Currently, 1 out of every 5 minutes spent on a mobile device in the U.S. is on Facebook or Instagram. In fact, 1.6 billion Facebook users are connected to a small business on Facebook.
I hope that with these statistics you are finally convinced that all the eyeballs are on Facebook and it’s a no brainer for companies to advertise on Facebook.
The awesome part about Facebook ads is that you can choose the budget you want to invest compared to traditional advertising methods where you needed a really high minimum budget.
Any business, small or large, can advertise and generate results. You can even start at only $100 or $5 per day, it’s really up to you. Now it’s not to say that having a larger budget doesn’t help, but no one is stopping you.
The Facebook ads manager is essentially your ad campaign command center. It allows you to launch ads on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and Facebook’s audience network all in one place.
If you just want to start your first Facebook ad, click here!
If you are looking to find the Facebook ads manager, I’ve added a link below!
Here are a few cool things you can do with the ads manager just to give you an idea:
- Choose which placements to display ads (Instagram feed, audience network, etc.)
- Select the location where you want your ads to appear (Ontario, United States, New York, etc.)
- Upload contact lists for custom targeting
- Retarget your past website visitors
- A/B test different ad creatives
Here’s what’s on the menu…
- Who should advertise on Facebook?
- What is the Facebook Ads Manager?
- Why you need the Facebook ads manager?
- When should you use the Ads Manager?
- What can you do inside the Facebook ads manager?
- What happened with the Facebook Power Editor?
- How to create your first Facebook ads?
- Creating & editing Facebook ads
- Breakdown, time & performance of your ads
- Tools in the Facebook business manager
- Facebook ads resources by Facebook
Who should advertise on Facebook?
Since there are billions of people on Facebook, it’s fair to say that there are people who like almost anything, which gives a huge opportunity for almost any business (unless they violate Facebook ads policies).
Whether you have a small company with zero employees or a large one with 500 employees, you should advertise on Facebook. Here’s what you can do:
- Gain visibility: you can advertise to generate more impressions or reach more people so that more people know about your brand.
- Connect with your audience: you can drive traffic to your website, generate interactions, app installs, leads or even video views.
- Generate sales & conversions: you can increase the number of conversions you get thanks to your Facebook product catalogue, eCommerce store conversions and so on.
It would be a lie to say that spending a big amount on Facebook ads won’t boost your results, but it would also be a lie to say you can’t generate good results with a small budget too. With over 65 million businesses advertising on Facebook, it’s fair to say there is some value there.
I would still have to stop right here to talk about the difference between B2B Facebook ads and B2C Facebook ads. The way they advertise is quite different.
B2C companies have had way more success in the past because people were used to buying directly online on what we call impulse shopping. Those B2C companies could create Facebook ads that were informing, entertaining, friendly with direct incentivization to buy a certain product.
A lot of tactics can be used around scarcity, social proof and amazing ad creative that can push people to buy fast. It could be an ad with a carousel of products that people could then go on an eCommerce website where they could buy it right away.
On the flip side, B2B companies have been very slowly getting on the platform because their clients were slow too. B2B companies are using Facebook ads to inform their customers about their expertise and their credibility through content such as articles, landing pages or webinar registrations.
B2B businesses can really take advantage of Facebook ads because of their targeting capabilities to reach specific job titles, interests, age groups, and more. A company can target CEOs or business owners managing Facebook pages.
What is the Facebook Ads Manager?
With the ads manager, you can create and manage your Facebook ads on mobile and desktop. In other words, it’s your starting point to launch your campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or the Audience Network. It’s a tool that does everything you need to create ads, manage them and measure their true performance.
It can be daunting at first to enter the big ads manager dashboard with the long list of menu items, but it’s really designed for advertisers of any level. You can run your ads in the most simple way or the most complex one because it is one of the most powerful ad management tools you’ll find online.
Why you need the Facebook ads manager?
Advertising on Facebook can give your brand an amazing opportunity to reach & engage with their target audience.
