Facebook Ads | how to set up a campaign step by step

Facebook Ads is the advertising platform of the Zuckerberg network that allows us to show paid ads on the Meta network, that is, not only on Facebook, but also on Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger. Our ads will appear both in the News feed and in the right column of the social network.

It has become one of the most used online advertising channels due to its simplicity, effectiveness and ease of making campaigns profitable thanks, above all, to its great possibilities for segmenting our audience . In this way, these ads can be directed exclusively to the type of audience with the greatest chance of becoming our real customers.

My goal with this post is to serve as a guide for beginners who want to launch effective and, above all, profitable campaigns on Facebook Ads. I do not intend to explain advanced techniques, nor bidding or optimization systems, nor go into technical issues beyond the basic fundamentals to understand how online advertising works with more Internet users. Shall we start?

Why is it worth investing in Facebook advertising?

As I mentioned, Facebook offers us one of the most powerful advertising platforms that currently exist. For this reason, it is not surprising that more and more companies trust Facebook Ads to develop their online advertising campaigns.

These are the keys to the success of Facebook Ads :

• Almost everyone is on Facebook , so we can potentially reach virtually anyone on the planet. And it doesn’t matter if your business is B2B or B2C, any company can apply Facebook Ads strategies.
• Facebook Ads is a demand generation platform , which means that regardless of what the user is searching for, they are automatically shown ads based on their interests, hobbies and behaviors. This represents a significant advantage over its main competitor, Google Adwords, which is a demand fulfillment platform. In this case, a user searches for a keyword and is shown a series of ads related to it in response. On the Google platform, each product has a limited set of keywords that can become very competitive, and sometimes there are certain products or services for which there are no searches because the user does not yet know them.
• Facebook Ads is constantly improving , and is becoming increasingly powerful, versatile and effective as an advertising platform.

The 3 basic elements of Facebook Ads

To begin to familiarize yourself with the Facebook advertising system, you must know the 3 basic elements that make it up : 

1. Campaigns

They serve to define your objectives, such as generating clicks or leads, and are the blocks that include all the other elements of the ads.

2. Ad sets

Ad groups are used to determine the audience to focus on and a defined objective, also specifying aspects such as budget, programming and location. Therefore, if you want to target different audiences, you will need to use a different ad set for each one.

3. Advertisements

These are the creatives of the ads, and there can be several in each of the groups. Within an ad group, different variations of an ad are normally experimented with, in order to refine and optimize the campaign and achieve maximum performance.

The step by step to create a Facebook Ads campaign

1. Create your campaign from the ads manager

The first thing you will have to do to create your campaign will be to access the Facebook profile from which you manage the page on which you will create the campaigns, and in the left side menu you must go to the “Ads Manager” option. 

Immediately, your advertising account will open, and there you must click on the green “+ Create” button. Once the action is completed, this is the screen that will appear:

I will use the “Potential Clients” objective as an example, since with this campaign I will try to get users to interact with my ad so that, through a form on Facebook or on a landing page, they download content to achieve lead capture .

It is important to understand that it is necessary to create different campaigns based on the different objectives of our business . For example, if you want to generate more traffic to your app’s pricing page and, at the same time, increase its downloads, you will have to create two different campaigns with their respective objectives.

2. Set up campaign details

Once our objective has been selected, the following will appear:

Here we must carry out the following actions:

• Campaign name: we will have to give it a name so that it is easy for us to identify the campaign. This title is not displayed to users, it is simply an internal name.

• Special ad categories: if we want to create ads that include any of the following categories: credit, employment, housing or social issues, elections and politics, we must select it in this section, since some countries have specific requirements regarding this type of content. Otherwise, we will simply leave this section blank.

• A/B Test: used to test different audiences, ad texts, images or other aspects to see which one performs better.

• Campaign budget: we will activate the button in this section and enter the desired budget for the campaign. We can select both a daily limit, if we want the campaign to be active indefinitely, and set a total budget if we want it to be published for a certain period. We will also see later that we would have the option to allocate the budget per ad set.

Once the global aspects of the campaign have been configured, you can click “Next”, located at the bottom right of the screen, and move on to the ad group settings, where you will be shown the following page:

3. Set up the ad group

 

So that you can now create your first set of ads, configuring it as best suits the development of your campaign, you must take into account the following points: 

• Name of the ad set: I recommend that you use a self-explanatory name, which refers to the campaign and, at the same time, to the segmentation to which we want to target the ad set. For example, if you have an ad unit for a millennial profile and a different one for middle-aged women, you can indicate it this way in the name of the group.

• Conversion location: Next, the system will ask you to select where you want to generate your leads

• • Website : redirect users to a website external to Facebook, such as a landing page, where they can perform the action you are looking for with the campaign.
  • Instant forms : they are used for the objective of potential clients and allow the user to fill out the form within the same Facebook platform. What we are looking for with this placement is that the lead has the shortest possible journey until converting, since, sometimes, redirecting to the website can generate loading problems that make the user give up on their action.
  • Messenger : Users can interact directly with you by sending a message and asking you questions about your product or service, which makes it easier to convert in the future.
  • Instant Forms and Messenger – This is a combination of the two locations mentioned above.
  • Calls : By simply clicking on your ad, users can contact you at the phone number you enter below. But you have to keep in mind that you must be available to be able to cover that volume of calls, since, if not, you could lose business opportunities.
  • Application : allows you to connect Facebook with an application if you want the action to be carried out within it.

