If your business has been advertising on Facebook, then you know that Facebook advertising has complexities that can make it intimidating, but take heart! It can be made simpler by running an effective Facebook ads campaign. Though challenging, setting up a well-structured Facebook ads campaign can pay off by helping you reach your campaign goals and also for ongoing tracking and identification for metrics.
Structuring a Facebook ads campaign for success includes determining your campaign objective, determining your target audience, creating an ad plan, setting up your campaign, ad sets, and ads on Facebook, and looking at your ads’ metrics to determine which ads are helping you reach your goals. If you want to get the most out of advertising on Facebook but don’t quite know how to run a successful Facebook ads campaign, this post is for you.
What is a Facebook Ads Campaign?
When a business advertises on Facebook, the business sets up an ad campaign in their Facebook Ads Manager account. Ad campaigns contain ad sets, and within the ad sets are the ads themselves. In order to place an ad in Facebook Ads Manager, you must have all 3 elements.
To break it down:
- Campaigns are made up of multiple ad sets which all have the same objective.
- Ad sets are a group of ads which have the same objective but can have a different schedule, budget and target audience.
- Ads are simply the individual advertised posts including visuals and creative.
All the ads within each Facebook ad campaign will have the same objective, but you will have the ability to change the audience, budget, dates, image, and creative in the ad sets within each individual campaign. Each campaign must have its own objective, but don’t worry, you can set up multiple Facebook ad campaigns to help you reach your Facebook advertising goals. For example, if you had a goal of gaining followers and increasing website traffic, you would need to to set up two different campaigns, a traffic campaign and a like ad campaign, in your Facebook Ads Manager. After you set up the two campaigns with similar names so they are easy to identify, you would be able to set your ad sets and ads for each campaign.
A properly structured Facebook Ad campaign organizes your ads and makes it easier for you to measure results and test different audiences and or creative to help you determine which ads work best for reaching your campaign goals. Additionally, well-organized ad campaigns allow you to look back later and easily identify which ads performed well in the past and may help you strategize which types of ads to run in future campaigns.
How to Run a Facebook Ads Campaign
1. Facebook Ads Campaign: Determine What Your Business Needs
Your Facebook Ads Campaign Objective
The first thing you need to determine when setting up a Facebook ad campaign is your advertising objective or goal. Creating a plan of action including identifying your campaign goals will help you run a successful Facebook ad campaign. You know your business best – what is it your business needs? Does it need traffic to its website? Are you looking for social media engagement? Maybe you want to raise local awareness for your brand. Figure out what your objective is before you begin planning your ads.
Your Facebook Ads Campaign Audience
Before you begin to actually build your Facebook ad campaign in Ads Manager, you will also need to determine what audience you are trying to reach with your ads. Again, you know your business best, and you will probably know who best to target based on age, gender, and location. You can also target people who are interested in a certain product, activity, etc. For instance, if you run a pet food company, you’ll want to include interests such a dogs or cats into your targeting. You can also retarget by setting a custom audience made up of people who have in some way interacted with your business, maybe on your website or app.
If you don’t know which audience is best to target, you can test multiple audiences! This can be hugely beneficial in meeting your advertising goals. Test the same ad on different audiences and check back to see how each ad performed. This will clue you in on which audience is best to target for a specific objective the next time around.
While you can always adjust or change your audience throughout your campaign once you review how an ad performs, it is important to have a sense of the audience or audiences you want to target prior to setting up your Facebook ads campaign.
2. Create an Ad Plan for Your Facebook Ads Campaign
When setting up a Facebook advertising campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, it is crucial to create a precise, detailed plan of action for your ads. It is not enough to have a general idea in your head outlining what you want to get out of your ads or approximately how much money you are going to spend. Get your plan down on paper and be consistent to see results and monitor your Facebook ads!
Creating a mapped out plan on paper before you begin to build your campaign on Facebook will help keep everything clear and organized. It will also help you to catch any errors that may occur when you set up the campaign in Facebook Ads Manager. For best results, set up a consistent Facebook Ad naming system for your business and use it within the ad plan and when setting up your campaign in Ads Manager!
