Facebook Ads for Beginners: Guide For Success
Facebook Ads for beginners can be overwhelming – it’s a powerful tool with endless possibilities. It allows businesses to serve highly targeted ads to users that are likely to buy your products, visit your site or attend your event. Since Facebook gets a lot of data from their users – for example, things like age, location, and interests via their profile – they have a good idea of who users are and what they like.
What are the different types of Facebook Ads?
There are a number of different Facebook Ad creatives. We have outlined the most common examples below:
Image Ads
Video Ads
Carousel Ads
Story Ads
Facebook Ads for Beginners: How to choose your budget
The best way to calculate your budget as a Facebook Ads beginners is to work backwards from the data already on your site. We’ve written a post about how to calculate your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for ecommerce PPC ads, which is well worth checking out at this stage.
You want to answer these questions:
- How much is your product or service?
- How many do you want to sell?
- What’s your conversion rate already?
For example, let’s say:
Product value: £100
You want to sell: 10
Conversion rate: 1%
Use that data to calculate that £1,000 from 10 sales with a 1% conversion rate means that you’re going to need 1,000 clicks on your ad.
The next step is to to calculate how much it is going to cost to get those 1,000 clicks. More on that later…
How to start your first Facebook Ad Campaign
Facebook Ads for beginners can be confusing as there are a number of different account set up stages. To get started with Facebook Ads, you’ll need a business manager account. If you don’t have one set up, follow these steps.
When you open Ads Manager, you’ll see a page like this:
Step 1, ensure your business manager account is set up
This is where you’ll see all of your current or past campaigns. You’ll want to click the green ‘Create+’ button on the left to get started.
Choosing Your Objective as a Facebook Ads Beginner
To start your campaign, you’ll need to select an objective. This is what you want to achieve for the campaign.
Facebook offers 11 marketing objectives based on what you want your ad to accomplish. Here’s how they align with business goals:
- Brand awareness
Introduce your brand to a new audience - Reach
Expose your ad to as many people in your audience as possible - Traffic
Drive traffic to a specific web page, app, or Facebook Messenger conversation. - Engagement
Reach a wide audience to increase the number of post engagements or Page Likes, increase attendance at your event, or encourage people to claim a special offer. - App installs
Get people to install your app - Video views
Get more people to watch your videos - Lead generation
Get new prospects into your sales funnel - Messages
Encourage people to contact your business using Facebook Messenger. - Conversions
Get people to take a specific action on your website (like subscribe to your list or buy your product), with your app, or in Facebook Messenger. - Catalog sales
Connect your Facebook ads to your product catalog to show people ads for the products they are most likely to want to buy. - Store traffic
Drive nearby customers to bricks-and-mortar stores.
As a Facebook Ads beginner, we’d recommend keeping in mind that for conversion-oriented objectives (like sales) you can pay per action, but for exposure objectives (like traffic and views) you will pay for clicks or impressions (you can decide this).
Campaign Settings
Manage your spending easier by setting realistic budgets
Once you’ve named your campaign, you can head down to the Campaign budget optimisation section. This option allows you to set an overall budget for this campaign, rather than setting it at the ad set level. We’d recommend that Facebook Ads beginners do this as it makes it easier to manage your spend, but also it means that Facebook will spread the budget between your ad sets based on what is performing best.
Click on and then set your daily budget. You can then click next.
Ad Set
Your ad sets sit underneath your campaign. This is where you decide who you want to target with your campaign.
The first step is to name your ad set. Then head down to Budget & Schedule. If you set your budget at the campaign level, you’ll just be able to set the schedule here. You can choose the start and end date (and time).
As we mentioned previously, we’d recommend Facebook Ads beginners set their budget at campaign level. However, if you didn’t set the budget at the campaign level, you’ll see the option to do it here. Remember, this is just for this ad set. So if you have 3 ad sets and put a budget of £20 in each, that’ll be £60 per day. Whereas if you have the same number of ad sets but set the campaign budget at £20 per day, the total budget for all three ad sets will be £20.
Audience targeting
Detailed Targetting and Connection Targetting, what are these?
Underneath this, you’ll see the option to define your audience for this ad set. Different ad sets can have different audiences within the same campaign. The first step is to edit the demographics you want to target, e.g. location, age, gender.
You can analyse your organic social media audience to understand these types of demographics. You’ll find these in your Facebook page insights.
Now it’s time for the detailed targeting. You have two fields here in which to make your audience as specific as you choose:
- Detailed targeting: Target people based on demographics, interests, and behaviours.
- Connections: Target people who have an existing connection to your Facebook Page, your app, or an event you managed.
Editing your Facebook Ad Placements
Time to chose your ad placements
Underneath this, you can edit your placements. This is where your advert will show across Facebook and Instagram (think feed, stories, explore page, messenger). We’d advise considering cutting these down to just feeds and stories. They’ll get the best interaction.
Facebook Ad Optimisation and Delivery
This section is where you’ll dictate how you are charged by Facebook for the campaign – you’ll definitely want to update it for traffic campaigns.
Facebook tends to default to ‘impressions’ which means they’ll charge you every time your ad gets an impression. You want to change this to ‘link click’ to make sure you’re only charged when somebody clicks on your ad. This is where a lot of Facebook Ads beginners get caught out and are charged way more than they expected.
To change this, click on ‘show more options’ and change when you are charged to link clicks.
Creating your first Ad as a Facebook Ads beginner
Now’s the exciting part! You get to create an advert!
First choose your ad format, then enter the text and media components for your ad. The formats available will vary based on the campaign objective you selected back at the beginning of this process.
Use the preview tool at the bottom of the page to make sure your ad looks good for all potential placements (mobile, desktop news feed, right column, and so on). When you’re happy with your choices, click the green Confirm button to submit your order, then wait to get an email from Facebook notifying you that your ad has been approved.
Publishing your first Facebook Ad Campaign
Once you’ve checked your ads and campaign settings, it’s time to hit publish! It may seem daunting, but remember you can always change up and optimise your ad after it’s published.
We’d recommend analysing the data on a regular basis in order to achieve the best results for your campaign. Good luck!