How to set up your Facebook Ad Campaign

This step-by-step-tutorial is designed to help you with everything you need to know about Facebook advertising, in order to successfully set up your first Facebook ad campaign and achieve good results. Just like with the Business Manager tool, Facebook has created two ad management tools that you can use for free, to set up, manage and edit ad campaigns: Facebook Ads Manager and Power Editor. If you don’t have a Facebook ad account or a page yet, we have explained those steps in our previous blog post ‘How to set up Facebook Business Manager‘. If you would like to find out more about how Facebook ads work, or some of the advantages of advertising on Facebook over other platforms, you can check out our Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Advertising.

Before we jump into it, let’s have a look at the structure of a Facebook Campaign:

A campaign is structured into three levels:

Campaign
Ad Set
Ads

A Campaign has one objective and can contain multiple Ad Sets. So, if you want to drive traffic to your website and get Likes to your Page, you are going to need two campaigns, as those are two different objectives.

Ad Sets can include multiple ads. They have their own targeting, budgets, schedule, bidding and placements.

Ads can have different landing pages (URLs), use different images, and different ad copy.

Step 1: Choose an Objective for your Campaign

You can choose from the following campaign objectives:

Brand awareness
Local awareness
Reach
Traffic
Engagement
All installs
Video views
Lead generation
Conversions
Product catalog sales
Store visits

Choosing an objective is a crucial step, as it determines your campaign settings and options available, such as different bidding strategies or different ad formats.

Facebook Advertising Objectives - Amazee Metrics

Step 2: Define your Facebook Audience

Once you have selected your campaign objective, the next step is to setup your Audience Targeting.

The targeting can be so precise, helping you reach highly engaged people that are very likely to engage with your brand or buy your products.

There are a few things that you should know when setting up your audience:

Location and Demographics

This one is straight forward: Add the locations your customers are located. You target by radius from a location (useful for local businesses) and exclude locations you want to make sure your ads don’t show up in.

User demographics such as gender, age, relationship status, education, work and more is another feature that is going to help you refine your target audience and reach the right person.

This is a must if your target audience is gender or age specific.

Facebook location and demographics targeting

Facebook Audience Demographics - Amazee Metrics

Interests and Behaviors

The Interests and Behaviors targeting options help you narrow down your target audience even further. There are hundreds of different interests and behaviors you can choose from, and best of all – you can layer them on top of each other!

Facebook behavior targeting - Amazee Metrics

Lookalike Audiences

This feature helps you target audiences or people who are similar to your existing audiences. You can choose some of your most valuable audiences and target their lookalike audience. Here is a description how to set up a lookalike audience.

Step 3: Set up your Ad Creatives

Your ads, both the design/image and the copywriting play a crucial role in your campaigns success. Depending on the image or text you use, it will affect the difference in your CPCs (cost-per-click) or CPA (cost-per-acquisition). So make sure your ad design and copy work for your audience.

Here are some tips when creating your ad creative:

Do not use blurry, low resolution or bad stock photos.
Do not write ad copy that is too long. Make sure your ad copy is straight to the point, stick to important information to ensure your audience will engage while scrolling on their newsfeed.
When you choose the image, and write the text, think with your customer in mind.
Place your main value proposition in the image, so that your audience reads it as they see the image.
Use images that are 1200 x 682 pixels, making sure they are properly displayed on all devices/screens.

Ads Placements

There are 4 ad placement options:

Mobile News Feed
Desktop News Feed
Right Column
Instagram

Which one is the right format depends on your campaign. The best is to test most of the formats and see which one works best for you. Although most advertisers choose the Desktop news feed, the right column ads are significantly cheaper.

If you’re targeting people on their mobile devices, and creating mobile news feed or Instagram ads, make sure you are not sending anyone to a non-mobile friendly website.

Step 4: Define your Bidding Strategy

Just like Search Engine Adverting, the ad bidding on Facebook works on an auction basis. You compete with hundreds of advertisers and win or lose based on a combination of highest bid, your relevance score and an ‘estimated action rate’.

‘Estimated action rate’ is essentially the likelihood of a person taking an action. You can learn more about the estimated action rate here.

There are two problems to keep in mind about your bidding strategy:

If you bid too low, your campaign might not get enough exposure. This might be limiting for your campaign and reaching your goals.
Bidding high does not mean you will win the auction, as there are two other factors that play a role (see above).
In terms of bidding strategies Facebook offers a range of different possibilities: CPC (Cost per Click), CPM (Cost per Mile), Conversions, Daily Unique Reach, Post Engagement and more.
CPC bidding is probably the most common bidding strategy. It allows you to bid for clicks. The key thing here is that the higher your CTR, the lower your CPC.
A CPM bidding strategy means that you are bidding the maximum of what you are willing to pay to deliver 1,000 ad impressions. You should use this for things like increasing brand awareness or a product awareness. But be careful – you can spend a lot of money quickly without much results.
With Bidding per Conversions, you probably get the best results. Facebook will try and show your ads to the people who are most likely to complete your goal (campaign objective). When bidding on Conversions, you need to make sure you have Facebook’s pixels installed, because conversions like subscriptions or downloads happen outside of Facebook’s platform on your website.
The bidding strategy “Daily Unique Reach” is almost the same as CPM bidding, except your ad will only be shown once a day. You tell Facebook what reaching 1,000 people is worth to you and Facebook makes sure your ad is seen by as many people as possible, but not more than once a day.
With bidding on Post Engagement, you can monitor metrics like total actions people took on your ads (comments, likes and shares) and pay per post engagement. This bidding strategy works well if you would like to improve interactions with your page posts.

If you have any questions regarding setting up a new Facebook campaign, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask me.