3. Set Up Your Facebook Ads Campaign
After you have your ad plan finalized, you can begin to build your Facebook ads campaign using Facebook Ads Manager! Simply go into your Facebook Ads Manager and click “create” to get started setting up your campaign! There are a number of steps to this process – but because you have already taken the time to create a detailed plan, it won’t be too hard to implement it.
Set Your Facebook Ads Campaign Objective
The first thing you must do is set the objective for your Facebook ads campaign in Facebook Ads Manager. Once you are in Ads Manager and you have clicked “create”, entering your campaign objective will be the first step. In your ad plan, you’ve already chosen an objective or two. Facebook provides many options for advertising objectives. Your job is to make sure you place the correct ads with the same objective in the same campaign. Don’t forget you can create multiple campaigns if you have multiple advertising objectives. This will help to keep them simple and separate, which will make it easier for you to check on how they have performed afterwards.
Set Up Your Facebook Ads Campaign Ad Set
The next level of your Facebook ads campaign is the ad set level. Select “Ad Set” in Ads Manager – Creation (it is beneath “Campaign” – where you just set your objective). The ad set level is where you will set the dates for your campaign. This is very straightforward – simply select the dates you would like the ads to run, which you have likely already determined on your handy-dandy ad plan!
At the ad set level of the campaign, you will also set an audience. Targeting is very important to advertising and it is important to be purposeful when setting your target audience. At this point, select the audience that you have determined when you created your ad plan.
Finally you will set the budget that you determined in your ad plan at the ad set level. Facebook makes it very easy to set your budget. We can’t tell you how much is the “right” amount to spend. Do what you can with the resources you have – and after your ads have run, you can look at the results to determine which ads you should be giving more of your budget, based on how well they perform.
Set Up Your Facebook Ads Campaign Ads
The last step in setting up your Facebook ads campaign in Facebook Ads Manager is setting up your Facebook ads. This is where you set the creative for your ads (the copy or text and image or video that makes up the ad – this is what will appear on your audience’s screen). Beneath “Ad Set” on the Facebook Ads Manager – Creation page, you can select “Ad” to set your ads.
Again, Facebook Ads Manager gives options. You can opt to include a single image or multiple images, video, slideshow, URL links, and call-to-action buttons. Depending on what objective you have set, there may be a limit on the type of ad you’ve created (for instance, the objective of video views only allows for ads containing videos).
After you have created the individual ad and double-checked it against your ad plan, you can go ahead and publish your ad using Facebook Ads Manager!
Facebook Ads Campaign: Monitor and Test Your Ads for Best Results!
Once your Facebook ad campaign is up and running it is extremely important to monitor your ads for best results. You can do so within Facebook Ads Manager. You can determine parameters for reviewing your ads’ performance based on your campaign goals. You can look at the cost per result, engagement, link clicks, impressions, and more.
You need to determine which metrics will help you monitor your campaign to lead to its success. For example, if your campaign objective is to drive traffic to your website, you probably want to look at the cost per link click and number of link clicks to determine which ads are performing best to help you reach your campaign goals. When you created your ad plan and set up your ad campaign, you set an objective, so check in on the performance of those ads against your specific campaign goals.
If your ads are not performing as strongly as you would like you may want to move some of your ad spend to the ads that are strong performers or move some ad spend to a different audience you would like to test. In order to run an effective Facebook ads campaign you will need to monitor and test different ads to achieve your campaign goal.
Keep in mind each campaign provides you with valuable data that you can reference when setting up your next ad campaign! This information can help you determine which ads to use again, which to change or do away with, and where you should be funneling your advertising budget.
Structuring your Facebook ads campaign can be intimidating, but it is an important component in helping you reach your Facebook advertising goals! Remember to be thoughtful when determining your target audience and campaign objective. Creating a detailed ad plan and following it when setting up your campaign, ad sets, and ads, and monitoring your ads’ metrics will help you reach your goals and take your business even further!
Done with your Facebook ads campaign but not sure how to name it? Read our in-depth post on naming Facebook ads campaigns here!
Does setting up and running an effective Facebook ad campaign seem like a lot to manage? It certainly does take strategy and some know-how! Contact us to help – we are a full-service social media agency which specializes in Facebook advertising.