How to Run Facebook Ads: A Step-by-Step

Guide to Advertising on Facebook

_________________________________________

When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked.

Are you targeting the right people? Are your image dimensions to scale? Are you running
the right type of ad? If we're being honest, it can get a little confusing.

With more than 2.3 billion people using Facebook every month, and nearly 1.6 billion
users every day, Facebook offers up a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their
organic efforts. The trouble is, with both an investment of time and money on the line,
there's not much room for oversight.

How to Run Facebook Ads

Facebook offers a variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken
down into three elements:

1. Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets.

2. Ad sets. If you're targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you'll need an
individual ad set for each.
3. Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary
in colour, copy, images, etc.

With that terminology out of the way, let's dive in to creating an ad.
Start creating an ad through Facebook's Ads Manager.
You can create a paid ad on Facebook using Facebook's Ads Manager.

Once you log into this page, you'll see a performance dashboard where all of your
campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be listed including the results they've driven for your
Facebook page. Unless you've already created an ad for your Facebook page, this dashboard
will be empty.

To create a new campaign, ad set, or ad through the Facebook Ad Manager, tab over to the
type of ad you want to create and click the green "Create" button to far left of these ad
types, as shown below. You can see from this screenshot that we're currently set to create a
new campaign.

Choose an objective.

Facebook's Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your
campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose
an objective for your campaign:
 There are 11 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from general
brand awareness, to getting installs of your app, to increasing traffic to your online store.

By choosing one of these objectives, you're giving Facebook a better idea of what you'd like
to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. As shown in the screenshot
above, Facebook's ad options include:

• Brand awareness

• Reach

• Website traffic

• Engagement

• App installs

• Video views
• Lead generation

• Messages

• Conversions

• Catalogue sales

• Store traffic

Let's say, for sake of this guide, you're looking to drive more traffic to your website. When
you select this option, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you're looking to
promote.

Once selected, Facebook will then display the ad option that makes the most sense in terms
of achieving this objective.

Choose your audience.

Your next step is to configure your target audience -- you can do this for each ad set that
belongs to the same campaign. If you're just starting out with paid advertising on Facebook,
it's likely that you'll have to experiment with several different targeting options until you
reach an audience that fits just right.

To help you narrow your focus, Facebook's targeting criteria are accompanied by an
audience definition gauge. This tool -- located to the right of the audience targeting fields --
takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential
reach number.

If you're wavering between choosing a specific audience over a broad one, consider your
objective. If you're looking to drive traffic, you'll probably want to focus on the type of
people you know will be interested in your offering. However, if you're looking to build
brand awareness or promote a widely appealing offer, feel free to focus on a more general
audience.
 Facebook's built-in targeting is vast, including options such as:

• Location

• Age

• Gender

• Languages

• Relationship

• Education

• Work

• Financial

• Home
• Ethnic Affinity

• Generation

• Parents

• Politics (U.S. only)

• Life Events

• Interests

• Behaviours

• Connections

You also have the option to select a Custom Audience -- this allows you to target people on
Facebook who are in your company's contact database, visited a page on your website that
has a tracking pixel, or use your app or game. To learn more about how to set up a Custom
Audience on Facebook, check out these instructions. (And for more on the specifics of these
criteria, visit this Facebook targeting resource.)

Once you find a group that responds well to your ads, Facebook allows you to save these
audiences to be used again later -- so you may not need to dive into this step once you've
been running Facebook ads for a while.

Set your budget.

Facebook allows you to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here's how they differ
from each other:

• Daily budget. If you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day, this is the
option you'll want to go for. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your
spending per day. Keep in mind that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is R10.00 and
must be at least 2X your CPC.
• Lifetime budget. If you're looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select
lifetime budget. This means Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for
the ad to run.
To further specify your budgeting, turn to the advanced options -- this option is linked at the
bottom of the screenshot shown above. This section allows you to specify a few things:

Schedule

Choose whether or not you want your campaign to run immediately and continuously or if
you want to customize the start and end dates. You can also set parameters so that your ads
only run during specific hours and days of the week.

Optimization & Pricing

Choose whether or not you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. (This will
alter how your ad is displayed and paid for.) By doing so, you'll pay for your ad to be shown
to people within your target audience that are more likely to complete your desired action,
but Facebook will control what your maximum bid is.

If you don't want Facebook to set optimal bids for you, you'll want to opt for manual
bidding. This option awards you full control over how much you're willing to pay per action
completed. However, Facebook will provide a suggested bid based on other advertisers'
behaviour to give you a sense of what you should shoot for.

Delivery

Delivery type falls under two categories: standard and accelerated. Standard delivery will
show your ads throughout the day, while accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience
quickly for time-sensitive ads (Note: this option requires manual bid pricing).
Create your ad.

What do you want your ad to look like? It all depends on your original objective.

If you're looking to increase the number of clicks to your website, Facebook's Ad Manager
will suggest the Clicks to Website ad options. Makes sense, right?

This ad option is broken down into two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means
that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with
three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.

A Links ad will be displayed like this:

A Carousel ad will be displayed like this:

 Once you decide between the two, you'll need to upload your creative assets. It's important
to note that for each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design
criteria.

For single image ads, Facebook asks that users adhere to the following design
recommendations:

• Text: 125 characters

• Ad Headline: 25 characters

• Image ratio: 1.91:1

• Image resolution (including CTA): 1080 x 1080 pixels

For multi-image ads -- also known as Carousel Ads -- Facebook provides the following
design recommendations:

• Recommended image size: 1080 x 1080 pixels

• Image ratio: 1:1

• Text: 125 characters

• Headline: 40 characters

• Link description: 20 characters

Your image may not include more than 20% text. See how much text is on your image.
Keep in mind that these are the ad options for the "Traffic" objective.
If you selected "boost your posts," you'd be presented with different ad options like
the Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. This ad has a unique set of design recommendations.
To explore all of the ad options and their design specifics, refer to this resource.

Once you select an ad type, the Ads Manager will prompt you to identify how you'd like to
display your ad. The options they provide are as follows: Desktop News Feed, Mobile News
Feed, and Desktop Right Column.

Here's how each ad would appear:

Desktop News Feed

Mobile News Feed
 Desktop Right Column

Be aware if your ad isn't associated with a Facebook page, you'll only be able to run Desktop
Right Column ads. To leverage all three display locations, you can learn how to create a
Facebook Page here.
Report on your ads' performance.

Once your ads are running, you'll want to keep an eye on how they're doing. To see their
results, you'll want to look in two places: the Facebook Ad Manager and your marketing
software.

Facebook's Ad Manager
Facebook's Ad Manager is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview
of all their campaigns.

Upfront, the dashboard highlights an estimate of how much you're spending each day. The
dashboard is organized by columns, which makes it easy to filter through your ads so you
can create a custom view of your results. Key numbers like reach, frequency, and cost are
readily available, making reporting on performance a no brainer.

According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):
• Performance. Can be customized further to include metrics like results, reach, frequency
and impressions
• Engagement. Can be customized further to include metrics like Page likes, Page engagement
and post engagement
• Videos. Can be customized further to include metrics like video views and avg. % of video
viewed
• Website. Can be customized further to include metrics like website actions (all), checkouts,
payment details, purchases and adds to cart
• Apps. Can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit
spends, mobile app actions and cost per app engagement
• Events. Can be further customized to include metrics like event responses and cost per
event response
• Clicks. Can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-
through rate) and CPC (cost per click)
• Settings. Can be further customized to include metrics like start date, end date, ad set
name, ad ID, delivery, bid and objective