Facebook is one of the best platforms to reach your audience digitally. You just have to know how to leverage the tools they provide. Here we give you a comprehensive guide.
How to Create a Facebook Ad Campaign
Due to Facebook's obscenely high usage (2.7 billion globally), it is a goldmine for business marketing. And they make it easy. With varying options, budgets, audiences, etc. you have the insight to run a Facebook ad campaign that provides the most ROI. You just have to know how to do it. Don’t worry, we’re going to lay it out.
Step 1: Create a Facebook Ads Manager Account
Ads manager is a dashboard feature that allows you to oversee and control all aspects of your Facebook ad campaign. The dashboard provides you with crucial information like campaign cost and performance.
Here's how to set up an Ads Manager:
- Mini Step 1: Create a Facebook Business page. (Personal accounts can't run ad campaigns on Facebook)
- Mini Step 2: On the homepage's sidebar, click on "Go to Ads Manager."
- Mini Step 3: View your account setting page and confirm your personal information. Ensure the details are all correct
- Mini Step 4: Set up your payment method
- Mini Step 5: Save changes
With this, your Ads Manager is now set up and becomes a hub where you can control and monitor your advertising campaigns on Facebook.
Step 2: Choose Your Objective
Before you get started on any marketing campaign, Facebook asks for your campaign objective. Your objective is the essence of your campaign; they define exactly what your goals are for each ad you send out.
Facebook offers a wide range of objectives for marketers to choose from. Here are your options:
- Brand awareness: Advertise your brand to a new audience and build awareness around your products and services.
- Traffic: Use ads to drive traffic to your website
- Engagement: Get more Facebook users to interact with your brand by liking and sharing your content, attending webinars, and sharing their thoughts on your brand.
- Reach: Extend your business' borders by exposing it to as many people as possible
- Video views: Get more people to watch your Facebook videos
- Lead generation: Use lead generation forms to add potential customers to your sales funnel
- App installs: Use ads to prompt people to download your app
- Messages: Encourage users to contact your brand through Facebook messenger
- Conversions: Use ads to prompt users to convert by purchasing a product or starting a trial
- Catalog Sales: Showcase your online store to potential customers and encourage them to browse through your listings
- Store Traffic: Direct customers from Facebook to your physical store with ads
Step 3: Name Your Campaign
Facebook allows you to search up and analyze specific ads, but when you've run many on their site, finding particular campaigns can be difficult if you don't make them distinct through naming conventions.
We prefer to keep these short because we use them to create UTM parameters, as well. Our setup is usually:
- Funnel Level: TOF (top of funnel) for cold audiences and RT (retargeting) for warm audiences.
- Objective
- Sometimes we also add a date or month to help differentiate older and newer campaigns
This is just one of many formats you can use to differentiate ad campaigns. It is important to find a format that works for you right from the start and stick to it. This will simplify reporting and analysis later on.
Step 4: Choose Your Audience
The next step is to choose your ad audience. These are the people Facebook will send your ads to, so nailing this part of your ad campaign is essential to the entire process. With Facebook, you can make your target audience as large or narrow as possible through their versatile marketing system.
On the "Create an Audience" page, Facebook will give you the option of creating a "Custom Audience." This is an audience you can target consisting only of people who have previously interacted with your brand.
A custom audience is different from targeting options. Custom audience helps with laser-targeted advertising by retargeting specific individuals such as people who visited your website, shared their email with you, watched a video, etc (on or off Facebook). So even if you've never advertised on Facebook before, a custom audience can help you find Facebook users who know your online business.
Here's how to create a custom audience on Facebook:
- Mini Step 1: Go to "Ads Manager" on the homepage and select "Audiences."
- Mini Step 2: Select "Create Custom Audience"
- Mini Step 3: After creating your custom audience, you'll see a page prompting you to select your traffic source. Your traffic source is the users you want to target with your ads based on how they interacted with your brand. Here are your options:
- Website: Target users based on their activity on your website
- App Activity: Target users that have downloaded your mobile app
- Customer List: Upload a list of your customers and target them with your Facebook ads
- Offline Activity: Target audiences that have interacted with your business offline
- Facebook Sources: Target users that have interacted with you on the Facebook platform. This is an important one to emphasize because you can use data from both Facebook and Instagram to create lookalikes and retarget audiences.
- Mini Step 4: Facebook allows you to edit your custom audience. For example, if your traffic source is "website," you can target ads at anyone who visited your website or people who visited specific web pages on your website only.
- Mini Step 5: Click " Create Audience" and save it.
While creating your audience, Facebook assists you further with an audience definition gauge. This is located on the right of the screen and takes all your selections into account to calculate the estimated performance of your ad.
Step 5: Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) vs. Ad Set Budget Optimization (ABO)
CBO essentially gives Facebook's algorithm control over which ad set should spend more based on performance. With ABO, you're telling Facebook how much exactly you want each ad set to spend.
The advantage of the former is that you don't have to constantly monitor your campaigns to turn off underperforming ad sets, it also helps you avoid missing opportunities by funneling the budget to the best-performing ad sets.
The advantage of the latter is that you have more control of your budget and results during the initial testing phase.
Facebook gives marketers two budgeting options. A daily budget and a lifetime budget. How do they differ, and which one is better for your business?
Daily Budgets
Daily budgets mean that Facebook will pace your spending on a daily basis over the course of the week. You specify an amount, and they will spend roughly only that per day on your ad sets. With daily budgets, you can count on the fact that a fixed average amount will be spent on daily advertising; this makes it easier to keep a lid on your marketing finances and performance per day.