In the past years, Facebook made a big decision to the algorithm that almost entirely killed organic reach for a business page. People now see in their feed relevant posts from friends and family.
What does this mean for you? You’ll need to sponsor content and launch ads to reach your audience because posting on your page won’t get you much.
Facebook also has one of the most affordable reaches you’ll find on the advertising landscape. With over 1 billion Facebook users worldwide and Facebook’s advanced targeting abilities, you are bound to find success. You can target people based on location, demographics, online behaviour, interests, and more.
Finally, you can monitor and track your results directly in the Facebook ads manager which gives you full control to know where your ads are appearing which enables you to optimize and get better results over time.
To summarize, here the advantages of using the Facebook ads manager:
- Edit ads or campaigns quickly (audiences, budget, ad creative, etc.)
- Managing your campaigns
- Test different audiences with locations, interests, custom audiences, etc.
- Analyze your ads with built-in Facebook analysis tools (ad reporting)
When should you use the Ads Manager?
You can use the Facebook ads manager to do a lot of things. It’s pretty much the place where any Facebook advertiser will spend the most amount of time in the long run.
- Duplicate your ads, ad sets and advertising campaign
- Edit your settings such as targeting, budget & audience
- Access all your metrics and breakdowns of your ads manager, campaign, ad set or ad
- Analyze your results and make smart decisions to get better results
- Customize your dashboard to see your data in a way you understand
If all of this seems too complicated, don’t hesitate to reach out to K6. We can help!
What can you do inside the Facebook ads manager?
There are a lot of things you can do inside the Facebook ads manager and I think it’s important here to make a distinction between the business manager and the ads manager. The ads manager is one tool amongst others in the Facebook business manager.
Creating new Facebook ad campaigns.
In the Facebook ads manager, you can launch a new Facebook ad campaign and select your objective, audience, placements and much more. You’ll also be able to launch new ad creative, ad copy and see how your ad looks in different placements & devices.
Reviewing and managing your campaigns
The ads manager makes it simple for you to change your budget, audience, placements and ad creative. You can also choose to turn off, turn, pause or even duplicate any campaign, ad set or ads you have running.
Analyzing your performance
This part is obviously very important to most Facebook advertisers because of what is Facebook ads without analyzing your results. You can see which demographic, placement, audience or ad creative performs best and optimize your budget according to it. You can also choose to do A/B tests of your top-performing ads to see if you could bump your results.
What happened with the Facebook Power Editor?
As of today, Facebook officially decided to combine the Facebook Power Editor with the Facebook Ads Manager to have one super powerful tool. You don’t need to learn to use two different platforms anymore which is my opinion marvellous news!
The power editor used to be the place where you could launch multiple ads at the same time and do a lot of tasks that would save you time. The ads manager would be the best place to look at your statistics and optimize your Facebook ads.
How to create your first Facebook ads?
If you’ve never used the Facebook business manager, then we will show you exactly how to get started. All you need to do is head over to business.facebook.com and it’s where you’ll be able to access your business pages, Facebook ads as well as grant access for your employees to manage those.
Step #1 – Head over to business.facebook.com
Step #2 – Click on create account. If you already have a Facebook account, you’ll be able to log in.
Step #3 – Enter the name of your business, select the primary Facebook business page of your ad account and provide your name & business email address.
If you don’t have a Facebook business page, you’ll need to create one. It’s one of the best first step to take your social media game to another level for your brand.
Apart from having a lot of new perks and tools from Facebook like Facebook analytics and the ads manager, you’ll be able to start interacting with your audience on a more personal basis.
After having set up your business profile, Facebook will allow you to create your first ad. There won’t be any need from you to create an ads manager because it will be automatically created for you!
To access your page, tap on the dropdown on the far top right side and select manage pages of your Facebook personal profile
After having created your account, it’ll be time to set up your first ads manager account.
Step #4 – Go in the menu and click on Business Manager Settings
Step #5 – Under People and Assets, click on + Add.
