Meta Ads Setup for Your Home Service Business (Beginners Guide)

So if you're trying to run Facebook or Instagram ads for your business and you're completely overwhelmed— yes— confused— yes— I think I can help. And my promise to you, by the end of the video, you're going to have the confidence and the clarity to run your first or next Meta ad campaign without having to worry about if you skipped a step or if you did something wrong. If we haven't met, I'm Jordan Eastler. I'm one of the co-founders of Forward Marketing. And if you're a little skeptical about watching some random guy on YouTube, this is the exact process that we use to help a client add an extra $463,000 in his home service business in 3 months. We helped another service business add $200,000 in sales in the last 30 days. We helped a dental client add 100 new leads in their business in the last week. And if that's not enough, we helped a local gym owner fill his gym to capacity within the last 3 months. So what we got pulled up here is the framework. We've got our steps. I'm a man of simplicity. It's really only 2 main parts, which is going to be our setup for success, and then we are going to go into the fun stuff, which is I've referred to as the ad manager structure. So the first thing that we got to do, we have got to create a business portfolio if we don't have one yet. We're gonna go to business.facebook.com. You got a Facebook page already set up, it's probably gonna look something along the lines of this. If not, don't worry, it's probably gonna have a page where you just sign into Facebook and you'll actually be able to set this up probably a little easier than what we're gonna do here. So the first thing we need to do is create that business portfolio. I'm gonna go ahead and create one from scratch, that way you can kind of see what all the screens look like. And shout out to CP Landscaping, this is my brother. So if you're in the South Carolina area, he's good at what he does. We're just gonna go ahead and go to create a new business portfolio. Then we're gonna go next. I would go ahead and add another person. The reason why is because if somebody hacks your account— God forbid that happening— you probably want to have another person in your account to go ahead and shut things down. Go ahead and invite somebody, whether that be an employee, a spouse, family member. Next, we're gonna go confirm, and now it's gonna look something along the lines of this. From here, next thing we have to do is add relevant business information. So this is pretty straightforward. Basically what we're gonna do is we are gonna make sure that we have the relevant business portfolio selected here. So we've got YouTube tutorial, and from here we're gonna go down here to settings and we're gonna move up here to business info. So this is where we're gonna go ahead and add all of our business name, our address, phone number, website, all of that stuff. You want to go ahead and add that there. And then I would highly recommend down here in the two-factor authentication— I'm not going to do it in this video because it'll make me send a code to my brother. For our sake, I'm going to keep that off. Highly recommend going ahead and adding everyone. And I'm going to warn you, as soon as you start running some Meta ads, you're going to get all kinds of DMs from all kinds of people. It's going to look like Meta support. It's a 99% chance that it's not. Um, but basically what they're going to try to do is they're going to try to get your information. And say you slip up and you put in your information but you don't have two-factor authentication, they can easily just get in your account, start running up your credit cards. Not gonna be a pretty day. What's cool about this is if somebody tries to log in, they got to get an actual code from your email or from your phone number before they can actually get in your account. So go ahead and set that up. I would highly suggest that. Once you get that done, we can go back here to our next step, which is adding our Facebook page, Instagram page, and ad account. I've got a graphic for us. To break down what a business portfolio actually is. In simple terms, let's think of a house, okay? Inside of your house, you've got multiple rooms that make up your house, right? You've got your living room, you've got your bathroom, you got your bedrooms, you got your kitchen. Think of our business portfolio like your house, and under your roof, your business portfolio, you've got your rooms. Your ad account, your Instagram profile, your tracking tools, your APIs— all that. We're not going through all that stuff. I'm gonna save you all the jargon. We're gonna keep this simple today. All of that stuff lives inside of your business portfolio. So think of your ad account, that could be like your, your living room. Maybe your Instagram profile, that's your kitchen. Your tracking tools is your— I don't know, I'm only a few YouTube videos in, give me a break. I'm trying my best. So instead of, you know, everything kind of being all