How to Create Facebook ads

Step 1: Select Your Campaign Objective

Now, on Facebook you can choose from a handful of campaign objectives that match your advertising goals. For example, if you are looking to drive traffic to a physical location you would use “Local Awareness”. If you’re driving traffic to a website, you want to use “Conversions”.

Here’s the complete list of Facebook campaign objectives available:

• Brand awareness
• Local awareness
• Reach
• Traffic
• Engagement
• App installs
• Video views
• Lead generation
• Conversions
• Product catalog sales
• Store traffic
• Messages

Step 2: Give Your Ad Campaign a Name

After we have decided our campaign type, let’s give our campaign a name. This may seem like a fairly simple step, but it is actually very important to adopt useful naming conventions for your campaigns when you start with Facebook advertising so you can easily organize your campaigns as you scale and run more of them. It also sets you up for hyper-efficient reporting later on when it comes time to analyze your results.

For example, you should always include the date range the campaign will be running in your campaign name. Depending on whether you are advertising for your own business or for clients, you can add more elements in your campaign name:

• Client name/ website
• Target Audience/ Location
• Custom Audiences
• Creative Type ( Video? Carousel?)
• Facebook Page, etc

Step 3: Set Up the Audience Targeting

Facebook offers a lot of powerful ways to target audiences, and we’ll talk more at length about creating these different audience types in Chapter 6.  The next step is where you will create your adsets, or audiences.

If we think back to the last chapter, you should recall your main ads manager screen has a campaigns tab, adsets tab and an ads tab.

The ads and adsets are contained within your campaign, with the ads containing a specific combination of creative and an adset containing a specific audience and budget.We’ll discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 7 when we review budgets, but for now let’s focus on building our audience.

In this phase of your campaign setup, you have two options:

• Create a new Facebook target audience
• Use a Saved Audience

Step 4: Set Up Your Ad Placement

By default, Facebook will have “automatic placements” selected which can include Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network, but generally will use the placements optimized to give you best results. You can also choose to edit your placements if you have some data on what placement works best for you.

The full list of placements are:

Facebook

• Feed
• Instant Articles
• In-stream videos
• Right column
• Marketplace
• Stories

Instagram

• Feed
• Stories

Audience Network

• Native, banner and interstitial
• In-stream videos
• Rewarded videos

Messenger

• Inbox
• Sponsored messages

How to select your Facebook ad placements?

If you’re setting up your first campaign, we recommend that you use the Automatic Placements.

However, if you’re trying to get people convert on your website and it’s difficult to navigate on mobile, de-select the Mobile Newsfeed, Instagram and Audience Network placements.

Here are the ad placements recommended by Facebook for every campaign objective:

• 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 5: Set Up Your Campaign Budget and Bidding

Your Facebook ad budget and bidding options are such important topics, that we’ve devoted the entire Chapter 7 to it.

Step 6: Set Up Your Facebook Ads

The actual ads are what users on Facebook will see, and you want them to look good. This is the final step of your campaign creation process, you can select your preferred Facebook ad type and insert your ad images and copy.

There are two options here: you can either select an existing Facebook Page post or create new ads: