We understand that Facebook Ads Manager can feel overwhelming at first. With its wide range of features, targeting options, and campaign settings, navigating the platform can be challenging, especially for beginners.
Whether you’re:
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A small business owner looking to run your first ad campaign,
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A freelancer wanting to expand your digital marketing skill set, or
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Simply someone looking to understand the fundamentals of Facebook advertising,
This guide is designed to give you a solid foundation. We’ll walk you through the key components of Facebook Ads, including campaign setup, audience targeting, creative best practices, and performance tracking, so you can start building campaigns that deliver real results.
Content
So, why use Facebook Ads?
Facebook Ads continue to grow in popularity, and for good reason. More businesses are recognising the platform’s potential to drive real results. When used strategically, Facebook Ads can be a powerful tool for growth, delivering measurable ROI across a wide range of industries.
Consider the reach:
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Over 80% of internet users are active on Facebook.
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That’s roughly 2 billion monthly users, generating around 22 billion ad clicks per year.
With numbers like these, it’s clear, your audience is already on Facebook. The challenge isn’t whether they’re there, but how you find and engage them effectively.
If you’re not currently leveraging Facebook Ads, now is the time to start seriously considering it. Every day you delay could mean missed opportunities, and lost revenue.
Onto the technical Stuff
Facebook Business Manager can be confusing at first, so here’s a simple breakdown of how it’s structured:
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Business Manager: The top-level hub where you manage everything related to your brand or clients.
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Ad Manager: Where your ad accounts live and campaigns are managed.
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Ad Account: Where you actually run ads. We recommend one ad account per client to stay organised.
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Campaign: Sets the overall objective, traffic, conversions, reach, or engagement.
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Ad Set: Defines your audience, placement, budget, and schedule.
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Ad: The creative, image/video, copy, and destination URL.
Top Tip: Always Test
The more variations (visuals, copy, audience segments) you test, the faster you’ll find what works.
Setting Goals: Campaign Types
Before launching, decide what you want to achieve. Facebook breaks campaigns into three categories:
1. Awareness
Introduce your brand to new audiences.
Examples:
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Boost posts
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Promote your page
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Increase reach or brand awareness
2. Consideration
Engage people who are thinking about your brand.
Examples:
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Website traffic
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Video views
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Lead generation
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Event promotion
3. Conversion
Encourage action, sales, sign-ups, or purchases.
Examples:
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Website conversions
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App engagement
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Catalogue sales
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Store visits
Note: If you’re running conversion campaigns, you’ll need to install the Facebook Pixel on your (or your client’s) website. This tool tracks user actions and enables retargeting.
Pro Tip: Name Your Campaigns Clearly
Use a consistent naming format. It saves confusion later, especially if multiple people are managing the account.
Ad Set
Similarly with naming the campaign, you want to give your ad set a name that makes sense.
Here is where you are going to define your audience and budget. When first starting out with ads, it’s important to experiment with different audiences to find the right one for yours or your clients brand.
The demographics you can play with are:
- Location – This is relevant if your product only ships to a specific country or if you have a bricks and mortar business in a particular area. So this starts at country level, then goes down to state or county, then to city, zip code, address and you can refine it even further to target people within a mile radius.
- Age
- Gender
- Languages
- Interests – To find this information Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, and the Pages they like.
- Behaviours – Things like purchase behaviour and intent, how they react to similar ads or pages.
- Connections – This enables you to show to the ad just to people connected to your page and vice versa.
Now, think outside the box with audience. Sometimes it isn’t the most obvious route that will be the most successful.
Setting your budget
There are two ways in which Facebook allows you to set your budget.
- Daily: A daily budget is the amount you’re willing to spend every day.
- Lifetime: A lifetime budget is the maximum that you’ll spend during the lifetime of your advert. Facebook averages this out over the period the advert is set to run.
Different companies like to work in different ways, there is no best practice way to work. The daily budget allows a little more control over when and where the budget is spent whereas lifetime leaves a little more of the work up to Facebook.
Also remember budgets can be set at the adset or campaign level, but that’s a whole other blog post entirely.
Creating your ad
There are different types of ads you can use, it’s important to find the most effective one for your brand.
Image – we think you can guess this one!
Video – this is an easy one as well.
Slideshows – this format is a combination of images or videos, text and sound. You can include three to ten images or one video.
Carousel – simply enough, you can showcase up to ten images or videos in a single ad, each containing its own link.
Instant Experience – this enables the viewer to immerse themselves in a full-screen experience that opens up after clicking on the ad.
Collection – The collection format features multiple products and opens as an Instant Experience when someone interacts with it.
Here are the different specs for both stills and videos.
Image specs:
Recommended image size: 1200 x 628 pixels
Image ratio: 1.9 1:1
Video specs:
Format: .MOV or .MP4 files
Resolution: at least 720p
File size: 2.3 GB max.
Recommended aspect ratio: widescreen (16:9)
The wordy bit
Sometimes people think that all that matters in an ad is the images. Wrong! The text adds information, personality and can draw the customer in. First, you want an attention grabber; tell the audience what it is you’re selling and why they’re going to want it. End with a call to action, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.
The three areas of copy on the advert are the Primary text, the description and the headline. These snippets of text appear in different places in different ads, so its important to preview and test them out.
Final bit of advice, the biggest tip we can give you when it comes to Facebook adverts is to test until you’re blue in the face. Try different images, play with video and see what merits the best response. Add in different variants of copy, use different language and different CTA’s.
As a Facebook advertising agency, we can help with all different areas regarding Facebook Ads, from creative to digesting the numbers. If you would like a hand with your Ad account schedule a call here.
