How To Setup & Run Your First Facebook Ad Campaign [Simple Strategy]

If you're an online business owner or an entrepreneur, you may have heard of Facebook ads.

Facebook ads are used all over the world to build and scale businesses.

Compared to regular methods of marketing like TV, billboards, etc, Facebook ads are really effective for driving large amounts of traffic to your site or business for much less.

I've owned a marketing agency where we help businesses like real estate brokers and eCommerce businesses generate leads and get sales respectively.

Within this period of time, I've managed to pick up a few tips and tricks about running effective Facebook ad campaigns that truly scale businesses.

I understand how challenging it could be for new entrepreneurs to navigate the maze we call Facebook ads, and so I wanted to write this quick and simple article to walk you through the Facebook ads process.

By the end of this article, you'll know how to set up your first ad campaign and run adverts for your business, or even start building the foundations for a marketing agency if you wanted to!

Let's begin.

The campaign

Firstly, Facebook ads are split up into three main parts.

There's the campaign, the ad set, and then the ad itself.

Let's begin at the top - the campaign.

At the campaign level, you have a few options available to you.

As soon as you click 'create,' you'll be shown a bunch of options under 3 categories:

• Awareness

You usually will not want to spend money here

• Consideration

The only two types of campaigns I would set up here are engagement campaigns or lead generation campaigns.

• Conversion

Conversions should be your best objective here if you're looking to make sales - the other two are not as effective.

In this demo, we're going to walk through creating a conversion campaign - it will be almost exactly the same for each ad campaign objective you choose.

Once we've chosen our objective, we then need to name our campaign.

There are formulas you can use, such as [brandname]_[objective]_[cold/hot]_[location], but you can make it anything memorable.

You can choose to run a special ads campaign if your business or products/services fit into any of those categories, however, they most likely will not.

Finally, under the campaign settings, you can go down and choose 'campaign budget optimisation,' also known as, 'CBO'.

To begin with, you should have this turned off - the Facebook algorithm is powerful enough to understand its own data then start to optimise its delivery.

After running ads for a few days or a week, and seeing some results, you can turn on CBO in order for Facebook to start allocating your budget into the right places.

That's it for the campaign level, you're already 1/3 of the way there!

The ad set

At the ad set level, this is where it starts to get interesting.

The first thing you're going to be able to do here is set an ad set name. Once again, make it something memorable and different from the rest of the ad sets you'll be creating.

Underneath this, since we chose conversions as our objective, you'll want to select event location as your 'website' - if you have an app, then you'll select 'app', but in most cases, we're recording events captured on our site.

That means, when we get a sale on our site, we want Facebook to record that as an event.

Right below this, there's the budget (if you don't have CBO turned on). The budget can be anything you want it to be.

Recommendations are $5-$10 per day per ad set.

If you have lots of ad sets, you can start at $3-$5. The more you spend, the faster you gather data.

However, don't go too high (above $10) because they ads won't necessarily perform better.

You're able to set a start and end date, but it's better to just start at some time in the afternoon, and run it without an end date, this should all be in your control.

Usually, we run ads for 3 days before pausing them to see the results and optimising accordingly.

Now the audience section of the ad set is where it can get a bit confusing or even scary for some people.

Here, you might be worried that you'll get it wrong.

The truth is, there's no single right way of running Facebook ads. Different people have different strategies.

I'm going to be sharing the two strategies with you here.

A few months ago, Facebook took out one of its most effective advertising features, a stupid business move in my opinion, but it happened.

This tool allowed you to find amazing audiences to target by looking at the data Facebook has compiled.

Today, it's more of a guessing game at the beginning. When you first start an ad campaign, you're going to be using your own logic to find profitable audiences to target.

Firstly, the simplest thing here is the location - where are you conducting business? Europe, USA, UK, etc? 

You can go as small or big as you want.

Think about your business - are you targeting people who are younger or older?

Are you targeting men or women in general?

There's a simple option to make changes to the age and gender if needs be.

