How to run a Facebook Ads campaign step by step

Possibly in the last year you will have realized that with the same efforts or even putting in even more hours, Your organic content on Facebook does not have anywhere near the results it had in the past. If this is not your case, congratulations! You have switched to Facebook. But for the rest of us mortals, it is time to accept reality and enter the world of Facebook Ads campaigns.

Because effectively, in order to compete, at least on Facebook, you will have to pay. This situation, which has been called “pay to play” in the sector, has its origins in the changes to the Facebook algorithm that Mark Zuckerberg already announced under the excuse of pursuing a greater connection with our Facebook friends and that have been happening since then.

You have two options: increase your efforts to achieve with 10 posts the results that you achieved before with 1, or get going with Facebook Ads. @marielespt Tuitea esto

But since a picture is worth a thousand words:

That said, get to the point! The first thing you should know to get to work is that Facebook Ads ads are made up and configured in three parts:

• Campaign
• Ad Set or ad set
• Ads or advertisements

Campaign

A Facebook campaign is like a matryoshka, each element that you configure encompasses the following, so that You move from decisions that affect all parties to decisions that only affect one of them.

In this case, the campaign is the great container of everything that will come after it, so this is where you will have to decide your objective and the way you want to pay.

Goals

In this image you can see everything you can achieve with your Facebook ads packaged into three major objectives related to the conversion funnel.

• Awareness: If what you want is for your content to have more notoriety, Facebook allows you to choose whether your ads are distributed to as many people as possible (reach) or to the people most likely to remember them (Brand Awareness). Quantity vs. Quality. In this case, what you will pay for is per thousand impressions, called CPM (cost per thousand).
• Consideration: one step further, since what the consideration objectives pursue is greater involvement on the part of the user: going to your page (traffic), getting some type of interaction, ranging from likes and comments to fans (engagement), downloading your app, consume your videos in greater or lesser measure of time, obtain your data (lead generation) or establish a conversation (messages). Based on your choice you will pay per click (CPC), per interaction (CPI), per view (CPV), etc.
• Conversion: to get direct conversions from Facebook. It will be essential that you have the corresponding pixel installed on your page (https://es.semrush.com/blog/pixel-facebook-que-es/).

As we said, in this step you will also decide how to pay, if in advance, so that you ensure that you will achieve fixed objectives with your investment by “reserving” the audience to impact (what is known as reach and frequency). or by bidding.

If you have a low budget (the assumption under which we will follow the rest of the instructions), Reach and Frequency will be less accessible to you since the costs are higher. However, With the bid format you can decide what price you want to compete for to impact an audience.

Along with two more factors, related to the probability that your ad will be liked by the selected audience, if your bid is higher than that of the rest of the accounts bidding to impact the same user segmentation, Facebook will distribute your ads. If it is not, it will wait for the price to drop to do so. This is why you will not be able to know in advance if you will achieve your target figures and you will have to work based on estimates.

Ad Set

Let’s assume that our goal is to bring traffic to a blog. We will have selected this option in the campaign settings and now it is time to make decisions related to the ad set: Who to impact, where to impact, for how long and with what budget.

Audience

Ideally, you should test how your campaigns work with different audiences, so as you create them you can save them to have them ready and complete this step more quickly. But since this is about setting up a Facebook Ads campaign from scratch, we are going to stop at each of the steps to take.

You also have the option of use your own audiences (custom audiences that are called) based, for example, on the traffic to your website that the pixel has been able to collect or on contact lists that you can upload yourself.

This is not mandatory because you can also make segmentations based on the data that Facebook has about its users: location, age, gender, language (in which your account is configured) and interests and behaviors.

Interests and behaviors are related to characteristics that users have expressed in their profile and consumption of the social network: their profession, their marital status, pages they like, etc. In the case of a cooking blog, we will have more possibilities of generating interest from users who are interested in this discipline, so we will select related interests: cooking shows, famous chefs, other cooking blogs, brands, etc.

