Facebook Ads: A Beginner's Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions

Putting together a child's toy is similar to running a successful Facebook ad campaign in that there are too many moving parts that are all important to the final result, but there are also little instructions on how to begin.

Are you running the appropriate advertisements? Are the proper people your target audience? Can the people who matter to you view your ads?

However, it's a task you must undertake if you wish to gain access to the 2.89 billion Facebook users, take advantage of the crazily precise targeting, and increase your organic reach.

To help you succeed, we've put together a comprehensive guide that covers everything you need to know, from organizing your first Facebook advertisement to using Facebook campaign best practices.

What are advertisements on Facebook?

Facebook ads are sponsored messaging posts that companies post on the social media platform. With them, marketers may reach the precise target audience—individuals who would actually be interested in your goods or services.

The most significant aspect in the concept of "paid."

Facebook posts are open to all users, but posting doesn't guarantee that particular audiences will see it. You are in complete control of the most potent targeting and advertising capabilities available on the social media platform because of Facebook Ads Manager.

The most important aspect of Facebook advertising is your audience. They really act as the foundation of your marketing.

Facebook allows you to target three audience types with your ads:

Saved audiences: Among other things, you can target the interests, habits, geography, and income levels of a particular audience.

Custom audiences: You might aim to reach those who are already aware of your company. These could be folks who have already viewed your content, are on your customer list, or have visited your website.

Lookalike audiences: To build a lookalike crowd, create audiences that are exact replicas of your source audience. It consists of individuals who fit your target demographic but haven't engaged with your content or brand yet.

You can target a certain demographic on Facebook when you post a paid advertisement. You can also be as particular or as general as you like. 

Facebook ad types

With Facebook, advertising will never become dull. Facebook offers you the freedom to create ads with a variety of goals, styles, and placements.

Let's examine the various kinds of advertisements that can be displayed on the website.

Campaign goals

Facebook advertisements can help you reach your most important company goals and objectives. This covers the objectives for consideration, conversion, and awareness. Let us examine each objective's meaning in further depth.

Awareness-raising goals

Brand: Present your business to a fresh group of people.
Reach: Expand the audience for your advertisement to include as many members as you can.

Goals for Consideration

Drive visitors to a specific app, website, or Facebook Messenger discussion.

Engagement: Reach a large audience with your advertisement to boost the amount of likes and follows on your page, get more people to take advantage of offers, or draw more people to your event.
Installs of your app: Encourage users to install it.
Get viewers for your videos by increasing their views.
Bring in fresh leads by drawing them into your sales funnel.
Messages: Invite folks to get in touch with you using Facebook Messenger.

Conversion Goals

Conversions: Persuade visitors to your website, app, or Facebook Messenger to perform a particular activity. Short CTAs like "Shop Now" or "Subscribe" can be used in this way.

Catalog Sales: Link your Facebook advertisements to your product catalog so that users see advertisements for the goods they are most likely to purchase.

Store Traffic: Encourage locals to visit neighboring brick-and-mortar establishments by driving retail traffic.

Advertising Formats

While these all work well to increase interest in your service, different ad styles have distinct effects on your target demographic.

Each ad format also has unique technological requirements and design specifications. When creating your advertisement, you must consider the dimensions, file sizes, character limits, and other relevant criteria to get the best possible impact.

Pictures Advertisements

The norm for Facebook advertising is image ads. They are simple to create and offer a beautiful layout for you to advertise your company and goods. Another benefit is that a Facebook study revealed that photo-only ads worked better in generating unit visits than other ad types.

When your ad budget is tight and you need to quickly market your business, image advertising work best. If you would like more precise targeting choices, you can build an advertisement in Facebook Ads Manager or directly from your Facebook page as a boosted post.

Videos Advertisements

You can quickly grab the attention of viewers by showcasing your business or product through video advertisements. These advertisements can run in the Stories or News Feed, or they can show up as in-stream advertisements in longer Facebook videos.

Carousel Advertisements

A carousel ad lets you add up to 10 images or videos in a single ad—each with its own link—to showcase your product or service.

Use this advertisement format for:

Emphasize the various advantages of a single product.
Display multiple items in one advertisement
Combine all of the images to get a single, sizable panoramic.
Describe a procedure or provide a quick instruction.

Ads for collections

A great technique to convert interest into sales is through collection advertising. You can provide consumers with an enjoyable browsing experience while also showcasing your product inventory.

However, these advertisements are exclusive to mobile devices. They come with a full screen and are paired with Instant Experience, which allows you to add five pictures or videos that may be clicked by prospective clients to make a purchase.

Placement Advertisment

The locations where you can run your adverts are referred to as "placements" in this context.

Your advertisements may show up on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network, depending on the campaign aim you have selected. To increase engagement with your target demographic, try putting your adverts in various apps and styles. 

Feeds

In this scenario, users who are reading through their desktop, mobile, or email feeds will see your advertisement. The following techniques can all increase the reach of your campaign.

Facebook News Feed: Your advertisements will show up in the desktop News Feed for users accessing Facebook through a computer, and in the mobile News Feed for those accessing Facebook through a mobile browser or the Facebook mobile app.

Instagram feed: Ads on the Instagram feed are only visible to users who are browsing the app. When they use the Instagram mobile app, they will see your advertisement in the mobile feed. 

Facebook Marketplace: The Marketplace home page will include your adverts. They will also be available to users who are perusing the Facebook app's Marketplace. 

Facebook video feeds: In video-only contexts, your video advertising will play in between native videos. Consider Facebook News Feed and Watch.

Facebook right column: On Facebook, your advertisements will appear in the right columns. Only users on laptops accessing Facebook are seeing these advertisements.

