A Crash Course in Facebook Advertising

If you’ve ever created a brand of any kind, you know how important it is to get traffic and followers. One fairly simple, fairly cheap way to do that is through Facebook advertising.

Advertising on Facebook is a great way to experiment with ad creatives and your audience. However, it can seem overwhelming if you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Have no fear, here is a very simple overview of what you need to do to get started, beginning with the very basics, and continuing to the more detailed and more difficult. Let’s just right in.

The Basics

1. Have a Facebook account and create a page for your business. Obviously you need a Facebook account, and you’ll need a page to run ads from/through. All the way at the bottom of the left side of the page when you’re looking at your regular Facebook feed, there is a header that says ‘Create.’ Under that, you have the options to create an ad, page, group, event, and fundraiser. You’ll want to select ‘page’ and follow the steps to create your business page. Choose your profile picture, banner, and make a couple posts.
2. Promote a post from your page. This is probably one of the simplest ways to get started. Once you’ve created a page and made a post, there will be a “Boost Post” button at the bottom of it. Make sure your post looks the way you want it to look, because once you promote it you can’t edit it. Boosting a post doesn’t give you the same control as creating an ad through the Ads Manager does, but it’s a good starting point if you just want a little more traffic. Choose a post that’s already doing well on your page. If you’re just starting out and don’t have a following, choose your most eye-catching and engaging post.
3. Choose your audience. Facebook lets you target your audience based on several variables. You can target people based on location, age, sex, and interests. As you move on to the Ads manager page, which I’ll talk about later, it’ll even let you target people based on how they’ll likely react to your post. It’s important to keep your audience targeted. You don’t want it too broad or too narrow, or it’ll be either shown to people who don’t care, or to too few people. Choose a large city to target, then go into refining your audience with interests, age, and sex.
4. Choose your budget. You can either choose a lifetime budget or a daily budget. A lifetime budget puts a cap at how much money total you’ll spend, and divide that money up between the days the ad is running as necessary. A daily budget puts a cap at how much money you spend during a day, and the ad runs as many days as you have scheduled. The minimum budget is $1/day, and the smaller the budget then the more targeted you’ll want your audience so you’re not wasting your money. Personally, I suggest starting out small and growing your budget as your brand/business grows. If people have never heard of you before, chances are they probably won’t buy anything from you the first time they see your ad, no matter how amazing it is or how much money you’re spending on it.

Setting up a Campaign

If you decide to start and stop with what I talk about above, that’s fine. You’ll likely get some likes, page views, and maybe even some link clicks if you have a link. Still, if you want to really focus on marketing and get into the details of it, you’ll have to go set up a Business Manager account and make sure your page is connected (yes, you still need your business Facebook page).