over the place, you're bringing all of these things— you ready for this— under one roof. And I'm done with the analogies. Maybe we may bring it back up. We may bring it back up. Hopefully this is making a little bit of sense. Okay, one of the things I did skip here is obviously to create a business portfolio, you've got to have a personal Facebook page. So your personal profile is going to create your business portfolio that's going to be connected to your personal Facebook profile, right? And then under your personal profile, you got your business portfolio that houses all of these things like your ad account, your Facebook page, your Instagram profile, your tracking tools, all that. Okay, so we just built that out. Um, but, but what we do have to do is we got to start actually adding our rooms to the house. So we've got kind of the structure of our house built. Now we got to start adding the rooms. So as you can see We need to add our Facebook page, Instagram page, and our ad account. And how we're going to do that, we're going to go here under Accounts, we're going to go to Pages. If you don't have a page, you just want to go ahead and create a page. If you already do have a page, you just want to add it like this, and that's how you would add your page. And then from there, we need to actually add an ad account. If you don't have an ad account already set up, if you don't know if you do or not, I would just go ahead and recommend creating a new ad account. And how you would do that, little tile up here, create new ad account. We're gonna name this YouTube Tutorial Ad Account. Very creative, right? Update our time zone here, pretty important. And then this will obviously be for, you know, more than likely it'll be for your account unless you're an agency and you're creating this for somebody, right? So create my account, we're gonna go agree, and we're gonna go to done. Now we've got our ad account, and then next thing we need to do is we need to actually connect our Instagram account. You can click this one or you can click this one, whichever one. This is gonna come up and you just want to go ahead and log into your Instagram account. We just go agree, add Instagram account. This will pull up, log in, and it's gonna get everything connected. Connected for you. So that is done. And then data sources. So I'm gonna kind of sprint through this. The reason why is this can get complex really, really fast. If you want to learn a little bit more about this, I'm sure there's all kinds of YouTube videos out there already for this. Or, you know, if you like the way that I'm speaking to you, like my little Southern accent that I got here, and you feel like you can trust me, let me know if you want this video. We can, we can break this down a little bit more. But ultimately, at a very high level, your data sources— for an example, say you want to run an ad from Meta and you want to send them to your landing page or your website for them to fill out a form on your, your website. Or let's say you want to run ads only to people who have visited your website in the last 30 to 60 days. You can do all of that in Meta, which is really, really cool, but it takes a little bit of time to set things up. And the example that we're going to give you today, we're really not going to need our data sources yet. Let's just kind of keep the train rolling. But that's what data sources is. That's where you're going to house all of your pixels, APIs, custom conversions, your different audiences and things like that. So we're making some pretty serious progress. We've kind of got things set up for success. The foundation portion is complete. Now we're going to get into some of the fun stuff. The Ads Manager. In the words of MTV Cribs, this is where the magic happens. Let's go ahead and go to the first step here, which is go to Ads Manager. Manager. So we're gonna go to adsmanager.facebook.com, and it should look something like this. I'm glad that this loaded like this because this is something that whenever I first got started running ads confused the heck out of me. It looks like there's no ad accounts to show, but we just walked through this. We just created a YouTube tutorial ad account. Why does it say that there's no accounts to show? The reason why is we don't have the right business portfolio selected. So we want to make sure that we have our correct business portfolio, right? Our house— board and click our business portfolio here, which is our YouTube tutorial that we just created. As you can see here, here's our YouTube tutorial ad account that we just created. So it's a great sign that we did things right. And once we click that, we should find a page that looks something like this. Okay, so now that we're there, let's go back over here to our guide that we've got set up. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually build out— we're gonna walk through the entire process of how I typically build out a campaign for any of our clients. So we're gonna walk through it, I'm gonna give you the mindset behind it, that way you know exactly what each part of the process is. And I've made us a graphic here, that's how my brain kind of connects the dots. Maybe I'm, you know, a little slower than you, but Hey, if you're slow like me, I got you. I feel a connection between us, me and you. Fist bump. That's right. At the very top here, let's go back over here. We're gonna kind of bounce back and forth. Let's go ahead and click campaigns. So as you can see from a high level, we've got campaigns, we've got ad sets, and we have ads. There's really only those 3 parts. Let's explain what each part means and what they do. What we have, kind of think of it as like an upside-down funnel, or if you're a pyramid type of guy, it can be a pyramid. But my brain, it's like it's an upside-down funnel. My hands are doing weird stuff. I'm not sure what to do with my hands. So the very top, the ad campaign, we're telling Meta what our objective is going to be for running this campaign. And let's go ahead and create one from scratch together, and I'll walk you through how we set all this stuff up. So we're going to go create, and as you can see here, like I said, we are telling Meta why are we paying them to run this ad. Are we paying them for video views? Are we paying them for traffic? Or we want people to hit our website? And what's cool about this, as you can see over here, it's going to go away whenever I move cursor, but over here on the right, it'll tell you what each thing is best for. So like Messenger, Instagram profile views, landing page views— there's a lot of different options. I would bet if you're watching this video and you're a local business, you're probably gonna want leads. Or if you're, you know, selling things online, you're probably gonna be wanting sales. So we're doing this specifically for a landscaping company, so what they need is they probably need leads. It's very simple. Right? What's our objective? Why are we spending money with Meta for this ad campaign? And that's how Meta is going to attribute success to your campaign. So if you're wanting leads, if they're getting you leads, well, it's a successful campaign. But if you want video views, you know, you click awareness. Does that make sense? Hopefully it does. Now we're going to go to continue. Name it something that is relevant to you. So I don't know if he was doing like a Name it something better than that. I'm just— I'm trying to, trying to keep us on pace here so, you know, we're not wasting a ton of time. Advantage campaign budget, I'll probably just go ahead and turn that on. I'll explain, this is gonna make sense here whenever we talk about ad set. I would probably, if you're just getting started, like I said, this is where I would probably set my budget. Budget scheduling, I don't really mess with that in this scenario. We're not gonna A/B test it, we're gonna be doing some of that a little bit later. A special ad category, the only time this is gonna be be important to you is if you're in the insurance, financial services. Basically, there's gonna be some limitations on how you can actually target people on an ad set level. If you don't fall in any of these, don't worry about that. We can go ahead and get started with the ad set. Now, it's kind of where you can see this is big giant folder right here is our ad campaign. These 4 squares right here is your ad sets, and then this little thing right here is gonna be our ads. So that's kind of the flow of the funnel. Let's jump back over here to what an actual ad set is, though. Water break. Are you hanging in there with me? Is it making some sense? I hope it is. Hopefully it's not overhead. Hopefully this is kind of starting to connect. On an ad set level, we're basically going to be telling Meta who are we trying to reach and how are we trying to reach these people. So what we're going to do is from an ad set level, we're going to click right here. And we are going to— I'm gonna come back and name it because we need to knock out some stuff real quick, and then we'll name it afterwards. What we're gonna do is we have this conversion portion right here, which is basically where the conversion is gonna happen. So if we're wanting leads, where are we gonna actually have the conversion of these leads? Where's, you know, is it gonna be happening on a Facebook Instant Form? In this tutorial, That's where the magic will be happening, and I'm going to show you how to set up an actual Instant Form that's super, super simple and effective, that's worked really, really well, actually got us all the results that I mentioned at the top of the video. Is it going to be happening in the Messenger? Is it going to be happening in the DMs? Is it going to be happening on a phone call? Is it going to be happening on your website? Are you sending traffic from the ad to your website for them to fill out a form on the website? The only thing about website, you're definitely going to have to set up the data source. In this scenario, we're going to do Instant Forms We want to select our Facebook page. We want