How to Run Facebook Ads: Beginner's Guide to Ads Manager & Campaign Setup

So I've recently been asked, how do you run Facebook ads and is there a cost? What's the cost? So I figured, hey, let's answer that question to the person who asked me that, but also put this video out for you guys here to, to maybe answer any questions you may have. So let's, let's look at this and figure this out. So there are a couple of ways you can run Facebook ads. One way is to go into Business Ads Manager, which looks like this. Now this is more set up for advanced users once you've understood how to run ads. So this is one way to do it. And while we're in here, I just want to explain the breakdown of how ads work. So ads are set up in 3 different sections. There are campaigns, which is the overarching, um, essentially campaign of that where you name what it is and you set the objection of that. So if we go in here, we say, okay, which one of these 6 objections is the ad. So are we running an awareness ad, which means are we trying to just get, as you see there, reach, brand awareness, video views, or store location awareness? Traffic is, are you trying to get people to click a link and go to a website, a landing page, an Instagram profile, or click to call? Engagement, do you want Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp messages? Do you want video views? Do you want post engagements, meaning comments on it? Conversions, which you're trying to sell something or get people to opt in. Um, or again, calls, which calls shows up in a couple of different ones. Leads. So instant forms. These are people that would click a link and a form fills in their information from Facebook. So you can get those leads. This is more from a sales side of things. Um, app promotions, if you're building apps or sales, if you're using an e-commerce. So for most businesses who are starting out or individuals that are starting out, you're going to be in the one of the top two, awareness or traffic. Here's the other thing to consider with this is if you chose awareness, you're gonna get the broadest audience within the targeting that you set up. This is obviously just gonna be showing it into the feeds of people that are there. It's not essentially showing to specific types of people who take action and click on it. Traffic, however, as we start to go down the list here, Each of these will start to show your ads to people who have demonstrated the type of action you're looking for. So if people have clicked on links or gone to landing pages on other ads, it's gonna show to them first and so forth as you go down, okay? So that's the first part in setting up the ads in here. So let's just click on awareness for now. And now it's gonna go in. So you got those 3 levels. You got this one here, which is your campaign level. So you give it a name and you start to go through. Now, one thing, if you're running anything for these 4 categories, so ads for credit, ads for employment, ads for housing or social issues, elections or politics, and this falls under municipal politics as well, you do need to declare that here. And once you do that, and if you didn't do it, they're gonna decline your ad. Once you do that, as you go down, you gotta pick your country, and then you gotta confirm your identity. You gotta go through Facebook's steps to send the information to them to confirm you're an actual person for that. And then which page is the ads going to be running from, right? So you select your page from here. As you go through, then we get into different things like what's the campaign details, the buying type. Most commonly, auction is the one, that you'll want there, or reservation is the second. But 99.9% of the ads that I've ever ran for myself or for another business has been an auction type, which means it's done on a bidding type of system. So that means that you can run, let's say, a campaign budget ad which says, okay, we're going to run the campaign for 7 days and we're going to spend $50. Well, within that $50, we tell Facebook to start to bid for placements, determining which spots there to show up. Now, if we say, okay, we want to target men and women between 30 and 50 in a geographic area, then if there's a lot of other advertisers targeting the same people, the cost to get that ad in front of them is going to be higher. Okay, now if your ad starts to perform well and you get a lot of engagement and it does what you need it to do, it's telling the algorithm that to show this ad to more people within that targeting area. And if other people's ads that are bidding for the same spot are not getting engagement, they won't get the space, so you'll get it in there. So that's why it's important to think of your ad creative as well as your targeting. And we go down through here, we've got our ad campaign budget advantage, which means we will use Facebook's ability to smartly use your budget to reach the best audience. And then A/B testing, which is another side of it. So that's the campaign level. The next side is what's called the ad set. Now the ad set is who do you want to reach with this set of ads? So what's the goal? Is it meet the, meet, the maximum reach of the ad. So if you're doing an