Facebook Ads Manager is a powerful all in one tool for creating ads on Facebook. Learn how to create and manage all your Facebook ads with this powerful ad management tool.
Demystifying Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager is a Facebook tool which lets you create and manage all your Facebook Ads in one place. I am not talking about the Facebook boost post options here, but the actual Facebook Ads manager. You can run ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger or Audience Network and track how well each one of your campaigns is doing.
If you are serious about running ads on Facebook for your business, you must learn how to use the Facebook Ads Managers. You can either access it by clicking the down arrow in the upper right corner of your desktop news feed, directly go to facebook.com/ads/manager or download the Facebook Ads Manager app on your phone.
Let’s explore together, how to create an ad and demystify all the ad options along the way.
1. Choose Your Campaign Objective
When you create a new ad in your Facebook Ads Manager you will see a new page (image above.).
The left column represents the navigation menu and tells you how far along you are in your ad creation process. As you see, the ad creation divides into 3 big steps:
- Campaign objectives.
- Ad set.
- Ad.
The first things that need to be done are to choose the right marketing objective for your ad. Each of these objectives will impact differently your ad performance, so it’s important to understand how each one performs.
The objectives are broken into 3 main categories, awareness, consideration, conversion.
Awareness Objective
Brand Awareness: Increase awareness for your brand by reaching people who are more likely to be interested.
Reach:Â Show your ad to the maximum number of people.
Consideration Objective
Traffic: Send more people to a destination on or off Facebook such as a website, app or Messenger conversation
Engagement: Get more post engagements, Page likes, event responses or offer claims.
App Installs: Get more people to install your app.
Video Views: Get more people to view your video content.
Lead Generation: Drive more sales leads, such as email addresses, from people interested in your brand or business.
Messages: Get more people to send messages to your business in Messenger.
Conversion Objective
Conversions: Drive valuable actions on your website, app or in Messenger.
Catalog Sales: Create ads that automatically show items from your catalog based on your target audience.
Store Traffic: Drive visits to your physical stores by showing ads to people who are nearby.
Select the objective that best fit your needs and then name your campaign before continuing to the next step. For this tutorial, we will continue with the traffic objective.
2. Create New Ad Set
Choose where you want to drive your traffic, website, Apps or messenger.
The following options are automatically turned off and if this is your first time creating an ad, you should leave them as is.
Dynamic Creative: It is an advanced option to help you generate creative combinations for your audience.
Offer: Offer is a very good tool to promote your discount to an audience of your choice.
Audience
Let’s create your first audience 🙂
The Facebook Ads Managers provides you with advanced options to target the ideal audience for your products and services.
Location: You need to pick a location you would like to target. It can be a country, a region or a city. If you do pick a city and depending on the city, you can target an audience located within a 10 miles (16 km) radius or go as high as a 50 mile (80 km) radius. Surrounding cities are included when the center of the city falls within the radius.
Age: Select the minimum and maximum age of the people who will find your ad relevant. You can target users as young as 18 and/or all the way up to 65+.
Gender: Self-explanatory. Choose All unless you only want your ads to be shown to either men or women.
Language: Facebook recommends you to leave this blank unless you are targeting an audience who uses a language that isn’t common to the location you have chosen above.
Detailed Targeting: This is the option that makes all the difference. You need to define your audience by including and/or excluding demographics, interests and behaviors.
As you clicked each of these options, they will open up sub-categories to choose from. I recommend you to get familiar with all the options here. In case you can’t find what you are are looking for, you can always type it directly in the box. Facebook will automatically try to guess what you are typing and provide you with a series of answers. If you Facebook isn’t able to provide you with an answer, it means the audience you are looking for doesn’t exist.
Connection: You can target users who have a specific kind of connection to your Page, app or event. To give you a better idea, these are the options available to you:
Facebook Pages
- People who like your Page
- Friends of people who like your Page
- Exclude people who like your Page
Apps
- People who used your app
- Friends of people who used your app
- Exclude people who used your app
Events
- People who responded to your event
- Exclude people who already responded to your event
If you are just starting and your page only has a few followers, I strongly suggest to no touch this option as this will narrow your audience drastically to include only people with that specific connection who also meet the other targeting categories you’ve selected above.
When your page has a large following, it is a very useful tool to zoom in on your followers’ interests and behaviors.
Audience Size:Â
As you define your audience step by step, you may have noticed on the right column, the audience size barometer change. If your audience is too small, the needle will be in the red (too specific), too big, it’s going to be in the yellow (Broad). You want your audience size to be defined in order to find the needle in the green. Ideally, you want to have a potential reach of 1 million people. You could go higher if you would like but don’t go too high either.
Just below, you can find the estimated daily results. You can see an approximation of your daily reach and daily link clicks. Estimates are based on several factors such as past campaign data, your budget size, and your targeted audience. These estimates are only meant to give you an idea of performance for your budget. By no means, these estimates are guaranteed results.
Lastly, make sure you save your audience, so you can use it at a later time.
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Placements
The Facebook Ads Manager gives you the opportunity to pick the place you would like your ad to show. No matter which ad objective you pick, Facebook recommends the automatic placement option.