However, on days with better market opportunities, Facebook may spend up to 25% over your daily budget. For example, if your daily budget is $20, Facebook may spend up to $25 when your ads may achieve better results and compensate by spending $15 on another day.
Lifetime Budgets
With lifetime budgets, you're telling Facebook how much you're willing to spend throughout your entire ad campaign. Instead of your daily budget, you specify your budget for three weeks, a month, six months, etc. These are useful when you have a fixed budget you don't want to exceed, you can put that amount into your lifetime budget, and Facebook will help you run your ads based on that amount for a fixed period.
While you can choose for Facebook to spend your lifetime budget evenly throughout your campaign, for best results, you can give Facebook the license to spend more of the budget on days with better market opportunities and less on days with fewer opportunities.
For example, if you have a budget of $300 and wish to run a campaign for a month, you can put this information on the budget page, and Facebook will spend $10 per day on your ads. However, on days with better market opportunities, they may spend as high as $15 and compromise on other days by spending as low as $5 on your ads.
Daily budgets also have flexible spending, but the 25% cap doesn't apply to lifetime budgets. Additionally, daily expenditure is a lot more erratic and unpredictable.
Which is better for your business?
Both options have their advantages and drawbacks.
Daily budgets give you better control of finances. You decide exactly how much goes into ads daily, and it ensures your ads run every day continuously. While this means your business will have coverage at all times, it also implies that Facebook will spend your entire daily budget, even on days of poor marketing opportunities.
Lifetime budgets, on the other hand, put Facebook in the driving seat in terms of how your budget is spent. It allows you to choose what hours of the day and days of the week your ads will run. However, Facebook decides how your budget is distributed across those days, which is a stark contrast to daily budgets, where you choose the daily spending.
While this could be seen as a positive, it's also difficult to know the amount of coverage you get on any given day. You're putting the success of your campaign entirely in the hands of Facebook's algorithms correctly predicting positive and negative marketing days.
In summary, you should choose daily budgets when:
- Your campaign has no set end date
- Your budget is flexible
- You need your ads running constantly
Choose lifetime budgets when:
- You have a predetermined schedule or time frame for your campaign (start and end date)
- Your campaign has a strict budget
- You only need your ads running at specific times
For daily budgeters, your ad's schedule–the amount of time your ad set is due to run–is continuous. Meanwhile, your schedule on a lifetime budget is how long you set your ad to run, i.e., the start and end date.
In some instances, Facebook may override your scheduling depending on your delivery settings. There are two delivery types for every ad set you create:
- Standard delivery- This is the default setting for your ad set. It displays your ads evenly throughout the day using your allocated budget for that day. For lifetime budgets, standard delivery spreads your ads to show across the hours you configured your ad to run.
- Accelerated delivery- This instructs Facebook to show your ads as quickly and frequently as possible. With this option, your daily budget can be spent in an hour and your 1-month lifetime budget can be exhausted in a week. Accelerated delivery is used to deliver time-sensitive ads to audiences.
Step 6: Create Your Ads
Now, it's time to put the finishing touches on your ad. You'll need to select an ad format depending on your campaign objective. This is also where you choose the images, videos, and copy that will be attached to your ads, as well as your CTA.
There are a lot of formalities and requirements to get through while creating your ads and they can vary greatly depending on your campaign objective. However, Facebook guides you through the entire process. Once you're done inserting your content, you will be prompted to select a display type. You should also consider whether you’d like the Instagram feed, IG and FB stories, In-Article, and Instagram reel as some of these are different formats (imagery/video).
Things to Consider
As we said, the great thing about Facebook ads is just how much they aid marketers in maximizing their strategies. After you're done creating your ads, Facebook still offers you many features to help you get the best out of your campaign.
These include:
A/B Testing
The Facebook A/B testing feature allows you to change variables and settings in your ads to determine which strategy produces the best results. This implies that you can take a copy of your finished ad, make changes to it, and run them against each other to see which version will be best suited for future marketing campaigns.
Retargeting
We talked about custom audiences earlier and how Facebook helps you reach out to customers who've previously interacted with your brand. That's what Facebook retargeting ads is all about. This is especially important for new marketers because fine-tuning your sales funnel takes time.
Many potential customers will leave your funnel before completing their journey during the days or even weeks it takes you to perfect the art of maximizing conversion rates. Retargeting helps you to reintroduce those customers to your funnel at a later date.
Expert Help
Advertising is a fierce competition against other marketers. No matter what strategy you're using, another marketer is riding the same wave in a bid to win over customers. This can make increasing conversion rates a colossal headache for businesses on Facebook.
Creating ads that draw customers' attention away from other brands, and instead, toward your business is a tedious process. While this guide provides an overview, Facebook advertising is complex, and there are still a lot of intricacies that determine your campaign's results. One minor facet could drag down your entire Facebook marketing effort.
This is where Social Ktchn can help. We are Facebook and Instagram paid ad experts having done it all–from beauty to ecommerce to plants to furniture. Our goal is to help you create customized ad campaigns to boost your business's conversion rates and improve market performance. Never done this before? That’s okay! We’re happy to explain our strategy every step of the way. We view ourselves as more of an extension of your team–we’re just a quick Google Chat away.
We know Facebook advertising can be a tough place to navigate for marketers, but it doesn't have to be.