Facebook has over 2.6 billion monthly users per the latest estimates. It is the single largest social media platform, way ahead of the other top platforms.
This represents a unique opportunity for marketers to use it as a marketing and advertising platform. With the potential to reach billions of people, it really is a great place to advertise. However, a lot of people still don’t know how to create and run Facebook ads. Luckily for them, Facebook offers a powerful tool called “Facebook Ads Manager” which makes it easy to create and run ad campaigns. In this post, we will discuss the detailed process of using the Facebook Ads Manager to create ad campaigns. We will also give you actionable tips to help you get better at it. Let’s get started.
Facebook advertising offers ecommerce entrepreneurs extensive targeting options. Notably, you can reach people not just by location (countries, states, cities, and even zip codes), gender, and age, but also by interests, behaviors, life events, and many other alternatives.
In addition, you can promote pretty much any content suitable for your business using Facebook advertising tools: from text posts, photos and albums, to videos, events, offers, and, of course, links to your website.
When you combine an enormous user base, incredible targeting options, and a variety of ad objectives, it becomes clear why Facebook advertising is truly a powerful tool for ecommerce marketing.
This represents a unique opportunity for marketers to use it as a marketing and advertising platform. With the potential to reach billions of people, it really is a great place to advertise. However, a lot of people still don’t know how to create and run Facebook ads. Luckily for them, Facebook offers a powerful tool called “Facebook Ads Manager” which makes it easy to create and run ad campaigns. In this post, we will discuss the detailed process of using the Facebook Ads Manager to create ad campaigns. We will also give you actionable tips to help you get better at it. Let’s get started.
Why Facebook Advertising?
With more than 2.45 billion monthly active users on Facebook, some of your potential customers are definitely using the platform. The only question is how to reach them effectively.Facebook advertising offers ecommerce entrepreneurs extensive targeting options. Notably, you can reach people not just by location (countries, states, cities, and even zip codes), gender, and age, but also by interests, behaviors, life events, and many other alternatives.
In addition, you can promote pretty much any content suitable for your business using Facebook advertising tools: from text posts, photos and albums, to videos, events, offers, and, of course, links to your website.
When you combine an enormous user base, incredible targeting options, and a variety of ad objectives, it becomes clear why Facebook advertising is truly a powerful tool for ecommerce marketing.
What is 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.
Now, let’s take a look at the practical aspect of where exactly you can find it.
Here are three ways to access this tool:
• First, you can simply click on this link.
• Second, you can go to your Facebook page and click on the + icon. Select Ad and it will take you directly to the Facebook Ads Manager.
For new users, we recommend using the Ads Manager on a desktop to get familiar with the interface. Once you are proficient enough with the tool to create and manage ads on-the-go, you can use it in the mobile app.
Now that you know the basics, let’s get started with the actual process of creating an ad using the Facebook Ads Manager.
How Do Facebook Ads Work?
In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll learn how Facebook ads work.
Facebook’s goal is to find the most effective way to allocate the limited advertising space they have.
They achieve it by running thousands of mini auctions every second, with advertisers competing against each other for ad space. If you happen to win the auction, you’ll be charged and your ad will be displayed to the audience you defined and chose.
And how much does Facebook advertising cost?
Well, it depends.
Because of these auctions, your Facebook advertising costs will depend on many factors. These include your ad’s target country, audience, placement, and just how good they are.
For example, there’s much more competition in the US, so you’ll have to pay more to reach the same amount of people compared to a cheaper country like Thailand. Even within the US, some audiences can be twice or even three times more expensive to reach. The only way to find out is to test it for your own business and evaluate the results.
In fact, Facebook advertising involves a lot of testing. Try out what you think will work and adapt your campaigns to optimize them. And remember, there’s no such thing as wasting money on Facebook, because all the things you learn from trial and error will help you over the long term.
Now that you know how Facebook advertising works, let’s have a look at how to create an actual campaign.
Facebook Advertising Guide:
In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll learn how to set up an account.
If you haven’t created any Facebook advertising campaigns yet, you’ll have to first set up your ad account in Facebook Ads Manager.
Account Settings
Go to Facebook Ads Manager and select your ad account. Then, click on “Settings” in the drop-down menu in the top left.
Once you’re there, fill in your ad account name and check whether you’re buying ads for business purposes.
Next, fill in the remaining info on your business name, address, country, EU VAT number (if applicable), and whether you’re an ad agency.
Billing
Next, add a new payment method.
Staying in “Settings”, select “Payment settings” from the left-hand menu and click on “Add Payment Method”.
Choose how you’d like to pay (by card, PayPal, or a Facebook ad coupon) and enter your payment details.
