How to Set Up Your First Ad On Facebook?

Setting up your first Facebook ad but not really sure where to begin?

Facebook Advertising can be really intimidating. There are lots of options and it can be hard for a beginner to really use advertising effectively.

Hopefully, this post will make things much easier for you.

Top 5 Reasons to Use Facebook Ads

• Highly Effective

Facebook is considered one of the top advertising channels online, and digital ad spend accounts for a whopping 51% of total advertising spend in the US. With close to 1.5 billion daily active users on Facebook, it is really not that surprising either.

• Simple Setup Process

Setting up a Facebook campaign takes little time and can yield excellent results for your business. Digital advertising produces a great ROI and it can happen very quickly with the right campaign and product. That is why you see Facebook ads for small local businesses as well as large corporations.

• Awesome Audience Targeting

Facebook provides tons of detailed ways to reach specific people based on their behavior on your website, their known likes, engagement with your Facebook page, and other various elements of their demographics such as:

• Age 
• Gender
• Location. 

You can create extremely granular audiences that produce a high ROI using Facebook ads.

• Highly Customizable Campaigns

You can construct the perfect ad experience using Facebook ads. Contrary to another big name in the digital ad space, Google, your Facebook ad experience can be designed to attract your perfect audience. That is because Facebook has a wide range of ad formats to choose from.

• Tons of Cool New Features

Facebook is constantly adding more features and improving the user experience for both advertisers and normal Facebook users. This is a large part of why Facebook has sustained growth for so long, it’s always providing more value.

With all this in mind, let’s talk a little bit about how to get started.

How to Set Up Your Facebook Advertising Account

If you’re unsure how to get started with Facebook advertising, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.

Up next, you’ll find step-by-step instructions for setting up your Facebook advertising account.

Let’s start with the Facebook Business Manager Account.

How to Set Up Facebook Business Manager

The Facebook Business Manager is a tool designed to help advertisers manage their Facebook Pages and ad accounts.

P.S. – You can have multiple ad accounts and users all combined under your Business Manager account.

All you have to do to set it up is go to the Facebook Business Manager, and login using your Facebook account.

Once that is done, click on the ‘Business Settings’ CTA and click on ‘Pages’ under ‘Accounts’ in the left-hand sidebar menu.

Since this is a fresh account, you will need to add a business page to manage. So, click on ‘Add Page’ and simply select the page that you are looking to manage.

How to Add Your Advertising Account

To add an advertising account to your Business Manager:

• Go to Business Manager Settings
• On the left, click on Accounts -> Ad Accounts
• In the Ad Account column, click on the blue “Add Account” CTA
• Choose one of the 3 options: “Claim Ad Account”, “Request Access to an Ad Account” or “Create a New Ad Account”
• If you choose to request access or claim an ad account, enter the ad account ID.

Before you can start advertising, you’ll need to give Facebook additional account information and enter your credit card data as a payment method for your ads.

Setting Up Your Ad Account Info

You can’t publish your first campaign without setting up your payment method. This pays for the running of your ads. Once you set up your ad account, you won’t have to do this again until you need to change the payment method or create a new ad account.

Go to your Business Manager and from there, click on  “Ad Accounts” located under “Accounts”. Fill in all the blanks by entering your company’s name, address, and other relevant information.

Setting Up Your Billing & Payment Information

Now it’s time to add our payment method so we can move forward with creating a Facebook campaign. Click on your ad account settings -> Payment Settings. From here, we can insert our cc or payment method details.

You will land on the Billing page where you can:

• Add new payment methods
• Edit your current payment methods
• Set your account’s spending limit
• See your next bill 

To add a new payment method to your ad account:

• Click on “Add Payment Method” button
• Choose the method you want to add
• Fill in your information
• Click on “Continue”

You can expect a bill from Facebook on two occasions:

• At the end of every month
• When you reach your billing threshold (if you use direct debit to pay for Facebook ads)

And now it’s finally time to set up your first ad on Facebook!

The Facebook Ads Manager

The Ads Manager is where you go to create and manage your campaigns, of course! In full, you can use the ads manager to:

• Set up Facebook ad campaigns
• Create new ad sets and ads
• Manage Facebook ad bids
• Target many different audiences
• Optimize your ad campaigns
• Keep track of your campaigns’ performance
• A/B test your Facebook ad campaigns.

There are three ways to access your Facebook Ads Manager account:

• Use this link that will take you to your Ads Manager account.
• Click on the drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner of any Facebook page (that you have Admin access to) and select “Business Manager” in the drop-down menu.
• Use Facebook’s Ads Manager mobile app to access and manage your ad campaigns anytime and anywhere.