to view and accept the Meta Ads terms. And then what's our performance goal? In the beginning, I typically just select maximize number of leads. Cost per result, um, show more options. All of this stuff, not really worrying about if you're just getting started. Okay, you can get lost in the sauce. You've probably watched those videos where 20 minutes in and it gets to the point where it's like, dude, this is like, this is crazy. If you lock in with me, we're gonna get this done right. We're gonna do it simple and we're gonna have success. Simple and success, that's our, that's our motto. Maybe, I don't know, I just kind of came, came up with that. Dynamic creative, let's not worry about that. Um, budget and schedule. So you can technically set your, your budget within an ad campaign level, which is what we did in this scenario, but You know, what is cool about this is let's say you want to target two different groups of people. You can do that. Let's actually push pause on that and I'm going to set up the audience first. And I think this is going to click a little bit, a little bit better. And next thing we have here is our budget and schedule. Let's actually come back to that. That's going to make a lot more sense whenever I explain how we control our audience, whenever we tell Meta who do we want to reach with our ad campaign. In this scenario, it's a landscape company, so we're probably just going to go 25-mile radius. We are in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Shout out to Spartanburg. I typically like, you know, something like this, probably a 25-mile radius is best. You kind of want to have a decent, you know, population here, you know, 600. That's kind of a sweet spot for us. And then let's make sure— see, this is where I trust Meta on a lot of stuff. We've got a great relationship in a lot of areas, but there's some things that we're working on. Okay, so there's some like trust issues that we're, you know, working out the kinks because you've probably seen whenever you get ads from someone who is in Texas and you don't live in Texas, and you're probably not going to be getting your grass cut from somebody who lives in Texas and you live in South Carolina. Also, don't worry about this up here. Meta is going to make you think that you're missing out. You're not. Commercial break. And this is free, so down in the description you can go ahead and grab this. It's a quick bonus training that I put together really for this video. It's called Craft Your Offer. A very fast way to waste a ton of money is not having a strong offer and a strong ad script. It's on now. So in this video, I'm gonna pull back the curtain that I mentioned in the beginning of the video. I'm gonna show you how we crafted a unique offer. That way we stand apart from everybody else in the local market. And two, how we actually script our ads, which is kind of the secret sauce. So if you want access to it, it's down in the description. You just put 0.00, click download, and you got it delivered to your inbox. And then next thing we're going to do is we are going to select show more options. Minimum age, let's not worry about any of that stuff, not relevant in this scenario, not relevant for most of the scenarios. But this is, this is pretty important. I want to target people that I want to target, okay? So we're going to select further limit the reach of our ads because we want to tell Meta who we really want to reach. One of the mistakes that I made early on is I tried to add every single, you know, homeowner. I started adding all kinds of stuff here in the beginning until you start having like, uh, 80% of your leads, 70, 80% of your leads just totally not your type of person. I typically keep the targeting broad. I normally don't even touch this. Meta's algorithm is really good. In a lot of cases. So last night you're talking to your friend about that chainsaw, and then this morning at about 9 o'clock you got the ad for that chainsaw. It's because the algorithm is pretty darn good. I'm gonna let the algorithm do this portion for me. Like I said, until I start having really bad quality leads, I'm gonna keep it broad, and it does a great, great job. So I'm really not going to touch that. I am going to touch age, uh, you know, landscaping. I'm probably wanting somebody that's 35 plus to 65, probably gonna be a homeowner. I think average homeowner now is like 34 years old. So we want to target those, those type of people. Advantage detail targeting, not gonna touch that. Not gonna touch the genders. And let's see, from here I'm gonna keep it that broad. Now what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna bump up here, you know, follow along with me. I know we skip budget and schedule, but the reason why it's kind of important to bring this up now is let's say we did want to target somebody who was 25 to 35 and kind of A/B test something. If 25 to 35 versus 35 to 45. What's cool about it is if you want to do that, you can basically duplicate your ad set like kind of what we have here. And let's say