Facebook (Meta) Ads Made Easy
How to get more clicks on your ads
It shouldn’t be a shock that Facebook and Instagram are two of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with over 4 billion active users combined. With such a vast audience at your disposal, advertising on these platforms is a powerful way to reach potential customers and grow your business. In this article, I'll cover everything you need to know about Facebook/Instagram (Meta) Ads, including how to set up your account right the first time, target your audience, understand different ad formats, budget and bid effectively, monitor and optimize your ads, and troubleshoot common issues. Let’s dive in!
What Are Facebook/Instagram Ads?
Facebook/Instagram Ads are paid ads managed in Meta Ads Manager that appear in feeds, stories, and reels on Facebook and Instagram. That only scratches the surface of the capability with Meta Ads. Meta Ads Manager features a total of 21 ad placements. These placements include In-stream ads for videos and reels, search results, messenger-sponsored messages, In-article and external apps, and website ads. All these ad placements allow businesses to reach a targeted audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. Ads can be in the form of images, videos, carousels, collections, and other formats.
How to Set Up Your Ads Manager Account
As a media buyer, I’ve managed a variety of accounts for clients and MOST of them have all been set up the wrong way. Setting up your accounts the right way on the front end will save you, and your marketing team time and future headache. The most common mistake I see businesses make when setting up their Ads Manager account is they skip setting up their Business Manager account altogether. It’s important to follow these steps in the proper order when setting up an Ads Manager account for your Facebook business page. Let me break down the proper setup process.
Create a Business Manager account
To start running Facebook/Instagram Ads, you first need to create a Business Manager account. This is where you will manage your ads, pages, and assets. To create a Business Manager account, follow these steps:
Go to business.facebook.com/create and click 'Create Account.'
Enter your business name, your name, and your business email address.
Follow the prompts to add your business page and create your first ad account.
Set up your Ads Manager account
Once you have created a Business Manager account, you can create your Ads Manager account by linking it to your Business Manager account. Once logged into your Business Manager, navigate to the left side menu and click the three lines. You should now see a full menu of the tools available to you in Business Manager. Under Advertise, select “Ads Manager” and either follow the steps to create a new account or connect a pre-existing account. If your view in your Business Manager appears different navigate to business.facebook.com/adsmanager and go from there.
Explaining the Ad Hierarchy
You’re almost ready to launch your first campaign but, before you do that let’s go over the hierarchy of an ad campaign. When it comes to launching a Meta Ad campaign, understanding the difference between the campaign, ad set, and ad is crucial to set up properly. Each facet plays a specific role in achieving your advertising goals and objectives.
Campaign
The campaign is the highest level of organization in Meta Ads Manager. Think of it as a container for your ad sets and ads. The campaign serves as the foundation of your advertising strategy. When you create a campaign, you need to define the objective of your campaign, whether it’s to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads. The objective you choose will determine the type of ad format, optimization strategy, and targeting options.
Ad Set
An ad set is a group of ads that share the same target audience and budget. Within a campaign, you can have multiple ad sets, each with its own target audience, budget, and schedule. For example, if you are launching a campaign targeting users in different regions, you can create separate ad sets for each region to A/B test with its own budget and targeting parameters.
Ad
Within each ad set, you can create multiple ads that are variations of the same creative. Ads are the actual creative assets which include images, videos, ad copy, and call-to-action buttons. You can create multiple ads within an ad set to test different ad formats, messaging, and creative elements to see which one performs the best.
Now that you understand the role of each facet in a Meta ad campaign, you’re well equipped to begin building a campaign backed by a successful advertising campaign.
How to Launch a Meta Ad Campaign
I’m going to walk you through how to create a successful campaign that drives website traffic, leads, or sales for your business. Here are the steps to launch your own ad campaign in Meta Ads Manager:
Step 1: Choose your campaign objective
Starting at the campaign level, the first step is to choose your campaign objective. Your objective will determine the type of ad you create and the goals you set for the campaign. Meta Ads Manager offers a variety of campaign objectives, including brand awareness, traffic, lead generation, and sales.