Instagram Explore: This is one of the more recent additions to the platform. Here, when a user clicks on a picture or video, your advertisements show up during the surfing session.

In-Stream

Your advertisements will appear to users before to, during, or following video content, as the name implies.

Facebook in-stream videos: Your advertisements will appear in a limited selection of (approved) partner live streams on Facebook as well as in Video on Demand.
Instagram in-stream videos: When participating creators post videos to IGTV, your ads will show there.
Instagram Reels: Your advertisements will appear under Instagram's Reels tab.

What is the cost of maintaining a Facebook advertising campaign?

Everyone's biggest concern is "How much do I need to pay for my Facebook ads?" The only accurate response, which we detest to say, is that it depends.

An AdEspresso study states that the following elements must be taken into account when calculating the expenditures of your advertising campaign:

Timing: Your ad cost may vary depending on the hour, day, and month.
Ad placement: More expensive spaces are those with more competition.
Target audience: Audiences with greater competition tend to be more costly.
Choosing a certain bid range or going for the lowest price is your bid strategy.
Ad relevance: Lower rankings for quality, conversion, or engagement in ads might result in higher expenses.

How to advertise on Facebook

A lot of people give up on Facebook paid advertising because they either set up their account incorrectly or become so overwhelmed by Facebook's plethora of ad possibilities that they ultimately decide to stop the campaign. Here's how to run Facebook advertising step-by-step so that you don't experience this.

Step 1: Create an account using Facebook Ads Manager

Using Facebook's Ad Manager is how you run advertisements.

With the Ads Manager, you can design ads, control where and when they run, and monitor their effectiveness all in one place. Consider it as an advanced dashboard providing you with a summary of all your advertising initiatives.

Ads cannot be displayed on personal profiles. You will therefore need to change to your company's Facebook page. Click on Go to Ads Manager to launch Ads Manager from there.

On the screen where you set up your ad account, verify your details and then select your payment option. Save alterations.

You can now access your Ads Manager account.

Step 2: Start a campaign for Facebook ads

Open your Ads Manager account and log in.

A summary of all your campaigns, ad sets, and individual ads, together with their performance for your Facebook page, will be shown to you in a performance dashboard.

Step 3: Select your goal

The Ads Manager will then prompt you to select an aim.

Right now, you can choose from 11 different objectives (which we covered above), which range from increasing app installs to increasing traffic to your e-commerce site to raising general brand awareness. 

Step 4: Give your campaign a name

Type in the campaign name for your Facebook advertisement and indicate if your advertisement falls under any particular categories, such politics, the economics, or social rights.

Step 5: Create a timetable and budget for your campaign

Choose the Facebook page you wish to advertise and give your ad set a name.

Following that, decide on your budget and timetable. Determine the daily budget you want to allocate to the advertising campaign.

Facebook allows you to allocate funds for your campaign on a daily or lifetime basis.

If you would want your advertisement to run constantly all day, choose Daily budget. Facebook will track how much you spend each day. Having said that, an ad set's minimum daily budget is $1 and needs to be at least twice your CPC.

If you want to run your advertisement for a set amount of time, use the Lifetime budget option. Facebook will automatically adjust your spending to match the duration of the advertisement.

Step 6: Identify who your target market 

To begin developing the target audience for your advertisements, scroll below. Here, you have the option to build a lookalike audience or a custom audience.

Let's suppose that you will choose Custom Audience from the Create new selection for the purposes of this blog. This enables you to target Facebook users who have interacted with your app or game, are in your company's contact database, or have visited a page on your website that contains a tracking pixel.

Select the target audience's language, age, gender, and target location. Keep in mind that you can select or omit cities larger than a particular size under location.

Step 7: Choose where to position your Facebook ads

You must decide where your advertisements will run after deciding on your target demographic.

This is your first Facebook ad campaign, therefore Automatic placements is the ideal option. Facebook will make sure you receive the greatest results by automatically distributing your advertising throughout Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and the audience network.

However, if you are skilled and knowledgeable and would like to set up your Facebook advertising in particular areas, select Manual placements.

Regarding the latter, your options for placement will change based on the campaign aim you select. In general, they might consist of the following:

• Type of device: desktop, mobile, or both.
• Platform: Messenger, Audience Network, Facebook, Instagram, or both.
• Placements: Messages, feeds, stories, search, in-article, in-stream (during movies), and apps and websites (not affiliated with Facebook).

Step 8: Make a Facebook advertisement

How do you want your advertisements to appear?

After selecting the format for your advertisement, add the text and media elements. The format options that you see will change according to the goal of your campaign.

Step 9: Keep an eye on your Facebook advertising effort

You must keep an eye on your ad's performance indicators while it is running in order to assess the campaign's overall effectiveness.

Here, there are two areas you should investigate: your marketing software and the Facebook Ads Manager. Facebook recommends keeping an eye on the following crucial metrics:

• Performance: Outcomes, frequency, reach, and impressions
• Engagement: Post engagement, page likes, and page engagement
• Videos: Views and average proportion of viewed videos
• Website — All website operations, checkout, adds to cart, and payment information
• Apps: Installs, credits spent, actions taken by mobile apps, engagement with apps, and cost per engagement with apps
• Events: Event reactions, event response costs.

Step 10: Configure Facebook reporting for the effectiveness of your ads

Facebook allows you to get personalized email reports about your advertising campaign. To make this available, take the following actions:

• Click the main menu above and select Analyze and Report.
• Choose Reports on Ads, then Click on Create Custom Report.
• Choose a stored report and open it.
• Choose Save As. Next, give your report a name and verify the email schedule.
• To amend and validate your reporting preferences, keep responding to the prompts.