that our 25 to 35 is over here, 35 to 45 is over here, and you want to split up your budget. You want a little bit of your budget to go to 25-35 just as a test, and you want most of your budget going to your 35 to 45. Well, you can set the ad budget at an ad set level. But the only thing is, is we would have to go back here at a campaign level and set this, you know, turn this off, and then we would set the budget at an ad set level. We're not doing that in that scenario, but just so you're aware of the options that you've got. Does that make sense? I wish we could talk back and forth. I'm imagining us talking back and forth. Now what we're going to do is we're going to adjust our ad placement. So earlier, like I said, our ad set level is going to tell us who do we want to reach and where do we want to reach them. Me personally, I don't necessarily want all of my ads on Bass Pro Shop or ESPN. Here's my best practices. Do what you want, but this is what we do. I will typically go manual placements. I will— I don't like audience networks, which is what I was telling you about, you know. I don't really want to be on all kinds of websites. Don't really like some of these options either. So Explorer Home, not a big fan. Business Explorer, not a giant fan. Don't want a notification really. I mean, that's like notifying somebody that of your ad. It might be effective, I just don't like the idea of it, so I turn it off. In-stream ads, that's before, after a video plays. I don't want to bother somebody with my ad there. Search results, I turn that off. And all this other stuff is pretty good to go. And then here, allow limited spend, I don't want to do that either. Last thing here, I do want to name this so I know what's going on. I'm going to go Broad Broad targeting. I typically like to go broad first. If we start to get bad quality leads, that's where you can start to add your friction, you know, more intentional targeting. Or, you know, from an ad level, you can adjust some of your, your questions in your instant form and things like that, which we're going to cover next. But how we'll name it, you know, we'll go broad, we'll go Spartanburg, and then 25 miles, right? So very easy to see. Next, we're going to go to our add portion. Okay, water break, and let's go back to our graphic. So what is an ad? So now at the very bottom of our upside-down funnel here, what the ad's gonna be is the videos, the image. It's basically what people are gonna see whenever they are scrolling Facebook, Instagram, and they see your ad. This is where you upload your videos or your graphics or your pictures, is where you add all of your text. You know, your special offer text, all of that good stuff happens here. For an example, petting goats on the roof is an image. Petting goats on the roof is a video. Landing your rocket ship on the roof is a video. Now that we're here at an ad level, let's go goat on roof video, and we'll name it. What we're gonna do is we're gonna create an ad. In this scenario, we were— we will do a single video. I typically turn this off. Destination. We are gonna create a form. I'm gonna walk you through how to create a form, super simple. And then our ad creative. So our ad creative is gonna be the image, the graphic, the video. So let's just upload something here. So we've got a basic video uploaded here. We're gonna go next. Trim, crop, not gonna do any of that. Next there. And then this is technically where you can add all of your primary text. For whatever reason, I don't really like doing that there. I We're gonna do that here in a second. I just typically go next. A lot of this stuff I really don't like to mess with. I typically keep all this off. Me and Meta's got a great working relationship, but there's just some things we're working on, okay? I don't want to add video effects. I filmed it in a certain way, we edited the video probably in a certain way. I don't want it to be showing up in black and white and it looks bad, and I'm spending some money on some things where they jacked up my video, okay? So we're just turn that off there. We're gonna click Done. You can kind of see what everything's gonna look like over here, right? And now down here, this is where I typically add the primary text. The reason why I like to add it here is so I can actually see what it's gonna look like. And the way I normally will do this is at a 25-mile radius, we're kind of targeting the upstate of South Carolina. So like, upstate South Carolina homeowners 25% off your— bam, bam, bam. For the sake of time, we're just gonna kind of put some fillers here. Primary text is this, the text up here. I typically like to call out my audience first thing, that way we let them know we're local. Headline is gonna be what shows up here, so I like to use emojis. So just kind of calling out the offer that we're giving there. I like using the emoji because it stands out a little bit more, at least to me. Then the description, I typically don't add anything. Call to action button, where we've seen the best results results