Once you’re happy with the account settings and billing, let’s move on to researching your audience.
How to Create Ads Using the Facebook Ads Manager
Once you open the Ads Manager, you will see four tabs—Overview, Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. The Overview tab gives you a summary of performance data for your active campaigns. The Campaigns tab shows all the campaigns that you have created.
Ad sets are a part of a campaign and you can have multiple ad sets for each campaign. These can be viewed from the Ad Sets tab. Similarly, an ad set can have multiple ads and each individual ad can be viewed from the Ads tab.
So, if you have active campaigns and want to create a new ad or ad set, then you can go the respective tabs to do that. However, for the scope of this post, we will focus on creating a new ad campaign from scratch.
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Step-by-Step Guide to Create a New Facebook Ad Campaign
Here is the process that you need to follow to create and run a Facebook ad campaign.
1. Go to the Campaigns tab and click on Create.
2. The first step is to select a campaign objective. You will see a list of objectives categorized under the different stages of a marketing funnel—awareness, consideration, and conversions. Select the one that matches your goal and click on Continue.
3. Fill in the campaign name. You will also see an A/B test option, but skip that for now.
4. You will also see a Campaign Budget Optimization option, slide it on. Select the type of budget, i.e. daily or lifetime budget.
• If you select a daily budget then the Ads Manager will ensure that your average daily spend does not exceed your budget. It may vary from day-to-day, but the average will remain within your budget.
• If you select the lifetime budget option then your total ad spend during the course of your campaign will be under the specified amount.
• There are options to select your bid strategy, ad scheduling, etc. For now, you can go with the default settings and can edit them later.
• Check out our guide on the different factors that affect the cost of Facebook ads to learn more about bid strategies.
5. The next step is to create an ad set for your campaign. Fill in the name for the ad set and set the start and end dates for your campaign.
6. If you want help creating your ad creative, then you can try the Dynamic Creative option. Otherwise, scroll down for more options.
7. The next thing that you need to do is select or create your audience. Facebook provides advanced audience targeting options, so, do your research and fine tune your audience targeting.
8. You can choose from a list of demographic and behavioral targeting filters and then save your audience.
9. Select your placement option from automatic and manual. For new users, we recommend automatic placements.
10. Select from the optimization and delivery options and click on Next.
11. Now comes the final stage where you actually create an ad for your campaign and ad set. Write an ad name and scroll down to the Create Ad tab.
12. Select an ad format. The choices include a single image, single video, and carousel ad.
13. Upload the media file and add your primary text.
14. Select your language and set up ad tracking options.
15. If you want to use an existing post as an ad, you can skip steps 11-13 and directly select the post under the Use Existing Post tab.
16. Preview your Facebook ad, make any changes if needed, and publish.
This process may seem complex to first-time users, but it really isn’t. The interface is very simple-to-use and self-explanatory.
After you have created your campaign, you can create as many ad sets and ads as you want using this same process. You can target different ad sets to different audiences.
Facebook Ads Guide: Audience Research
In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll learn about audience settings.
Finding the right audience is the most critical part of Facebook advertising. If you choose an audience that’s not relevant enough to your ad, you’ll waste some of your vital Facebook budget on reaching the wrong people.
To research your audience, there are seven key questions to keep in mind before determining who your audience is for your Facebook advertising strategy. The answers to these questions are not necessarily complex, but it can be a time-consuming process to collect and verify the answers. Remember, the right audience plays a major part in deciding the success of your Facebook ads.
1. Who are the authority figures, thought leaders, or big brands in your niche?
This step is quite straightforward as you have to simply use Google to do some research about the key players in the industry, You can do this by entering the type of industry you are interested in into the search bar and going through the results one by one. You should try to find as many names and players in the industry to target. For books or magazines, you could also use Amazon to do your research.
2.What books/magazines/newspapers does your ideal customer read?
Similar to the previous answer, you can carry out your research for this question by using Google search. You can see what magazines are popular among your target audience, which you can also research on Amazon by searching in the books section. Normally, you won’t be able to target the names of the books, but you can try targeting the authors of those books.
3. What events do they attend?
This can be a very essential part of your research because normally, people who are very interested in a particular topic or industry are the ones attending conferences or events. So it’s a great opportunity for you to find out what sort of competitions or events your target group is interested in, or is attending.
4. What websites do they frequent?
To understand what sort of websites your audience is interested in, you can narrow down your search by looking at the blogs or forums that they are visiting. This way you’ll get better insights into what your audience is talking about or their concerns and issues.
5. Where do they live?
This question can be important depending on whether you are interested in selling a product that does well only in a specific geographical area.