Underneath this, you'll want to add one interest or demographic targeting option and duplicate the ad set later on if you're testing multiple targeting options.

Duplications should only be done once you've finished setting up both the ad set and the ad so that it's easier to edit the duplicates.

For example, if we're running ads for a makeup company, we'll likely target women of all ages (unless your business has a niche audience), and then our interests maybe things like makeup, Loreal, Kylie's Cosmetics, Beyoncé, etc.

For each of these interests, you'll want to make a new ad set in the same campaign, because it's much easier to read the statistics to see which ad sets are performing best with which interests.

The second strategy I was going to talk about is simply leaving your targeting open - this means not using any interests or demographic targeting, but simply letting facebook optimise the ads themselves.

From here, you'll be able to create something called a 'look-alike audience' later, which will be a version of an audience similar to the ones that Facebook found the best in the open ad set.

Next, you'll want to ensure your placements are set in the right places.

There are a lot of places you can show adverts, but a lot of them are terrible and get no results.

In most cases, you can try Facebook marketplace and news feed, or the Instagram news feed and stories - that's it.

Unless you're open to trying something else, these should be the only places you choose.

That's pretty much it for the ad set level!

You've done the hardest part of the whole process, if you set up the audience right, have a good ad (which is the next step), then you should see success with Facebook ads.

The ad

We're now onto the final step, the part where you set the ad creative, the copy, and finalize your first campaign.

Like the first two steps, you're going to create the name of the ad.

This is easy because you can write something about what the creative (the video or image) is about.

This way, if you're testing various images or videos, you're going to easily know which is which.

Make sure that you've selected the correct Facebook and Instagram accounts that go with the business you're running the ads for.

When we ran ads for clients, we would make sure that we had access to their Facebook page by letting them invite our business manager account to access their page.

(If you're an eCommerce business looking to scale, message me on LinkedIn!)

For the ad itself, there are two options you can choose from.

You can either create the ad yourself, by starting from scratch.

Or your second option is to choose an existing post that's on your Facebook page or Instagram page.

The second option is best because you'll be able to carry over the likes, comments, shares, views, etc of the post that you're going to use.

However, for the sake of this demo, we're going to 'create ad' instead.

Many people believe that videos work better than images for ads - and it's true.

In many cases, videos will outperform ads because they're longer and can carry a more powerful message.

However, you can try images and a lot of the time, still get great results.

The video or image are not the only things that matter. Once you've uploaded a creative, the copy comes next.

Firstly, you'll want to handle the primary text - the copy that goes above the ad on Facebook or below on Instagram.

This can be as long or as short as you want.

Make sure you have your brand name in there, the benefits to the customer, then a call to action.

You should read the article on writing killer product messaging to get a better idea of what sort of copy you should be using.

The headline will go beside the call to action button - which in many cases will be 'learn more' or 'shop now.'

The headline can be an offer or something that pushes them to click the call to action button.

You might be confused by what the 'description' is - it's nothing to worry about.

The description is simply another few words telling people why they're clicking the button.

Now, the call to action button needs to be able to take users to a place - this will most likely be your product's page, or if you're generating leads, a lead funnel where they enter their email and information.

This link will go in the 'website URL' input box.

From here, you're almost done - just one final thing left to do before your first ever Facebook ad campaign goes live!

Right at the end, there is something called 'tracking.'

This is crucial for your success with Facebook ads.

Turn on the tickbox called 'website events' and connect the correct Facebook pixel which you've set up on your site where visitors will be going after clicking the call to action button.

Setting up a pixel is simple and can take a few minutes.

Go on YouTube and search up how to set up a Facebook pixel on my site, to get started.

Once that's done, click 'publish,' and you're good to go.

That's how you set up and run your first Facebook ad campaign.

Please note that your Facebook business manager might look different to mine, and so some things may be indifferent places.

Facebook split test things to see what provides the best user experience and so it shouldn't be a big problem.

Did you find this article helpful? 

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Till next time,

Mohamad