Finally, you can also choose other types of connections related to your page, your app or the events of your pixel. This is especially useful for excluding users you don’t want to impact. For example, if what we are looking for is to attract new users to our blog, it would be interesting to avoid those who have already visited us.

As we fill in these options, Facebook will show us which potential users we can impact with this segmentation and if our segmentation is too specific or too broad:

Provision

The placement possibilities that Facebook offers is very broad and goes beyond the different formats that it can offer within the social network itself, involving other platforms such as Instagram or websites and pages within your network (Audience Network).

If what we want is to appear in some specific contact points, we must select ourselves from the option «Edit Locations»:

Furthermore, also we can choose which devices to appear on, so that if we were in the case of an application developed only for Android, we can avoid appearing on IOs devices. Or if our audience is mostly mobile, eliminate the option to also appear on desktop to optimize investment.

Careful: If you select some specific locations, Facebook can distribute your content on platforms or websites with which you do not want your brand to be associated (example: Tinder or betting sites). Make sure you stop at the exclusions settings.

Budget and delivery

It’s time to decide how much to invest and when we want to appear.

About the budget, we can choose between defining a total amount for the entire time the campaign lasts (I want to spend €50 that is distributed throughout the entire campaign as Facebook deems optimal), or a daily amount (Of the 15 days that my campaign will last, I want €5 to be consumed every day). This will depend on how uneven or constant you want your investment to be distributed depending on what you are pursuing.

Next you can decide whether to limit your bid to a specific time or not. Also, a little later you have the option to choose At what specific times do you want your ad to appear and on what days?. If your content plays with the context of time, it will be key for you. Imagine that your case consists of promoting an alcohol brand associated with nightlife, perhaps it makes more sense for your ads to appear on weekends from afternoon to night than on Mondays at 8 in the morning (or not… it is important that you try).

And it’s time to decide your bid. Again, Facebook lets us choose, this time between automatic bidding based on the lowest possible price, or maximum bid. The recommendation here is that if it is the first time you work with a specific audience and therefore you do not know the market costs, choose the first option, and as you learn the average prices.

Ads

The last piece of the campaign: the advertisement itself, or what is the same, the format, graphic resource and message with which you will impact the segment on which you want to achieve an objective.

At the beginning we talked about the fact that the decisions made in each of the steps affect the following ones, so depending on the objective and the location you have chosen, your customization possibilities will be one or another. If, for example, your idea is to set up an Instagram Stories campaign with a traffic objective, Facebook will give you the option of uploading 9:16 videos, but if what you wanted was to bring traffic from Facebook to your website, the options will be different.

Careful: If you have chosen to appear in both, what Facebook will do will be an adaptation of the piece designed for Facebook in Instagram Stories, something that usually does not give a good image. If you want to be on both sites, our recommendation is that you make a specific ad set for each ad.

Facebook also gives you the option to Promote as an ad a post that you have already uploaded organically. In that case you will just have to choose it and that’s it. A trick: if you can’t find the post, you can locate it by entering its ID.

Since this is about setting up Facebook Ads campaigns from scratch, we are going to continue assuming that you do not want to promote something on your wall, but rather that you want to make a publication in parallel. This is what is known as a dark post (because it is a post that is not seen on your page).

The first thing you will find is the format editor. As you set up campaigns, you will check the effectiveness of each one for your business.

If you have chosen the traffic objective, you will have different text spaces to customize, and again it is best to test the effectiveness of different combinations:

Finally you can customize the call to action What you want to appear in your ad, depending on your objective: see more, buy, more info…

As you fill in all the elements, On the right you can see the final result of your ad. Check carefully how it looks in each of the layouts you have chosen, because if, for example, you have chosen a headline that is too long, in the desktop preview of the ad it may not be cut off but in the mobile one it is, and that could affect your results.

If you have followed all the steps, You should now have your campaign ready to publish by clicking on the green button that you will see at the bottom right of the editor. If there is an error in what you have configured, don’t worry, Facebook usually detects them and notifies you using icons with exclamations indicating what the error is.

You know what’s coming now, don’t you? Test, test and test to optimize your investment to the maximum. Cheer up!