Facebook Ads 2026 Crash Course Guide: (Setup, Build & Launch Your Ads)

What's going on and welcome to this video where we're going to be doing a full overview of the Facebook Ads Manager updated for 2026. And this should get us a little bit into 2027 before Facebook makes some major updates. Most of the time Facebook's updates are extensive, but you can still apply a lot of what's in this video to future videos. This is going to be a good foundation just for understanding the Ads Manager setting up the Ads Manager correctly, and then I'll even walk through launching your first campaign just so you can kind of see the motions of everything and we can go from there. So first things first is setting up your Facebook ad account is really the first step here, and to do this correctly, you ideally want a Facebook Business Manager. And so to do that, you'll want to log into Facebook on your desktop. Over here on the left-hand side, you'll want to go to the Ads Manager section And just start with clicking that and kind of see where it takes you. If you don't have anything set up at all, it'll most likely take you to this page here where you can start with business tools. If you're not getting to this part or something's messing up at the Ads Manager section, just go on Google and type in business.facebook.com. It should take you here. You can log in with Facebook. And then at that point, just follow the steps on screen. It'll probably ask you to make your business name, set up your account, etc., etc. Pretty basic stuff that's self-explanatory. Facebook has plenty of help articles if you get stuck. I cannot go through every single scenario to setting up your account, but this should get you on the right path. After that point, once you do click on Ads Manager, once you do have everything set up, the ideal setup that you want here is this, which is going to be your Business Manager or your Business Portfolio. With your business name, and you'll kind of have these settings here. If you don't know how to get here, but you do have an ad account, like you have something like this where you can see ads and whatnot, to get to that spot, you'll go to All Tools and then Business Settings, and that'll get you right here. What you'll be able to do at this point is if you don't have an ad account, you can kind of take stock to see where you're at currently. So you can go to Ad Accounts. If you don't have one, And you'll be able to check everything that you have— your ad accounts if you have any, your pages, etc., etc. Now, if you don't have anything set up here in the ad account section, you'll want to actually just hit this add button, create a brand new ad account, name it whatever you'd like to name it, put your time zone in and the currency that you'll be spending in, and go ahead and make it. For the page, this is separate from your Facebook profile. The profile and the page are totally different things. But you'll want to set that up as well so you can actually run ads from that page. Once you're done with all that, then you will actually be at the Ads Manager. Now you can actually launch an ad, and I can walk you through this whole system here because it can look like a rocket ship for the first time. So the most important thing to understand are these 3 tabs up here. You'll see Campaigns, Ad Sets, and Ads. Campaigns are essentially the highest level, the objective that you're setting up your ads for. The objective that you have, sometimes the budget, and really just the objective is the biggest thing. Ad sets is where you'll set up things like the audience that you're targeting, your budget again, potentially placements like where you want them placed, Facebook, Instagram, both, or more detailed placements. And then the ad level is just the ad itself, the picture of the video that you're promoting, where you actually want to send people, whether it's a website landing page, your profile, to DM you, whatever it is. And that's essentially it. Super high level, that's what's the most important thing. Now, outside of that, once you launch ads, analyzing the ads is just as important. And you could go and set up custom columns here if you wanted to, to track very specific things. But I think to start, it's super simple just to use the performance and clicks filter because it filters pretty much everything that you need. Which would be all these things right here after amount spent. All this stuff is important to look at. Um, I have another video that is a KPI cheat sheet overview, which I can link below this one. This will give you a good overview of what these metrics actually mean and how you can actually make them better. So if something isn't working, that guide will tell you exactly what to change and what to do to make these metrics better. And it'll also explain these metrics very plainly. I'm not gonna get into that in this video. I'm just mainly showing how to set this all up. So once you're kind of familiar with that, let's go ahead and create a campaign. You'll click on that green create button, and then you can choose your objective. So to break these down, awareness is just simply that awareness. You're just running an ad with the objective to get more people to see it, nothing else. The important thing before I keep going with these objectives, they're very literal. If you are asking for awareness, the only thing you will get from Facebook or Meta is awareness and so on and so forth. So keep that in mind when you're choosing these. Traffic is just simply sending people to a destination. And this just simply the same thing. It just means that you're just sending traffic. Engagement, you can use this for engagement on your posts, your profile, and you could just, you even use this objective to have people DM you to work with your business, et cetera. Leads, pretty self-explanatory, getting leads. App promotion, this would be if you had an app on the App Store and you want people to install it or kind of achieve certain events inside of your app, you could do that. And then sales, pretty simple again, you want purchases. In this example, I'm just going to use the leads objective and then kind of go from here. Now what's super important, like I said, is these objectives, you should take them very literally. If you have a landing page, for example, and you're sending people to that lander to opt in or to book a call or to buy something, and if you do traffic, you could technically set up something where you're sending traffic to a page to hopefully get a lead. You will not get any leads, if any, maybe you'll get a few from this traffic objective. It'll be horribly optimized because you're basically telling Facebook, hey, all I really care about is just sending people to this page, for link clicks or landing page views. That's all I really care about. If you want a lead, you have to make sure you set it up with this leads objective. So before I go through this next step, I just want to explain to you the Facebook Pixel process and then just a very high-level crash course on how to set that up, because this is exactly where the Facebook Pixel will come into play. So heading back over to the Business Manager, what you'll want to do is you'll want to go to your data sources here. Datasets and Pixels, and you'll want to create a pixel. All the pixel is, is the communication point between your destination, like your website or your landing page, and Meta. And it helps track activity for your business that your business cares about so you can better target audiences and help improve performance. It's just a communication tool between Facebook and your website or your data source to make sure that Facebook gets the right thing. Like I said, if you want leads, Facebook doesn't know what a lead is until you tell it, and you tell it that by the pixel. So you want to make sure you set this up correctly. I've got other videos on detailed guides on pixels, but your first step is just make your pixel, create it, and make sure that it's ready to go. Depending on your actual setup, like where your website is and what you're optimizing for, there's a lot of detailed guides out there, and I have some around actually setting up the pixel right. But to start, just name your pixel, set it up, And get it moving. After that point, once you have it set up, then you can come back and we can carry on with the setup here. And I would highly recommend not to launch a campaign until you have your pixel set up, unless you are doing something like engagement. Get back here. Unless you're doing something like engagement, traffic, or awareness, because for engagement, you don't really need a pixel. But I'll just show leads here. So that's the first step. Let me actually start over here so it looks just as it is when you guys are clicking through it. Okay, so after you choose your objective, at this point you can choose the budget. Now you can choose budget in 2 places, either a campaign budget or an ad set budget. For your first set of ads, I'd recommend an ad set budget, and I would uncheck this option here to share budget with other ad sets. So after that, we'll go ahead and hit next in the bottom right. And then you can name your ad set if you'd like. For the conversion location, you'll want to make sure instead of multiple that it's single. So whether that's a website or you're just doing like a Facebook lead form, which you don't need a pixel for a lead form, we're just going to choose a website. From there, you'll choose your dataset. You'll be able to pick that here. And then you'll also be able to choose the conversion event. Like what you're optimizing for. So in most cases, that'll be a lead. Then you'll actually choose your daily budget. And then here's where you can choose your audience. Now there's a few things here to kind of understand. You'll see this Advantage Plus. This is just telling you that, hey, Facebook is going to take what you're putting in here as a recommendation, not so much as a guideline. So you could put in things like age, gender, and other detailed targeting demographics as well. So if you wanted to target people interested in Whole Foods, you could do that if you'd like. Once again, this is gonna be a suggestion, which you can see here. Now, if you'd like to, you can click this button here that says further limit the reach of your ads and further limit them. And then what this is gonna do is it's not gonna do this so much as a suggestion, but it's more so gonna do this as a guideline. So say you only wanted to target men, you could uncheck use as a suggestion. And say you only wanted to target people between the age of 30 and 45, same thing, and you could uncheck it so it's not a suggestion. At that point, you go down to this placement section and you can adjust things like the platform that you're targeting on, um, as well as like more specific kind of placements as well if you wanted to, right? So you can make all those changes here. After that, we'll go next, and then this is where we can set up the actual ad itself. You choose the Facebook page that you're advertising from. You choose if you want to do an image, video, carousel, or collection. You choose where you're actually sending people to website here. I'd recommend choosing none for browser add-ons, and then you can actually upload your video or your image, and I'll just use an example one for now. It's going to check the cropping on them. Then you can put in your primary text, which is like the caption and the headline and the call to actions, learn more. And then for these enhancements, I'd recommend turning all of them off. A lot of the stuff that Facebook tends to add is not too great, so just turn off all these enhancements, click done, and then you're pretty much good to go. There's nothing else really that you need to set up. If you wrote your primary text and headline, you'll see those here and you can launch. Now, I skipped over some things in this video inside the setup process, and if I did and you're wondering, oh, well, why didn't he talk about creative source or creative testing or languages? It's because they don't matter. Totally ignore anything that I didn't talk about specifically during the setup process. You don't need it. And it's essentially a full crash course for 2026 for setting up your campaign and then setting up your ad account. And Pixel as well at a high level. Hope you enjoyed, and let me know if you have any questions.