How to create a Facebook advert

Social media is a great way to interact with existing customers and engage with people who like your brand. It is also a fantastic way of targeting new consumers for a relatively little budget. Facebook advertising is affordable and the potential reach is vast if you run the ad campaigns properly.

If you’re looking to start advertising your offerings on Facebook, the first thing you need to do is set up a Facebook Business Manager account. From there, you can start creating the ads and posting them via your Facebook page.

How to set up Facebook Business Manager

Firstly, you need to have a Facebook page for your business set up. That process is simple and straightforward. Once your page is up and running, you can create your Business Manager account by visiting business.facebook.com.

On the Business Manager homepage, click ‘Create Account’ in the top right-hand corner. Log in using your normal email and password (the one that you used to create your business page). Follow the steps and enter the name of your business and email address. Click ‘Finish’ to complete the setup of your Business Manager account.

Next, you’ll need to link your Facebook page to your new Business Manager account. On the Business Manager homepage, click on ‘Add Page’ at the bottom of the ‘Page’ box. Then, select your Facebook page in the next window and click ‘Add Page’ once again. Your page is now linked.

The next step is to add a Facebook ad account on the Business Manager homepage. Click ‘Add Ad Account’ in the middle box. Now, you can either add an existing ad account or create a new one.

To create a new one, use your company’s name as the name of the ad account. This name doesn’t appear to the public, but it will help you and your employees (who will be added to the account) to identify it easily – *see the end of this article for tips on how to add employees to the account.

Fill in the required fields for time zone, currency etc. Then, click ‘Create Ad Account’ once you’re done. You can now run ads through your Facebook business page and your Business Manager account.

Install a Facebook Pixel

For e-commerce stores or websites that directly drive sales, you’ll want to install a Facebook Pixel on the site to track your users’ behaviour. A Facebook Pixel allows you to target specific products and adverts at individuals who have visited your site before.

This is an optional step; if your website doesn’t offer products for sale you can skip this step. If you want to know more about setting up a Facebook Pixel, we have an extensive article on how to do that, as well as how to set up dynamic product ads to target website visitors who didn’t purchase your products.

Create audiences to target groups of potential customers

You can create and save audiences consisting of potential customers who are most likely to love your brand. The Audiences tool is a great way to target groups of people that will be relevant to your brand.

To do so, open Facebook Business Manager and click on the menu icon (three horizontal stacked lines). Under the ‘Assets’ column on the right, you will see ‘Audiences’ – click on it. This will open a new screen where you can select what type of audience you want to reach.

You can choose between a custom audience, a lookalike audience or a saved audience:

Custom audience – This is a group of people who take action on your Facebook page or interact with your brand. You can manually select this audience based on customer personas or their likes and hobbies, for example.
Lookalike audience – Facebook’s artificial intelligence will create an audience that is most likely to be relevant to your business, based on their habits and previous engagement on the platform. It will also pool together people that are similar to your existing audience.
Saved audience – This is a group of people who have the same interests, behaviours and demographics. When you like a certain page on Facebook, you will be part of the same saved audience as the other people who like it too. This is a quick and easy way to start showing targeted ads for businesses new to the game.

When creating a saved audience, you can give it a name and select particular attributes of the people you’d like to reach. For example, you can target people who live in a particular area or people who like certain hobby pages on Facebook. You can even exclude certain groups from your audience, or add second attributes to narrow your focus even further.

Once you’re happy with your audience selection, click ‘Create Audience’ and it will be saved to your Business Manager account. When running adverts in the future, you can choose between all of your different audiences.

Create your Facebook ads

To create your adverts, open the Ads Manager (under the ‘Create & Manage’ tab in Business Manager). A new window will open with some tabs at the top. Click on the ‘Campaigns’ tab and then click on the green ‘+ Create’ button.

Next, Facebook will ask you to choose an objective for this campaign; there are three main categories of objective (awareness, consideration and conversion) and each of these has various options:

Awareness – Show your post to an audience to raise awareness of your brand or product. You can choose between a brand awareness campaign or a reach campaign.
Consideration – Get people to consider buying your product by generating interest. You can choose to drive traffic, engagement, app downloads, video views or messages, as well as generate leads for your company.
Conversion – Get people to actually buy your product and convert them into paying customers. You can choose to run a conversion campaign, to catalog your sales or to record store visits.

Your choice for the type of campaign to create will depend on your goals and strategy. Choose your main objective and create your ad set in the next screen. Here, you can choose your target audience (from the saved list you have from earlier), select the placement of the ads on Facebook, set your budget and decide for how long to run the campaign.

To choose the placement of the ad, click ‘Edit Placements’ and see your options for desktop and mobile. Facebook will also run ads on their partner websites, which is the ‘Audience Network’ option. The best option when creating your first ad campaign is to target only Facebook news feed. You can play around with the rest of the options as your budget and company grow.

Next, you’ll be asked to set the budget and schedule for your ad campaign. Start with a low budget and run the ad for a week to get some initial data. From there, you can make adjustments where necessary.

Click ‘Continue’ to begin creating the actual ad that users will see. This involves uploading graphics or images and inserting text for the advert post. You can create a new one from scratch or use an existing post on your page as the base.

Once you are happy with the ad, click ‘Confirm’ to save your settings and send the ad for review. Facebook will have a quick look to make sure that it meets their community standards and the ad will be published at your scheduled time and date.

The settings for the ad can be changed later in the Ads Manager page. Here, you can also find various tools for reporting, tracking and editing your ad campaign.

*Add employees to your Business Manager account

Earlier in the article, we mentioned that you may want to add some employees to your Business Manager account. The ‘Business Settings’ option under the ‘Settings’ column (far right) of your Business Manager menu is where you can do this, along with other administrative tasks.

To begin, open the menu in Business Manager and click on ‘Business Settings’. Then, click on the ‘Users’ drop-down menu and select ‘People’. Click on the blue ‘+ Add’ button to start adding employees. Follow the instructions and enter the email addresses of the employees you wish to add.

You can then choose to give them Employee Access or Admin Access, depending on their roles and responsibilities with the Facebook page. Click ‘Next’ to choose what employees have access to on your Business Manager account.

You can grant them access to your Facebook page, where they can create posts and engage with followers, or you can give them access to the ad account, where they can create and monitor advertising campaigns.

When you’re done, click ‘Invite’. This will send an invite to your employees, which they will have to accept to be granted access.

Facebook’s advertising tools may seem complicated and daunting at first, but once you play around with it and tweak certain settings, you’ll find it easy and an affordable way to reach the right audience.

Start simple and make small adjustments with each new campaign. Track the results and decide what to tweak next. Soon, you’ll be creating successful ad campaigns that work well for your business.

If you wish to partner with someone who knows how to apply the best practices to achieve your online goals, don’t hesitate to email us at zani@mobimeme.com.

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