Step #6 – Add New Ad Accounts and click Create a New Ad Account
Step #7 – Add a payment method and the right timezone and you are set
Facebook will then create a Facebook ads manager ID just for you and your business! One thing to keep in mind is that if you want to change the timezone and currency, you’ll probably have to create a new Facebook ads manager.
If you switch the currency and timezone of your current ad account, all your ads will be deleted and it’ll be as if you started a new ad account.
Creating & editing Facebook ads
Even if the ads manager already looks pretty awesome, Facebook keeps improving it with new functions that make advertising way easier and intuitive. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on how you can create your first ad campaign.
We recommend you explore everything this guide has to offer because we are sure you’ll learn a lot of things from it.
You have to see the Facebook ads manager as your advertising home. It’s where you can:
- Set up new Facebook ad campaigns, ad sets and ads.
- Manage and modify your budgets
- Select carefully your targeted audiences
- Track & measure your Facebook ad campaign performances
Step #1 – Click on the ads manager inside your menu and then click on create.
At this stage, you’ll have two options in front of you: guided creation and quick creation. Once you’ve made your choice, you’ll have it as a default for all your new campaigns, ad sets or ads. Don’t worry, you can always change your preference.
Both methods are fine, it’s really for you to find which Facebook ads creation workflow you prefer to have a better experience in the ads manager.
Guided creation
The guided creation is a step-by-step wizard that helps you go through the steps you would need to take to launch a normal campaign. You can choose this option if you are less familiar with all the features of Facebook ad campaigns.
Quick creation
The quick creation feature allows you to create your Facebook ad campaign, ad set or ad in the order you want. It’s generally for advanced advertisers who know exactly how they want things to look like.
Step #2 – Say we picked guided creation, you’ll have to select an ad objective for your campaign. When it comes to Facebook ads’ objective, it can be confusing when you are starting. There are three main categories of Facebook ads goals in the Facebook ads manager:
Awareness campaigns: gain more visibility by getting your ads seen as many times as possible by new people.
- Brand awareness: allowing you to reach more people that are more likely to take a look which builds awareness around your brand
- Reach: make sure your ad reaches as many people as possible for the best price
Consideration campaigns: the goal here is to drive a form of connection either through traffic, interactions or video views.
- Traffic: generating clicks on your ad that brings people to your website or on the app store
- Engagement: get people to interact with your post or page. The goal here is to generate comments, likes, event responses and shares.
- App installs: send people straight to your store where they can download your app.
- Video views: promote videos showing videos about your brand to build awareness around your brand.
- Lead generation: optimize to generate leads through Facebook or your landing page.
- Messages: get people to send you messages and connect with you by starting conversations directly in messenger.
Conversion campaigns: if you are looking to generate sales directly for your campaign such as an eCommerce purchase, then this is the right objective.
- Conversions: you can optimize to get people to convert on your website such as become leads or make purchases.
- Catalogue sales: you can show your eCommerce products to potential customers and generate sales.
- Stores traffic: push people to visit your eCommerce store with your ads.
Once you’ve selected your objective, you have officially created a Facebook ads campaign, but it just won’t run because you need to have an ad set and an ad inside.
There are also a few options when you create your campaign. One is called Facebook ads CBO and the other is creative split testing. We recommend you click on the links we’ve added on those words if you want to learn more!
Step #3 – It’s now time to select your audience. Facebook’s targeting capabilities are pretty much what makes the platform so amazing.
You’ll first have to add your ad set name which we recommend to be the name of the audience and the placements you choose to not lose yourself later.
With the huge amount of demographic and psychographic data they’ve captured, you are able to target anyone you want to with precision. Here are a few examples:
- Location: country, state, city, zip code, or a mile radius.
- Age/gender: this works by bracket like 18-24, etc.
- Language: any language you want.
- Education: schools, the field of study, universities.
- Interests: pages people like, general interests such as Fashion or pets.
- Behaviours: purchase behaviour, charitable donations, etc.
- Net Worth: self-explanatory.
- Saved audience: there’s a button at the bottom of the audience section to save an audience you’ve created.
You have multiple options when it comes to location if you are advertising something specific from people who are living to those are travelling to a location.