awareness ad, just get your name out there, that's what you're gonna want, you're gonna want that. That's maximum reach. Maximum number of impressions means if the group is small, so if you are targeting a geographic small area like maybe your town, you might want to go with a number of impressions, which means we'll try to show your ad to to people as many times as possible. That's in there. You have to be aware though that the more they see the same ad, they'll become blind to it and it won't have the same kind of results. So by default, we try to reach initially. That's there. And there's a bunch of other ones which we're not going to go into all the details. Then pick your page that you want there. Don't worry about the cost per goal result. That is more of an advanced thing. They also have dynamic creative, which means if you don't have the ability to create you know, really nice-looking ads or anything like that, you can start to put in a bunch of different head— I'm going to turn it on— but different headlines, different images, and the Facebook algorithm system will start to build ads mixing and matching those different assets together. And then when some start to perform better, it will show that one even more. And then down here under the budget, now this is where you can go astray just by not paying attention, and I've done this a couple times. You come in here like, I'm going to spend $50. So you go in here, you type in $50, but you don't notice that you didn't change this from daily budget to lifetime budget, right? And when you do that, see what happened there? So I did 50 here and I'm like, oh, I need to change it. And I go lifetime. Now it took the date, multiplied it, and it put 350 in here. So we'd have to go back and change that to $50 and put it in there. When do you want it to start? What's the end date in here? And you can change that to any date you want. You can run this for 3 days if you want. What you're going to want is at least 7 days minimum because the ad goes through what's called a learning phase. And when it goes to that learning phase, it starts to test out different audience subsets and everything and see what's working. And when it gets out of that learning phase, the ad will then start to do what it's supposed to do, um, because it's taught the ad algorithm how to deliver that ad properly based off of the parameters that you gave it and how people are responding to it. So you go through and now we get down to the audience targeting. So in here, what you're going to see is what are called custom audiences. Now these can be set up in advance, um, and they can be, you know, people that have already been to your website if you've got tracking pixels and all that kind of stuff. But starting out, what you're going to basically do is bypass this here and get down to your location. So what I'm currently in Nova Scotia, so let's say I want to run an ad targeting the people of Kentville, Nova Scotia, which is a neighboring town to me. So I'm going to click on that, and now it's going to by default say a 25-mile radius. You see on the map here where we're going to target those people. That may be a little big, right? So maybe we're going to bring that down to the minimum, which is 10, and now we're going to hit a little bit of Wolfville, a little bit of, um, Colebrook here, which is okay., to have that. That's the minimum you can get in there anyway. Um, so that's what's going to happen in there. So we're going to go down. Now you can add multiples in here. If I wanted to go and put in another town, I can start to stack them. Um, and I'll just show you that right now. So let's go Windsor. Uh, I see it there. Let's see if it shows up. There we go. So you're going to see here, it's going to make another circle. So you can start to target and build different spots that are there. You can also drop a pin if a town doesn't show up. Click on that and it actually puts a pin location in there. So we're gonna get rid of that, um, and we're gonna go down. Now we're gonna get into the age. What's the demographic, uh, of that category of people you're going to target? So put in the high, low age, uh, and then the gender, male, female, or all that's there. Detailed targeting— this is where you can start to put in their interests. So My rule of thumb with this is if you're doing a general blanketed ad, let the algorithm pick the people that you want it to see. Put in your geographic area, put in your age range, put in your gender, and leave it at that unless you have a very specific interest that you are trying to target in your ads. And this can get very creative over time as we start to build different ads for that. This little checkbox down here says reach people beyond the targeting section. So if you chose, let's say, you know, 35 to 65 and you turn that on, there's a chance it could reach people under 35. So only turn that on if you want to do that. This is more so on the targeting. So let's say you targeted people that loved automobiles and there were people that started to share your post or engage with it and click on it that were not automobile people, that weren't targeting, or their profile didn't say anything about that, it would then try to find other people like that. That's what that means. And then down here lastly is your placements. The advanced placements is on by default here, which means it will use, you know, if you got Instagram account, if you've got, you know, search right-hand side columns, it'll find all different placements for that, not just in the newsfeed. But you can always click this and go to manual placements, and now you can start to say, okay, I'm not gonna run it on Instagram, so I'm gonna turn on— well, that's not gonna let me, but I'm I don't want it on the audience networks, I'm gonna turn that off, and I don't want it on Messenger, I just want it on Facebook, okay? So that's the ad set. Now you can have multiple ad sets in your campaign. Why would you want that? Well, let's say you wanna target men and women differently in your ad. Let's say you're doing a political ad campaign and you have some images of you with men, you have images of you with women, maybe you wanna show those ads with those images to men, those two women. You could run two different ad sets setting up the audience to be one or the other, and then within that put in different ads for those type of things, okay? So by default it's showing another client's account here, but then you go to your ads and you start to build your ads in here. Now this is where you can get into different types of ads, single image or video, carousel ads, which is where you swipe to the right and have multiple images, or collections, which is just a group of multiple images. And when they click on it, opens to a full-screen experience that's in here. You can upload your media, put in your primary text. So your primary text is what shows up above the image, just like, let's say, a post. That's what they mean by primary text. Um, and you can add multiples in here, so you can do up to 5 different ones and it will mix and match. Your headline is what's going to show up down here in the ad. Your description is what's going to show up below. That is a little bit of description there. And then your CTA, or call to action, which is what do you want the button to be. If it's an awareness ad, maybe you don't even want a button, you just want the post to show up. If it's a traffic ad, you want to go to your website, then you're probably going to want to choose learn more, and then it will have that button in there. Now it's going wild because I haven't set up all the stuff before that. Okay? Once you've done all that, you're gonna click publish. It will give you warnings if things aren't set up properly. It will then go to an approval stage and it can take, you know, an hour. It can take several hours. It could take a few minutes. Depends on how the system looks at it. If it is declined, here's the key thing. Every time it's declined and you keep submitting it, it keeps declined. Those are negative marks against your ad account and your ad account can be shut down over time. If it is declined, it will tell you the reason why you need to fix that and try to resubmit it, um, to get it approved in the, in the system. So this is using the Ads Manager. Let's now hop over to the actual Facebook page and show you, you know, the more simple method that they've created in here. It doesn't give you as many options for building multiple ad sets, but if you're starting out, this is how you want to do it. So here we are using our Facebook page. Um, Blue Cow Marketing, and when I'm in it using it, so you see that the icon up here is the company icon. So we're using it as Blue Cow Marketing. On the left-hand side, we can go and click Create Ads. Now you have to be an admin for this to work. When it comes in here, it gets into the Create an Ad section. Um, and you pick your ad account at the top. If you don't have an ad account, you have to set one up. It will give you the option to do that in the process. So now what's your goal? Automatic, let Facebook choose. Well, or we want to change, and then it gets a little more, you know, colorful in here. So you've got get more leads, get more messages, get more page likes. So what they're trying to do is make it more, um, worded so you understand it better in here. So more page likes, more website visitors, just get more visits to your store, more leads. So pick the one that you want that's in there. I'm going to leave it automatic just for the sake of this. Your ad creative, so you can go ahead and, um, Write your ad in here, pick the, pick the button that you want. Now, one thing that's in here that is a little easier is, is the ability to click Use a Post. Now, here is something to think about. If you are creating content on your Facebook page and you want to then start to run ads, the best way to do this is to test your creative with organic. So you got an audience. Now if you're starting out, this is not going to work essentially until you have some followers on your page, but you're going to start to do some posts organically. It's meaning you're not running ads, you're just posting it there. As a post starts to get some traction, starting to get some positive comments, some likes, some shares, you can go in here and say use a post and it will look at your page and look at your Facebook posts. So