Before you jump in and create any adverts, it’s important to first think about why you’re advertising and what you’re aiming to achieve. By setting yourself a few goals ahead of going live with ads, you also have something to measure your success against.
For example, if you’re looking to increase downloads of your mobile app through Facebook Ads, you could set a goal of 100 downloads in the first month. This will also help you when it comes to choosing the correct objective for your Facebook Ads campaign in Step 3 below. Some more example goals could be:
Increase traffic to my website from Facebook
Increase attendance at my event
Generate new leads
Increase the reach of our content on Facebook
Boost engagement for our page
Step 2. Head over to Facebook Ads Manager
All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads Manager tool, which you can access via a direct link at facebook.com/ads, or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu on your Facebook account, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your page. Once you’re into the Ads manager, you can navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.
Step 3. Choose your objective
When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 15 options here for what you might want to achieve:
With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:
Awareness
Objectives that generate interest in your product or service:
Boost your posts
Promote your page
Reach people near your business
Increase Brand Awareness
Increase your reach
Consideration
Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it:
Send people to a destination on or off Facebook
Get installs of your app
Raise attendance at your event
Get video views
Collect leads for your business
Conversion
Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service:
Increase conversions on your website
Increase engagement in your app
Get people to claim your offer
Promote a product or catalogue
Get people to visit your shops
Once you’ve selected your marketing objective, you’ll then be asked to name your campaign:
Step 4: Define your audience and budget
Customizing your target audience
This step is extremely crucial for the success of your Facebook Ads campaigns. The audience for your ad can be customized based on all the following demographics:
Location, starting with a country, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
Age
Gender
Languages
Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics
Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, as well as device usage
Connections – Choose to show the ad to all people, just those connected to Buffer, or those not connected to Buffer
In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events. You can also further customize your targeting using custom audiences to retarget people who have already interacted with your business.
Example: Choosing an audience for your ads
Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way in order to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the following audience demographics:
Location: United States
Interests: Social media
Excluded: People who already like Buffer
Age: 18-65+
Language: English (US)
This gave us an estimated reach of up to 3,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are how many we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.
Setting your budget
Once you’ve selected your target audience, you next need to choose how much you’d like to spend on your ad. When you set a budget, it’s important to remember that this figure represents the maximum amount of money you want to spend. You can also set your budget to Daily or Lifetime:
Daily: A daily budget is the average that you’ll spend every day.
Lifetime: A lifetime budget is the maximum that you’ll spend during the lifetime of your advert set.
Step 5: Create your advert
This is where it gets really fun! It’s now time to choose the images (or video), headline, body text, and where your ad will be displayed on Facebook. For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image(s) or video.
There are two ways to create adverts: Using an existing post or creating a new advert. Here’s a quick look at both options.
Using an existing post
For certain types of adverts, such as boosting posts, you can create your ad using an existing post that’s already been shared on your page. To do this, select the ‘Use Existing Post’ option from the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard. From here, you can choose which Page you’d like to select a post from and pick an individual post from that Page to use as your advert:
Creating a new advert
If you’d like to create your advert from a blank canvas, the first task is to select the format you’d like to use for your advert. Facebook Adverts look slightly different depending on the results you want. Facebook currently offers 5 various formats for adverts:
Carousel: Create an advert with 2 or more scrollable images or videos
Single image: Create up to 6 variations of your advert using 1 image
Single video: Create an advert with one video
Slideshow: Create a looping video advert with up to 10 images
Canvas: Tell a more immersive story by combining images and videos
Image specs:
Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
Image ratio: 1.91:1
To maximize advert delivery, use an image that contains little or no overlaid text.
Video specs:
Format: .MOV or .MP4 files
Resolution: at least 720p
File size: 2.3 GB max.
Recommended aspect ratio: widescreen (16:9)
Facebook: 60 minutes max.
Instagram: 60 seconds max.
Step 6: Choose your ad placements
Advert placement defines where your advert is shown and with Facebook Ads, you’re able to choose which locations your advert will appear in. Adverts may appear in Facebook’s mobile News Feed, desktop News Feed and right column. You may also create ads to appear on Instagram.
Step 7: Place your order
Now, your advert is ready to go. To submit your ad click the ‘Place Order’ button at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Once your ad is submitted, it’ll be reviewed by Facebook before it’s put live (you’ll receive a confirmation email from Facebook once the ad is live).