When it comes to interest targeting, you either:
- Enter interests and play with the suggestions
- Browse amongst 3 categories: demographics, interests and behaviours.
The first option is the one most often used. You are selling fashion? Just enter fashion and then select the suggestions Facebook throws at you!
The second option is one for the most adventurous and those that have no clue what to target.
- Demographics: education level, financial data, life events, parents, relationship & work.
- Interests: business & industry, entertainment, family & relationships, fitness & wellness, food & drinks, hobbies & activities, shopping & fashion, sports & outdoors and technology.
- Behaviours: anniversary, consumer classification, digital activities, ex-pats, mobile device user, multicultural activities, politics (US), purchase behaviour, ramadan (month), soccer and travel.
Another amazingly sweet Facebook ad targeting function is what we call Facebook custom audiences and lookalike audiences. You’ll see the option to create them at the top of the audience section.
Facebook custom audiences are audiences that interacted with your brand by visiting your website, watching a video or making a purchase. A lookalike audience is an audience similar to the ones who have taken the action in question.
For instance, you could create a Facebook lookalike audience of your buyers in the past 30 days and Facebook would find similar people to those who bought from you recently.
This is pure gold once you have a large enough custom audience, you do need at least 100 people although we recommend 500 minimally. It’s why we recommend starting with low intent actions as you’ll have more website visits than website purchases in the beginning.
Finally, you can select to use a connection type, those are audiences that are linked in one way or another to your initial audience. For instance, it could be the friends of the people who like your page.
Step #4 – it’s now time to set your budget for your Facebook ad campaign.
The great thing about Facebook ads is that you can choose the budget you wish to spend on your ads, no more no less. This level of control is really beneficial for advertisers.
You can currently chose to allocate your budget in two different ways:
- Daily budget: it’s an amount of money you chose that Facebook will repeatedly spend every day.
- Lifetime budget: it’s a budget that Facebook will spend over a period of time.
Facebook will have entered the budget of $20.00 daily budget by default, but you can adjust your budget right now or later, it’s not complicated.
If you aren’t sure which budget you should have, we recommend spending a minimum of $5 per day for any campaign you start. We also recommend leaving your ads for at least 7 days to give it a chance to succeed. This is also because people react differently during different days of the week: some brands see 40% of their sales for one day.
You could also start a lifetime budget campaign by setting it to $70 for a 2-week period. Lifetime budgets are awesome because Facebook essentially maximizes your budget by spending only when they are getting really good results.
Furthermore, I can’t talk about budget without mentioning CPM’s and CPC’s. Your CPM is the cost per every 1,000 impressions while CPC is the cost you pay for every click. It’s essentially two ways with which you would pay Facebook.
You can choose to pay per:
- Daily unique reach
- Impressions
- Link clicks
- Landing page views
When it comes to how much Facebook advertising cost, you can pay for impressions (CPM) which is a good choice if your goal is to build awareness and visibility for your brand. You can also pay for link licks (CPC) which might be a better goal if you are trying to drive traffic or generate conversions such as leads or sales.
Something to keep in mind is that Facebook is on your side. The more money you make with them, the more they’ll make money. They will do their best to deliver your content to people most likely to convert.
If you optimize for conversions then it’s the best goal you can choose to drive conversions. In other words, if you want Facebook to find people most likely to take a certain action, choose it as an objective.
Finally, never forget that you can pretty much change and test anything you want within your Facebook ads manager. We recommend playing around your Facebook ads budget to see the impact you get in terms of campaign performance. The more experiments you do the more you know what to do.
Step #5 – at this stage, you’ll have to choose your placement.
You should see a choice between automatic placements and manual placements. We always recommend choosing automatic placements because not all placements fit for your ads in most situations.
If you’ve already been using Facebook, you’ve probably seen ads on your mobile news feed, on the right side of your screen or in the desktop news feed. Furthermore, since Facebook owns Instagram, you’ll be able to create Instagram feed ads or story ads right from the business manager.
Facebook Mobile & Desktop News Feed: those ads will appear in the news feed of your target audience (appearing next to the posts of their friends and family). This is probably the most used placement for brands trying to generate awareness, engagement or conversions.
Hot tip ?️: if you drive mobile ads that drive traffic to your website, make sure you pass the Google Mobile-Friendly test so that people have a great experience on your mobile website.
Instagram Feed, Story & Explore: like Facebook, you’ve probably seen Instagram ads in your newsfeed, while watching stories or in the explore page. You can create all those ads yourself now!
Facebook Right Column: this option allows you to advertise on the right-hand side of the Facebook news feed. Those ads essentially look like small banners. They are only available on desktop and are really good Facebook retargeting ads to try out.
Facebook marketplace: if you haven’t heard about the Facebook marketplace yet you are probably living in a cave. It’s a marketplace where you can sell anything to anyone as long as it respects Facebook guidelines and you can run ads to gain more visibility.
Facebook Messenger: messenger being the messaging platform of Facebook has ads appearing at the top of your inbox. They kind of looks like the ones you’ve probably seen on Linkedin or GMAIL.
Facebook Audience Network: Facebook has a network of mobile apps and websites that they partnered with to allow advertisers to show their ads. It’s a really good option to gain more visibility and awareness for your image ads but also for your video ads.
Here are all the other placements available to you in order if you want to see them to better choose.
- Feed
- Instant Articles
- In-stream videos
- Right column
- Marketplace
- Stories
- Feed
- Stories
Audience network
- Native, banner and interstitial
- In-stream videos
- Rewarded videos
Messenger
- Inbox
- Sponsored messages
Finally, although all placements are good, Facebook does recommend to use specific placements depending on your Facebook ad objective. Here’s a list of the placements you should choose based on the objective you are looking for:
- 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 #6 – it’s now time to create your Facebook ad. Just to recap, so far we’ve:
- Created your campaign with your ad objective
- Created your ad set with your audience, budget & placement.
Now it’s time to make your ad creative. For this, you’ll have 5 main different ad formats to choose from.
Here are the 5 formats:
- Single image: classic image ad with over 6 possible a/b tests of images. This is one of the easiest ads to try that also generates great results. It’s the best place to start in our opinion at K6.
- Slideshow: a video ad that loops with up to ten images. It’s a great ad format to tell a story with images.
- Single video: normal video ad which enables you to create any video ad you want including informative video ads or video testimonial ads.
- Collection: this ad takes videos and images and creates a full-screen experience. It’s a great idea if you have an eCommerce and want to show a collection of products.
- Carousel: those ads are the most fun to create. You can use two to ten images or videos where people can click on an arrow to see the rest. Adding a few video testimonials or multiple eCommerce products would be a good idea.
Finally, you could also choose to transform one of your ad into a Facebook instant experience. Those are really awesome because they look like ads and then they open up as a landing page on Facebook.
The big moment has arrived. It’s time to choose your ad creative and create a strong ad copy.
One word of advice in terms of image or video, we always recommend creating your own content. Copyright-free images are really known for bringing because they don’t stand out. Your goal here is to stand out.
Facebook says to “remember your photos will be competing with pictures of babies and someone’s fancy dinner. Focus on the things about your business that make it stand out. The people. The environment. The products. Try to pick an image that will grab your audience’s attention as they scroll through Facebook.”
You can choose to upload up to six images, and we recommend you do so. A big part of succeeding with Facebook ads is to A/B test and the difference in results between images can be night and day.
Now there are some things to keep in mind when it comes to writing your copy.
- Main text: can be up to 125 characters
- Headline: up to 40 characters
- Link description: up to 90 characters
You can now add up to six different versions of each to a/b test directly on the platform. We recommend you at least enter two different ad copy for each.
You should also check that your Facebook ad doesn’t have too much text. To do this, Facebook has a tool called text overlay tool which you should visit before launching your ad.
As a rule of thumb, it’s important to always remember that the first few words of your ad copy are the ones that matter the most. If people don’t stop, then the rest of your ad won’t matter. It’s thus the place where you should make the most a/b tests.
Finally, you’ll have to choose your call-to-action amongst Facebook options. We recommend adding a call-to-action in your ad copy that looks like this depending on your choosing. And make sure the ad copy stays between 2 and 3 words!
Learn more here –> k6agency.com
The most commonly used Facebook call-to-actions are (there are 16 to date):
- Learn more
- Subscribe now
- Download now
- Buy now
- Sign up
- Book now
Make sure you also add your URL with UTM tags. UTM tags allow you to track your Facebook ad campaign results directly in Google Analytics. You should also turn on your Facebook pixel with the toggle you should see at the bottom of the ad creative page.
Step #7 – Place your order in the Facebook ads machine.
Once you are ready, just click the final green button “Place Order”. Your ad will be reviewed by Facebook to make sure you are not violating any Facebook advertising policies.
We recommend you take a final look at those policies before you hit the green button!
Breakdown, time & performance of your ads
It’s now time to make sure your ads bring great results and Facebook is really transparent about your results, where your money is spent and so on. You should first look at the most important metrics:
- Conversion: wether its leads or sales you are looking for, this metric is the mother of all Facebook ads metrics.
- Cost Per Click: if your goal is to bring traffic to your website then this metric is extremely relevant.
- Impressions: we don’t track impressions as a goal, but we want to make sure we’ve reached enough people because drawing conclusions about our Facebook ads.
Always remember that the goal of being able to track your performance is to tweak things if things go wrong but you should also split test different things on your best ads.
Tools in the Facebook business manager
List of all the things in the menu and link to articles if we wrote some.
Is there a Facebook ads manager mobile app?
Yes, there is as you can see in the picture above and it works on iOS and Android devices. It’s pretty useful to see how your campaign is evolving while being outside and being able to make quick decisions if things turn south. You can also create and edit basic ads, manage your ad budgets, and much more.
Finally, you can set up push notifications to keep you informed about things you select which is super awesome if you want to stay reactive to anything that would go wrong. Here are the iOS app and the Google Play app link.
What is the Facebook audience insight?
The audience insight is a tool that allows you to research your targeting more in-depth. You can see the demographics of your audience, see similar pages to the ones you are targeting, etc.
For instance, if you see an Facebook ads interest yielding great results for your brand, you might want to input it there to see if Facebook has other interests around that audience.
You can also choose to analyze the people who already like your page to see if there are interesting audiences you should try from your research.
You can even see their education level and relationship status. This is a powerful tool that can really help your brand in getting better results.
There are a lot of other awesome tools such as the creative hub, the events manager and brand collabs manager which you should check out as well.
Facebook ads resources by Facebook
The Facebook advertising insight helps you see new ways to leverage your Facebook ads data and the ones of others. There are a lot of articles that go in-depth of how you can better your tracking, analytics, etc.
The Facebook ads blueprint is a course by Facebook to reach you how to use Facebook ads and get awesome results. It’s a great place to start learning about Facebook ads and get the basics if you like following courses.
This guide gives you all the recommend ad specs for Facebook image ads, video ads, carousel and collection ads. It’s a great place to go to when you are creating some new ads.
The Facebook Ads inspiration is an awesome place to go look for some inspiration for your Facebook ads. You will find ideas from Facebook, examples from other brands who crushed it and a curated selection of resources to help you by Facebook.
What’s better than success stories to not only get awesome ideas but also getting you hyped up to launch your next successful campaign? This is a great place to get some inspiration on campaigns and learn more about what happens behind the curtains of great Facebook ad campaigns.
Key takeaways
As we’ve seen, Facebook has so many users that it almost makes no sense to not advertise on the platform. Especially with the targeting capacities and the different ad formats in front of you, you are bound to craft some amazing ads that deliver results.
Now it’s not to say that it will be easy. Facebook ads are very competitive especially with all these experts fighting to generate more results, but not advertising would make you miss a huge opportunity.
Finally, it’s key to stand out. Remember, you are competing not only against other brands but also posts from friends and family.