here's one here. So I can go through and say, okay, find one, you know, maybe I wanted this one here. So I can say use post, and now it's going to pull that post into my account, the graphics, the text, everything. And the benefit, as long as I don't change the content, when the, when the ad goes out, it's going to have all that social proof on the ad, meaning the likes, the comments, the share stuff that's on there. If I change the ad up here, it's technically a bait and switch new ad. It's going to wipe that all out for you. So we go down here, we got again the Advantage Creative, which means you can start to change some stuff there. Um, special ad categories, so you can put that in. Your audience targeting, just like before. Um, you can click on this, pick your detailed audience location. Just the interface looks a little bit different. And then down here, how you pick the budget is, is a little different. Um, so run the ad continuously or choose when this ad will end. You can put that in there. You can say 7 days. And here, daily budget. Now in here, um, you're gonna have to do some math. So you've got 7 days here. How much are you going to spend per day? Um, says $3 in here. You can slide this up, and as you slide it up, what you're going to see here is estimated range here on the right-hand side. It's what is it estimating the charge is going to be. So I did $2 a day for those 7 days. I'm going to pay $16.10 after the tax and everything. Now, as I pull this up, this number is going to go up because that's the estimated reach per day. So the more you pay, the bigger the audience you're going to get. That is also dependent on the targeting that you set. So if you pick— by default it was set to Canada, bigger audience— this is always, always going to go up. If you have a smaller audience, this number may not be as big and you may not also have to pay as much for that. So if you go in here and say, okay, $80, now you know basically what you're going to spend. Then you put in your credit card information down below, um, and you click publish and it's set it and it waits for the approval and it will start to run. Perfect. Just what we want, right? So let's say you have an ad approved. Now I'm going to go in. I don't have an ad running for my page, so I'm just going to I'm gonna go back here, I'm gonna leave that there. And once you have your thing posted, you're gonna come back in here and you're gonna go into your Ad Center. Nope, sorry, not the Ad Center. This will show where your recent ads are that are in here. But once you're in there, you can go and say View Results. And you can see the results of the ad. Um, you can either run it again, you can edit the ad, so there'll be an edit button in here. The other thing is you also have a button on your page for Ads Manager. So when you click on that, that's going to take you over to this here, which now you'll see that the ad that you created is now showing up in here. Okay, so this one here is just one we have set up for a client. We just set it up yesterday. It's a Facebook lead ad, so it has the form. And it starts to show us kind of the, the details of it. How much did we spend in the range? So this is this month. So that's keeping in mind if you're going to break it down, if you're running a long period of time, you can go and change that. So your reach is how many people, how many accounts has that ad been loaded into their newsfeed, and what's the impressions? So how many times has that ad been shown? It could be shown to same person multiple times, which means this number is is going to be higher. And then from there, your, your ad spend. Now you can go in here and start to look at other things. So breakdown, day, age, and all this kind of stuff. That's all the reporting. You don't really need to get into those many details. So keeping in mind, that's how you would set up ads. Campaign is what's the objective? How much are you going to spend on this? Your ad set is how many, or not how many, but who are you targeting the ad to? And then what are the ads that you're in that you're going to have in that ad set? You can have as many ad sets under a campaign as you want. You can have as many ads in an ad set under a campaign as you want. Always test, try different things, try different images. Don't always set to just one because it may not resonate. If you're going to change and do variations on the ad, I recommend this tip and follow this. Change one thing at a time. So let's say you create an ad with an image, a headline, a description, and you want to do another ad. You're going to then possibly just change the image, keep the same headline, keep the description, right? Do that. Then maybe you're going to do another one where you're going to take those two ads, you're going to change the headlines to two different headlines, keeping the same image on each of those, right? Because if you change multiple things and one really takes off, you don't know what actually caused that ad to perform better. So if you like this video, if it's helpful, please, wherever you're seeing it, comment, like, share. If you're on YouTube, subscribe. Uh, just love putting this stuff together for you. Thanks for watching.