In our case, we will select “Instant Forms”, since we want users to fill out a form with their personal data on Facebook so that they can download the content.

• The next step is to select the Facebook Pixel : it is a fragment of code that is installed on the pages of a website and that allows you to track the actions that users take on them. It is a unique code for all pages, which allows you to define each of the objectives and actions from Facebook itself.

It is very important to create and install this code as indicated by Facebook, since it is what will allow you to track the conversions on your page and, therefore, know if the campaign is profitable for you and what the price of each conversion is. . At the end of the process you will automatically be shown the code that you must install; There is also the option to send it by email.

Once this code has been created and installed, if you did not have it, you will simply have to select it from the ad set drop-down menu.

Please note that, depending on the campaign location we have selected, they may not ask us for the pixel and will simply ask us to select the page associated with our ads or the application, if we have chosen this location.

• For Website and App goals , since the conversion action takes place outside of Facebook, we will be asked to select a Conversion Event . This is a meter of the action you want the user to take on your website or application. Each event has its specific code, which helps us record and optimize conversions, as well as collect data to generate audiences.

For example, if our objective is to redirect the user to a landing page to fill out the contact form, we must insert the code associated with “Potential Client” or “Lead” in the thank you page that we have where we redirect the user once. fill it out, since when you visit that page, it will mean that you have completed it. For more information and details on how to configure and install conversion events, you can consult this link . 

• Dynamic content: Allows you to take various components of your ad (images, videos, headlines, copy, and calls to action) and combine them to see what is best for your audience. It is an ideal optimization tool if you are not sure which type of ad is most suitable.

• • The next step is to select the optimization and delivery of your ad set. Depending on the criteria you select, Facebook will optimize your ads to get the most out of that goal: conversions, page views, clicks, reach, or impressions.

• Budget and calendar: as we mentioned previously, you can set a budget per ad group if what you want is, for example, to enhance the visibility of your ad to one audience more than another. Additionally, this will be where you can set a limited duration for your ad set, if you wish.

• Almost finishing with your configuration, you must define the audience to which you are going to show your ads by adding parameters such as: age range, gender, languages ​​and even interests. In the event that we want to make ourselves known, we can use audiences based on interests; However, if what we are looking for is to impact people who already know our brand, it is a better idea to direct the ads to a personalized audience of people who have already visited your website, rather than based on Facebook interests. Accept another tip: it is best to save your public profile and assign it a self-explanatory name so you can use it again in the future without having to create it again. As you will see, the audience definition step is one of the most laborious in creating Facebook Ads campaigns.
• You must also choose where the ads will be displayed in the “Locations” section . In this block I advise you to try the “Advantage Locations” option, since then Facebook will be in charge of showing your ads in the locations where they can have the most performance.

• To finish configuring the ad group, you have to click on the “Continue” button and it will take you directly to the next block: creating the ad .

4. Create your first ad

Depending on whether we have selected to activate the dynamic content option or not, we will see that we can create several ads, each with just one creative element, or a single ad where we can upload several images and have Facebook automatically optimize them.

Here are general tips for creating ads:

• Try different combinations of text and images and, over time, stick with the one that works best for you.
• Although there are several ad formats (single image or videos, sequence, or collection), it is best to start with single image or video ads because they are the simplest.

Now we will see how to create ads step by step :

• • The first step is to choose the page (for which you must have advertising permissions) and the Instagram account from which your ads will be displayed.
  • Upload an image or video from your computer in the browser , or select a free standard image from those offered by Facebook and edit all aspects of the ad text: the ad title, the text and the call to action that most fits the objective of your campaign.
  • The last step is to select the destination of your ad:
    • Redirect to a website,
    • Create an instant experience, which helps us show a preview of what will be seen on the website to persuade the user.
    • Add the link to a Facebook event, if that is what we are looking for.
    • And finally, and in our case, create a Facebook form. We will simply have to click on the “Create Form” button and fill out all the necessary information that is requested from us to create the destination of our ad.

 

• Finally, select the “Publish” option to submit the ad for review. It is important that you know that they are not published automatically, but are previously reviewed and may be rejected if they do not follow Facebook policies. You can consult them here .

Congratulations, you’ve created your first ad!

Wait! You’re not done, now it’s time to optimize your campaign

Now that you have launched your first Facebook Ads campaign, you surely want to leave a few days of margin for it to begin to gain traction and generate results.

Keep in mind that, generally, a campaign begins to leave the learning phase a week after being launched, and, after these days, the analysis you can do of the results can be much more solid. 

In any case, be sure to periodically check the results of the campaign and optimize it to get the most out of it. Some of the actions you can try are:

• Stop ad variations that involve a higher cost per conversion and create new ones that follow the design and format of those that have had a higher CTR.
• Create new ad sets that target user groups that you’re not reaching with the first ad set, but that you also find interesting.
• Optimize the learning phase by limiting the number of ad sets, otherwise Facebook’s efforts to optimize will be greater and it will take longer to exit this period.
• If we are using automatic placements, check if we are obtaining conversions or good results in all of them; If not, establish manual locations and leave active only those that provide good performance.

And, of course, you can try creating a new campaign with a different objective that allows you to achieve the same result, such as a Facebook Lead Ads campaign, the implementation of which is explained in detail in this article by Daniel Quer .

I hope this article is useful to you to implement your campaigns on Facebook Ads. Why don’t you tell me how you carried it out and what results you obtained?