Editing the ad placement gives you a lot more control of where your ad is going to appear and how it’s going to appear. Not all placements have the same image or video size, therefore your ad can look completely normal on Facebook and a part of your image may be cut off on Instagram. Make sure to familiarize yourself with all the different media requirements.
The first option you get to decide on is whether your ad will show on desktop, on mobile or both. After that, you need to decide on which platform your ad will show up in. Depending on your campaign objective, some ad platform placement may not be available to you.
Highlight each ad placement to activate the video on the right side of the menu. The video will show you exactly where your ad will be displayed.
Finally, you decide to target your audience by mobile devices, Android, IOS or Features phones. Unless you already exactly which type of device your audience is using, just target all mobile devices.
Budget & Schedule
Once again, the Facebook Ads Managers gives you a ton of options over your budget. You can define how much you would like to spend, how you would like to be charged and when you would like your ad to appear.
Optimization for Ad Delivery: I don’t personally recommend changing this option if this is your first ad. You can optimize your ad in four different ways: Landing page views, link clicks, impressions, and daily unique reach. Meaning If you choose to optimize for link clicks, Facebook will show your ad to the people most likely to click your link. If you pick the landing page view, Facebook will show your ad to the people most likely to view your landing page.
Cost Controls: This is optional but if you would like to, you can set a specific cost per the optimization you chose above. Once again, I recommend skipping this advanced option if you are a first timer.
Budget and Schedule: This is where you write down the amount you are willing to spend. Your budget can be set for the total lifetime of the ad. Meaning you can spend up to your total budget, or if you prefer, you can set a daily budget for the duration of the ad. Meaning the daily amount spent will never go higher than the number you set and your daily average spent may vary daily.
When you click advanced options …
You can decide how you get charged, impression or link click. You can decide to run your ad on a schedule rather than all the time and you can change the delivery type, so you get results as fast as possible. I wouldn’t recommend changing any of them if it’s your first time.
3. Create your Ad
Welcome to the last step of your ad creation. We now need to work on the visuals of your campaign.
First, you need to pick your Facebook business page as the identity for your ad, so people can see you and your logo. Next, you need to decide on your ad format.
The Facebook Ads Manager offers you three different options to choose from.
Carousel Ad: Add between 2 and 10 scrollable images and/or videos.
Single Image or Video: By far the most common type of ad you see on your news feed every day. Use one image or video or even a slideshow with multiple images.
Collection: Or also known as Instant experience displays a group of images that open into a fullscreen mobile experience.
Disclaimer:
*You can choose to add an Instant experience for both the Carousel format and the single image/video format. Instant Experience can only be displayed on mobile, therefore if you are advertising on both mobile and desktop, this option won’t work for you. You would have to create two separate ads to make this work.
Upload your image or video in this section. If you don’t an image, Facebook offers you the option to use a stock photo for free from Shutterstock. Remember your photo and video size matter. It may not be displayed the same way everywhere, so make sure you check.
Off to the very last part … The ad itself. 🙂
Select where you want to direct the traffic to. Your website or a Facebook event.
Text: Write a compelling description here. This text appears above your image or video.
Website URL: Enter your website URL or landing page URL. The URL appears just under your image/video.
Headline: Write a short headline in this box. This text appears in bold below your image/video and underneath the website URL.
Call To Action: Choose the action you want people to take when they see your ad. The CTA button appear on the bottom right of your image/video.
Multiple Languages: Translate your message in another language. This option is ideal when you advertise to an audience who may not speak the same language.
Advanced Options
Display Link: Enter your website URL or landing page URL. The URL appears just under your image/video.
News Feed Link Description: Add a very short text here. This text appears just below the headline.
URL Parameters: Advanced tracking option.
Facebook Pixel: Select your pixel to track your Ad performance.
Related Articles: What is the Facebook Pixel?
App Events: Track action that takes place in your app or on your web page such as a person installing your app or completing a purchase
Offline Events: Measure how ads drive offline conversions and reach audiences based on these activities.
Ad Preview
As you incorporate the text description, the link and the call to action. You are able to see all the changes happening live in the right column.
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The ad preview comes with a few options of its own. For instance, you can check how your ad looks on each platform you are advertising on. This tool helps you understand the difference in image and text display vary depending on the location where it is shown. Make sure they are displaying correctly everywhere.
If you would like you can preview your ad directly on your devices by clicking the little square icon with an arrow inside located on the top right side. icon
To recap:
Facebook Ads managers can be a little overwhelming at first but once you dive in, and discover everything it has to offer you quickly realize, it is a very powerful tool. It has been designed to help you with your marketing journey.
Facebook Ads manager gives you have a lot more control over every aspect of your ad from beginning to end. When you choose your ad campaign objective, you tell Facebook to optimize your ads to deliver a specific result. You can decide where your ad is going to be displayed, news feed, audience network, instant article, etc … When you create your ad, you can use Facebook free photo stock images and you can turn your photos into a slideshow if you would like to. Many of these options just aren’t available on your Facebook business profile when you boost a post.
Discover more about launching a successful ad campaign by signing up for our upcoming online training on Facebook Ads.
Guez Marketing Founder, social media strategist, marketer and content creator with a passion for connecting people through technology. When he is not helping business owners build a strong online presence he loves to discover new ethnic food, to watch sci-fi movies and to craft delicious cocktails.
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