, job offers, housing, social issues, or elections.

There is an option to turn on A/B testing, which tests different campaign versions to see which version has worked best.

Lastly in this section, you can opt to turn on advantage campaign budget, which will distribute your budget across all ad sets.

Step 5: Goal, Budget, and Schedule

These next steps are arguably the most crucial. This is where you will really start to customize your ad, based on your brand goals and target audience. First, you will select the overall goal for this campaign.

Then you will select the budget and schedule in which the ad will run. You can either select both a start and end date, or just the start date. If you don’t select an end date, the campaign will end once the budget has run out.

Step 6: Choose your target audience

Do you have a specific buyer in mind? Who do you want to reach with your ads?  This is probably the most important step of your campaign since it will determine the success of it.

The audience is broken down into location, age, gender, interests, behaviors, and preferred language.

You can either create a custom audience, based on people who have already interacted with your business, or select a lookalike audience, which reaches new people on Meta who have similar interests.

After creating custom audiences, you can save these for future use.

Step 7: Placements

Where do you want your ads to be shown?

You can either use Advantage+ placements, where Facebook chooses the placements based on where they think will perform the best.

You can choose manual placements which give you the following options:

Platforms:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Audience network
• Messenger

Then you will decide which placements you want for your ad, which include:

• Feeds
• Stories and Reels
• In-stream ads for videos and reels
• Search results
• Messages
• Apps and sites

Step 8: Review and Publish

Your campaign is ready to be launched but you can have a quick last look to make sure everything is correct. There is still time!

Click on “Review” and once you are satisfied with your choices you can click on “Publish”. Facebook will review it to check that all the requirements to be published are met and in a few minutes, your ad will be available and running.

Want to know more techniques to create the perfect strategy on Facebook?

Complete guide about Facebook Marketing

Are you ready to start running your first campaign with Facebook ads? Start today, remember that practice is the best way of learning.

How to Promote a Post From Metricool

If you have your Facebook Ads account connected to Metricool, you can promote a post that you think deserves a boost, or if it has succeeded a lot, get more interactions.

These ads from Metricool allow you to promote your post for two days with the objective of reach and with the budget you want. But, it will be Facebook who decides what you invest each day.

To promote a post published from Metricool:

• Enter Metricool and go to the Analytics section; choose Facebook and click on Post.
• In the Post section, choose the post you are interested in promoting and click on ‘Boost‘.
• Choose the budget you want to add and tap OK.
• All done!

You now have your post promoted from Metricool, now you only have to see how it worked and how it has improved.

How to Analyze the Performance of Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

From Facebook Ads Manager itself you can check the metrics of your ad campaigns. It will help you to decide whether a type of advertising is profitable or to implement some changes to your strategy. You can also discover what types of ads work best. 

However, it’s true that Facebook Ads platform is a bit complicated to use and interpret, this is why I come with an alternative that you will probably like… 

Metricool monitors and plans your social media content and also lets you analyze your Facebook Ads metrics and manage and make changes on your Facebook and Google campaigns from the same platform.

Besides, you can download reports of all your campaigns with a Premium version. So, do you want to give it a try?

Laura Montells , 01 August 2023