has been learn more or get offer. You know, use whatever you want to use, but in this scenario, we're just going to click the button. Let's do learn more. I think we've got most of this stuff ready from this side from an ad level. The last thing that we need to do, we need to actually create a Metaform. We're going to keep this really brief because this isn't technically the reason that we're making this video, but it's, it's pretty important you need to have a Facebook form for leads to fill things out. How you do that, we need to— from a destination level, we need to go New Blank Form, and I'll typically label it very easy to read. More volume, I typically don't use that. I like to use higher intent. The reason why is there's just kind of like an extra step here to add a little bit of friction. Like I said earlier, if you're getting very low low-quality leads, you typically just want to add a little bit more friction, you know, whether that be through an extra question or extra few questions on your forms, or just, you know, adding— like, for an example, you can now require leads to verify their phone number with a one-time passcode, right? So basically, before they can fill out a form, they get a code and they got to put in the code. So higher intent is normally where we stay. I typically don't add the one-time passcode until we start getting really low-quality leads. If we start getting really low-quality leads, Open, restricted sharing options. I typically keep that open. I keep that off. And then we're going to go next. I personally don't like using the intro. I feel like that's going to be too much. I would rather them see my video, quickly be able to fill out a form. So we're going to turn off the background image, no greeting. We want to get them right into the questions. Okay, you can select all the things you want them to fill out here. If you're just getting started, you know, obviously the basics. I do like to add this just simple question, multiple choice. So sometimes, you know, if somebody goes through your area— so like we're in Spartanburg— if somebody comes here for Thanksgiving or Christmas or the Fourth of July, they're in there, they're here for a week, you know, if they leave and go back home, they may start seeing these ads. I don't want that person to fill out the Facebook form. I'd much rather go ahead and disqualify them. That way they're not wasting our time and we're not wasting their time. So I'll typically go Are you a homeowner in the Upstate South Carolina area? Yes and no. What's cool, if you click this conditional logic, you can actually go ahead and disqualify them. So if they say yes, you can go to the end page for the lead. Then obviously if they say no, we want to close the form for non-lead. So we go ahead and disqualify them so we're not wasting their time. And then down here is gonna be their contact information. I like to go email, first name, and phone. First name, I like to typically have last name as well. So we'll go first name, last name. And typically I just go ahead and require this because you really want to be able to get in touch with them ASAP. Like I'm talking 5 minutes, obviously within business hours. I do make phone number mandatory. And outside of that, keep it super simple there. Privacy policy, you just want to attach your privacy policy there. If you don't have one of those, ChatGPT that sucker and incorporate your name. I don't know if that's great legal advice. So this isn't a legal channel, this is for marketing purposes only. So we would attach that link there, and then we go review screen ending. That's gonna be the final page that they see, you know, if they're a— if they're a qualified lead, this is what they're gonna see. You can add whatever you want to there, add whatever you want to there. Technically, you go ahead and have— have them call the business. That button there will actually call your number, or you can have them go to the website. You can add that link there. And then for the non-leads, same thing, you just add whatever you want to add there. And from that point, and then down here, if you want to go ahead and get a conversation started in the DMs, you can go ahead and select that as well. So now we're gonna go create form. Let's see if it creates. Boom bada bang, you've got your form set up, and you, my friend, have effectively set up your Ads Manager. Now obviously you've got to go and film the ads or create the ads and things like that, which is why I pieced together this completely free training that you can get access to down in the description. We're going to walk through multiple ad campaigns that have done extremely well for our clients, and I'm going to give you all of the frameworks, how we script our videos, how we set it up in the Ads Manager, which is very similar to this. So if you haven't yet, go grab that. If you enjoyed our time together, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, drop a comment, and as you do that, I'm going to wrap this thing up and I'll catch you in the next video.