Facebook Ads: Beginner Guide To Creating

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Facebook is the largest social network in the world, making it an important way to connect with customers. There are currently over 2.6 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide. To stay in the game, it’s a given that growing businesses should have an account on Facebook

Not to mention, December is one of the most festive months of the year. Christmas as well as New Year’s Eve are coming close. Make the most of this momentum. Raise your game by maximizing Facebook as a marketing tool. 

Aside from the huge number of monthly active users, Facebook has several features to accommodate businesses that trust them as a marketing platform. These features include but are not limited to Facebook business manager, Facebook marketplace, and Facebook ads. This article will focus on how to create ads on Facebook. 

Facebook Ads Manager

Source: xFrame

Benefits of Advertising in Facebook

Advertising on Facebook offers several advantages that can be highly beneficial for businesses:

  1. Targeted Reach. Facebook’s advertising platform allows for highly targeted ads. You can reach specific audiences based on age, interests, behavior, and location, ensuring your ads are seen by people most likely to be interested in your products or services​​​​.
  2. Diverse Ad Formats. Facebook offers a range of ad formats, such as image ads, video ads, carousel ads, and collection ads, to suit various marketing goals and preferences. This diversity in ad formats helps in capturing your audience’s attention effectively and conveying your brand message efficiently​​.
  3. Advanced Targeting Options. The platform’s targeting capabilities are a significant advantage. Advertisers can define their target audience with great precision, maximizing the relevance and impact of their campaigns​​.
  4. Remarketing and Retargeting Opportunities. Facebook enables advertisers to use the Facebook Pixel to track user behavior on their websites, capture valuable data, and retarget those who have shown interest in their brand. This helps in reconnecting with potential customers and guiding them through the conversion funnel​​​​.
  5. Integration with Other Platforms. Facebook’s integration with Instagram, Messenger, and other marketing tools like Shopify allows for a broader advertising reach and streamlined campaign management​​
  6. Visual Appeal and Creativity. Ads with eye-catching visuals and compelling copy can make a significant difference in performance. Creative and relevant visuals help in making ads stand out and conveying the brand’s message effectively​​​​.
  7. Cost-Effective Advertising. Facebook advertising can be quite cost-effective. With proper targeting, businesses can achieve clicks and conversions at a relatively low cost. The platform allows for precise targeting, optimizing the advertising budget​​.
  8. Opportunities for A/B Testing. Facebook enables advertisers to test multiple ad variations to find what works best. This involves experimenting with different visuals, copy, headlines, and calls-to-action​​​​.

Facebook Ads Manager

To create ads on Facebook, it’s essential to have a Facebook  business page. If you already have it, head straight to the Facebook Ads Manager or Business Manager to create a Facebook ad campaign. If you don’t yet have one, please make an account right away.

Ads Manager in Facebook is a unified ad creation tool that businesses can use to create and publish ads on Facebook. With Ads Manager, businesses can  create ad campaigns, manage multiple ads at once, and see how their ads perform. It also eases businesses to post on Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network.

Tip: Determine what ad objectives are available and think about how each one can bring you closer to your business goals. 

Choose An Objective

Source: Unsplash

Choose An Objective

Select the “campaigns” tab on Facebook Ads Manager, then click “create” to “get started”. Overall, Facebook generously offers 11 marketing objectives to choose from based on what you want the ads to accomplish. 

The objectives are brand awareness, reach, traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, messages, conversions, catalog sales, and store traffic. 

Choose a campaign objective based on your goals for this particular ad. It’s also important to note that conversion-oriented objectives (sales) are better done by pay per action, while exposure objectives (traffic and views) should use pay for impressions. 

naming the campaign

Source: Pexels

Name the Campaign

Name the Facebook ad campaign you’ve chosen and declare whether the ad fits into any special categories. For example, credit or politics. 

Setting up an A/B testing (or split testing)  can be done to refine the content and advertising strategies in real time. It is basically a form of real-world research that allows businesses to test small variations in marketing materials to determine which is most effective for your audience.  

To set up an A/B testing on Facebook ads, click “get started” in the A/B Test section. From the A/B testing, you can choose different versions to run against this ad after it is published.

Set a Budget and Schedule

Source: Unsplash

Set a Budget and Schedule

The top of the screen will have a place for you to name the ad set and choose which Page to promote. 

Once that is cleared up, decide how much you want to spend on the Facebook ad campaign. You will be given two options, which is daily or lifetime budget. If you want to schedule the post, set a start and end date. If not, then choose to post it right away. 

It can be more efficient to run your Facebook paid ads on a schedule. The reason being is that it makes it possible for you to only post when your target audience is most likely to be online on  Facebook.

Target Audience

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Target Audience

After setting a budget and schedule, scroll down to start building the target audience for your ads. 

The first option you’ll see here is to add a custom audience of people who have previously interacted with your business. There are several different types of custom audiences, however, that’s a topic for another day. For now, we’ll focus on the targeting options. 

Start by selecting the target location, age, gender, and language. While selecting a target audience, it is possible to specifically choose to include or exclude cities over a certain size. Pay attention to the audience size indicator on the right of the screen so that you can have a sense of the potential ad reach. 

choose placement

Source: Pexels

Choose the Facebook Ad Placements

Automatic Placements is the easiest way to go if you’re new to Facebook advertising. Once you’ve selected this option, Facebook will automatically place the ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network when they are more likely to get better results. 

Once that is cleared up, decide how much you want to spend on the Facebook ad campaign. You will be given two options, which is daily or lifetime budget. If you want to schedule the post, set a start and end date. If not, then choose to post it right away. 

It can be more efficient to run your Facebook paid ads on a schedule. The reason being is that it makes it possible for you to only post when your target audience is most likely to be online on  Facebook.

Voilà. Your Facebook Ad is Done!

There you have it. Those are the simple steps to create an ad on Facebook. Remember, digital marketing isn’t just about making and sharing content. It’s also about timing. Christmas and New Year are two of the busiest holidays of the year. Don’t miss out on it, use Facebook ads now. 

If you need more help, feel free to contact Pixie Digital. Pixie is a digital marketing agency based in Bali that is ready to come to your aid. See you in our next post!