Step 2: Define your target audience
After choosing your campaign objective, you’ll define your target audience. This step is critical to ensure that your ads are shown to the right people. You can define your audience by factors such as age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors. Here, you can create custom audiences based on an email list or your social media followers. You can also reach people who interacted with your business or others who may be similar. Audience targeting features are essential to ensure your ads are seen by the right people. As you create your audience pay attention to the right-hand side of your screen to see how defined your audience is. You want to make sure your audience is defined, not too broad or too narrow. If your audience is too narrow or broad it will drastically impact your ad performance.
Step 3: Set your budget and schedule
The next step is to set your budget and schedule for your campaign. You can choose to set a daily or lifetime budget and schedule your ads to run at specific times of day or days of the week. It’s important to choose a budget that aligns with your goals and to monitor your campaign performance regularly to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment. That said, to see significant results, businesses should typically invest a minimum of a few thousand dollars monthly for their ad campaigns.
Step 4: Create your ad
Now it’s time to create your ad! You can create a variety of ad formats in Meta Ads Manager, including a single image or video ads, carousel ads, and collections. Be sure to use high-quality visuals and ad copy that aligns with your campaign objectives and resonates with your target audience. As I mentioned earlier, A/B testing is a powerful way to see what different ad formats, visuals, and copy works best for your audience.
Step 5: Launch your campaign
After you’ve created your ad, it’s time to launch your campaign. You’ll have the option to review your ad and targeting settings before submitting your campaign for approval. Once your campaign is approved by Meta, it will begin running on the schedule you’ve set and you can monitor its performance in real-time.
Step 6: Monitor and optimize your campaign
Once your campaign is up and running, you’ll want to monitor its performance and make any necessary optimizations on a weekly basis. Meta Ads Manager provides detailed analytics that can help you understand how your ads are performing and make data-driven decisions to improve your campaign.
How to Maximize Clicks on Your Ad Campaign
With your ads up and running, we aren’t in the business of “setting and forgetting”. Right? Right! As you check in weekly on your ad performance, here are three optimization strategies that can help you get more clicks on your ads:
Refine Your Targeting: Refining your audience targeting is a great way to get more ad clicks. The more specific your targeting is, the more likely you are to reach the people who are interested in your products or services. Meta Ads Manager provides detailed reporting on how well your ads are performing in the audience you’ve built. As you dive into reporting, if you see a dominant age group in your performance metrics, I recommend scaling your targeting to the top performing age group or groups. Experiment with different targeting combinations to see which ones work best for your ads. You can do this through, you guessed it– A/B Testing.
Create Eye-Catching Ads: Creating ads that are visually appealing and engaging is an effective way to get more clicks. Use high-quality images or videos and write compelling ad copy that speaks to your target audience. Use a variety of ad formats and try different copy variations to enhance clicks. Another important factor is making sure your call-to-action (CTA) aligns with your ad copy. “Learn more” is the most generic CTA but, it fits most ads. If you have to use the “Learn More” button, I recommend including a CTA in your primary text copy that’s more targeted to your audience.
Use Ad Placements Wisely: Meta Ads Manager offers a variety of ad placements, including in-stream ads, feed ads, stories ads, and more. Experiment with different ad placements to see which ones work best for your ads. Keep in mind that some ad placements may be more effective for certain types of ads or audiences. Using Meta Ads Manager reporting tools, you can drill down into which platform is delivering the best results. If you see placements that aren’t driving any impressions or clicks, set your ad set to manual placements and remove placements that aren’t producing results.
Meta Ads are a powerful tool for businesses to reach potential customers and grow their business. By setting up your Ads Manager account properly, understanding the ad hierarchy, targeting the right audience, and implementing compelling ad creative businesses can launch a successful ad campaign. With 21 ad placements available Meta is a powerful platform to expand your customer or client base. Weekly monitoring and ad optimization is key for businesses to leverage their audience targeting and achieve their marketing goals. With a vast audience of over 3 billion active users combined, Meta Ads have become essential for businesses looking to expand their reach and connect with potential customers. What are you waiting for?
Still have questions about Meta Ads? Drop me a line!