6. What tools do they use?
To explain this question properly, you can look into what types of tools your audience uses. For instance, ecommerce platforms use plenty of analytics tools, content tools, marketing tools, etc. For other examples, it could be tools that simplify or are related to the activity or product that your audience is concerned with.
7. What’s completely unique about this group?
This question might require deeper thinking. Reflect on specific traits or features of your audience that are unique and stand out.
When it comes to targeting with Facebook advertising, I like to get super specific. For example, aim for an audience size in the US that’s between 50,000 and 100,000 people. If it’s a smaller country, the potential audience could also be even smaller.
You should avoid using generic interests like nature, sports, or food. Select very specific ones instead: relevant brands, authors, books, magazines, websites, or even other Facebook pages. If you’re looking to get ahead of the game with your Facebook advertising, you should research what interests your customers have.
To identify them, you’ll need to go to Facebook Audience Insights. You may access it from Facebook Ads Manager itself by selecting “Audience Insights” from the drop-down menu in the top left.
The first step is to enter the “seed audience” you want to analyze in the sidebar.
Then, click “Page Likes” on the top menu bar and scroll down to see a list of other pages that are relevant to the audience you defined.
In the example above, we can see that people who are interested in “running” also follow specific pages like “The Color Run”, “Planet Fitness”, “Whole Foods Market”, and many others.
So instead of using “running” as an interest to promote your running shoes, a great Facebook advertising tip is to choose interests like “The Color Run”, “Planet Fitness”, or “Walking” for your targeting to reach more relevant people.
Facebook Advertising Guide: Better Insight
In this section of the Facebook advertising guide, you’ll master how to get better insights into your ad effectiveness by analyzing reports.
Some countries, age groups, gender, interests, placements, and ads performing will better than others. The most important thing about optimization is that you shouldn’t start to optimize campaigns one day after running them.
Let the Facebook algorithm learn about your audience. Usually, it’s optimal to start making some changes to campaigns three or four days after starting them. This also applies to budget adjustments and ending the campaign – wait three to four days before making a final conclusive decision.
What’s truly amazing is that you can find all that information in your ad reports in Facebook Ads Manager, so make it a habit to come back every few days and evaluate your campaigns.
For example, under “Columns”, you can check the “Performance & Clicks” report to see how the ad is doing overall.
As a rule of thumb, aim to achieve at least a click-through rate of one percent on Desktop News Feed or Mobile News Feed.
If you’re getting a very high click-through rate, that means that your offer, audience, and ad design are working well. If you see that you’re not hitting one percent, you will want to continue testing. To make the most out of your Facebook advertising campaigns, you can test other products or other audiences. It’ll help your ecommerce store grow in the long run.
Also, see how many clicks you’re receiving and what is the cost per click for different ads and audiences. This will help you plan your future Facebook advertising campaigns.
Finally, check the breakdown of the results of your Facebook ad campaign by segments.
With “Breakdown”, you can very quickly analyze your results by various segments. For example, different countries, ages, genders, and placements, and identify any hidden gems that work well.
Age
Look for the best converting age group, and push the entire ad budget there. If your audience is big enough, and several age groups are performing well, you could split them into several ad sets in order to get a clear test. This is a good idea, especially when both the 18-24 and 35-44 age groups are performing. Because you can’t simply exclude the age group in between them, in this situation, you’ll have to split the campaign.
Gender
If you see that either men or women are converting more on your products, exclude the other gender and focus on the one with a higher conversion rate.
Country/Region
This process is more time-consuming in comparison to the others. It’s best not to optimize based on regions at the beginning. If you’re targeting several different countries in the same ad set, it makes sense to optimize if any particular country is dragging the performance of the ad set down.
Ad Placement
If you’re starting with the desktop and mobile news feeds, you need to know if your customers are visiting your store and buying products more on mobile devices or on their desktops. Take a look at placement breakdown metrics and exclude placement that isn’t converting while burning most of your budget.
Find those hidden opportunities, edit your ad campaign accordingly, and focus on segments that are bringing the best results.
So, go ahead and experiment with the Facebook Ads Manager until you are confident enough to launch your first campaign. Remember that, like everything else, this also has a learning curve.
You will get better results with each campaign if you learn from your past mistakes and keep upskilling yourself. Go on then, create your Facebook ads campaign today.
Conclusion
Now you have all the basic information required to create your first Facebook ad campaign. But, if you want to get it right the first time, we recommend exploring the interface and the various options.So, go ahead and experiment with the Facebook Ads Manager until you are confident enough to launch your first campaign. Remember that, like everything else, this also has a learning curve.
You will get better results with each campaign if you learn from your past mistakes and keep upskilling yourself. Go on then, create your Facebook ads campaign today.
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