1. Get to know where everything is. There are a lot of buttons here, too many to go over in one post. Most of them you probably won’t need, at least for now. I’ll just tell you the main ones you should be aware of.
   1. Business settings. This will take you to an overview page where you can see all your business pages and ad accounts you have connected. You can also connect new pages and accounts here.
   2. Ad Account Overview. This is pretty much just what it says. You can see an overview of all your ads and all your expenses, results, etc. over all your ad accounts.
   3. Business Manager. This is the most important button, because it takes you to all the other important buttons you’ll need to use.
      1. Audience Insights. This is where you’ll go to learn more about your potential audiences. You can also create/save audiences here.
      2. Ads Manager. This is the most important button, which is why this whole description is in bold. From here you will see your account overview, individual campaigns, ad sets, and ads. This is likely where you’ll be spending most of your time.
2. Create a campaign. From the Ads Manager you’ll see a green “Create” button. You’ll be taken to a page where you can choose your objective. There are a lot of options, but the main two you’ll start with are “Engagement” and “Conversions”. “Engagement” will help target people who will engage with your post, likes, comments, shares, etc. “Conversions” will help target people likely to click a link or complete an action. If you’re just getting started, you should probably begin with “Engagement” to introduce people to your brand. Choose a name for your Campaign before moving on.
3. Create your ad set.  Next, you’ll get to choose your audience and budget. At the top, you can choose your ad set name. Just below, you’ll choose your audience. If you already have one saved you’d like to use, you can click the “Use a Saved Audience” button. If you need to create a new audience, it’s very simple to do.
   1. Custom audience. If you have an audience off of Facebook already, like website traffic or email lists, you can use that information to target the same or similar people. You’ll need to upload a CSV or a TXT file with the information and in about half an hour Facebook will have your audience ready.
   2. Create from scratch. If you don’t have a custom audience, you’ll have to create your own and experiment with who your target audience is. You’ll start with location. Target a large city, like New York or Chicago, or Atlanta. I found I got the most success with Boston when trying to sell warm women’s clothing. Once you’ve targeted your location, move on to age, gender, and language, all very self-explanatory. Then you’ll begin to refine your audience based on interests, demographics, and behaviors. You’ll want to continue refining your audience until the needle on the left-hand side of the page is in the middle of the green part on the gauge.
   3. Choose your ad placement. You can choose where you want your ad to appear on your audience’s feed. The simplest is just automatic and Facebook will choose for you, but if you want to control it, you can choose to edit placement.
   4. Budget and schedule. Here is where you get to decide how much money you’ll spend on running your ad. You can choose to either have a daily budget, which is the average you’ll spend on your ad every day you run it, or a lifetime budget, which is the maximum you’ll spend over the whole time your ad is running. Then, just choose your schedule for when you want your ad to run.
4. Create your ad. You’re almost done. Give your ad a name and move on to the creative. If you already have a post on your page that you really like, you can choose to bost it from here. If you don’t, it’s very simple to follow the steps they lay out for you to create one. Upload your image(s) or video, write your copy, include your shortened link (use bit.ly, and copy the link twice on top of each other to grab a little more attention), and hit the green “Confirm” button at the bottom.

Now all you have to do is wait for your ad to get approved. As long as it meets these guidelines, you should be all set. One important thing to keep in mind is not to include language that encourages people to interact with your ad inauthentically. That means you can’t say things like “Click below” or “Share with your friends” because that somehow might encourage unnatural engagement. Is it silly? I think so, but it is what it is.

Split Tests

When running ads, there is a ton of experimentation going on. There are many variables, and sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what makes one ad perform better than another. The copy? The images? The audience? To help find out exactly what makes one ad perform better than another, you can run split tests. You can choose one variable, whether the audience, creative, placement, or delivery strategies. Aside from that one variable, everything else about the ads will be the same.

Your Creative

When running Facebook ads, you obviously have to create the ad. This primarily involves the copy and the image or video. There are plenty of different kinds of images, videos, texts, links, and buttons you can play around with. These variables depend on your business and your audience. If you are selling jewelry, a pretty picture of a ring or necklace and something quick and snappy for the copy would probably do the trick. If you’re offering your services as a free-lance digital artist, you might want bright colors in your image and a little more information in your text.

As long as your text is informative, intriguing and not too long, and your image is bright and doesn’t look like any old post you might see in your timeline, you should be all set. Think about what in an ad makes you pause, and try to mimic that.

Facebook Pixels

If you’re running engagement ads, the instructions I’ve lined out above should suffice. However, if you want to run a conversion campaign, you’ll need to use Facebook Pixels. Using a pixel lets you track people who come to your website through Facebook and lets you retarget them later on with more ads.

If you are running and promoting a Shopify store, it’s very simple to just get a pixel from Facebook and plug it into the designated spot on your Shopify dashboard. However, if you’re running your own website you’ll need to plug it into your website’s code. Here is Facebook’s instructions on installing their pixel.

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Running Facebook ads can be somewhat overwhelming if you’re not sure what you’re doing, but in reality it’s very simple, and once you get the hang of it you’ll be running ads for your business like a pro.