If you’ve never used the ads manager before, it can be quite a lot to take in at first. The bulk of your screen will comprisef four tabs:

• Account Overview
• Campaigns
• AdSets
• Ads

Now that you have some understanding of the Ads Manager, it’s time to create our first-ever campaign!

Your First Ad Campaign Ever!

This sounds really intimidating, doesn’t it?

Don’t worry. This stuff is really easy and anyone can do it.

Ready?

Cool!

Step 1: Select Your Campaign Objective

You can choose from a handful of campaign objectives that match your advertising goals. 

For instance, if you are looking to drive traffic to a physical location you would use “Local Awareness”.

If you’re driving traffic to a website, you want to use “Conversions”.

Here’s the complete list of Facebook campaign objectives available:

• Brand awareness
• Local awareness
• Reach
• Traffic
• Engagement
• App installs
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Conversions
• Product catalog sales
• Store traffic
• Messages

You should always select the objective that best reflects your desired outcome for the campaign. If you are promoting a website,  you will most likely be running a conversions campaign.

If your campaign’s end goal is to for example submit information to you via a lead form,  then you should select the lead generation objective instead.

Step 2: Give Your Ad Campaign a Name

After we have decided on our campaign type, let’s give our campaign a name. 

This may seem like a fairly simple step, but it is actually very important to adopt useful naming conventions for your campaigns.

This way, you can easily organize your campaigns as you scale and run more of them. It also sets you up for hyper-efficient reporting later on when it comes time to analyze your results.

For example, you should always include the date range the campaign will be running in your campaign name. Depending on whether you are advertising for your own business or for clients, you can add more elements in your campaign name:

• Client name/ website
• Target Audience/ Location
• Custom Audiences
• Creative Type ( Video? Carousel?)
• Facebook Page, etc

Hopefully, this gives you some good ideas to keep your campaigns organized and simplify reporting later on with custom campaign names. After you select your objective, you can also choose to create a split test on the campaign or optimize your budget.

Creating a split test, or an A/B test allows you to run experiments and collect data that shows you the best performing creative, placement, audience, and delivery optimization strategies

Let’s move on and set up our audience!

Step 3: Set Up the Audience Targeting

Facebook offers a lot of powerful ways to target audiences, and we’ll talk more at length about creating these different audience types in another post. The next step is where you will create your ad sets or audiences.

If we think back to the last chapter, you should recall your main ads manager screen has a campaigns tab, ad sets tab and an ads tab.

The ads and ad sets are contained within your campaign, with the ads containing a specific combination of creative and an ad set containing a specific audience and budget.

In this phase of your campaign setup, you have two options:

• Create a new Facebook target audience
• Use a Saved Audience

P.S. – Custom or lookalike audiences are another extremely powerful targeting option for you.

As you build your audience, Facebook will estimate your daily reach and tell you if your audience is too big, too small or if it’s just right using a meter. 

You can target “likes” or interests on Facebook, behaviors or demographics, and create very specific audiences to target in your campaign.

Step 4: Set Up Your Ad Placement

By default, Facebook will have “automatic placements” selected which can include Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network, but generally will use the placements optimized to give you the best results. 

You can also choose to edit your placements if you have some data on what placement works best for you.

The full list of placements are:

Facebook 

• Feed
• Instant Articles
• In-stream videos
• Right column
• Marketplace
• Stories

Instagram

• Feed
• Stories

Audience Network 

• Native, banner and interstitial
• In-stream videos
• Rewarded videos

Messenger 

• Inbox
• Sponsored messages

Here are the ad placements recommended by Facebook for every campaign objective:

Brand awareness: Facebook and Instagram

Engagement: Facebook and Instagram

Video views: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network

App installs: Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network

Traffic (for website clicks and app engagement): Facebook and Audience Network

Product catalog sales: Facebook and Audience Network

Conversions: Facebook and Audience Network

Step 5: Set Up Your Facebook Ads

The actual ads are what users on Facebook will see, and you want them to look good. This is the final step of your campaign creation process. 

You can select your preferred Facebook ad type and insert your ad images and copy. There are two options here: you can either select an existing Facebook Page post or create new ads.

Note: Before this step, you actually need to set up your Budget and Bidding. But these are huge topics in themselves and they deserve their own separate blog post.

Wrapping Up

That’s all, folks.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

If this post helped, drop a comment and tell us what you would like us to help you with next. Also, don’t forget to share this with more people.

Keep advertising, keep reading our posts, and keep in touch.

Until next time!