Facebook Ads Tutorial For Beginners With Pictures

This Facebook ads tutorial is geared towards first time Facebook advertising users. If you have never created a Facebook ad in the past, this guide is for you.

Why would you consider Facebook ads?

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is driving traffic. Facebook ads allow you to come to your customers. Facebook advertising is powerful having approximately 2 billion active users per month. That’s a lot of potential customers to do advertising to.

With Facebook ads, you’ll be able to target specific audiences that fit with your niche. Most importantly, retargeting your audiences is smooth with Facebook ads. Custom audiences can be easily created depending on the behavior of your customers the data gathered.

If you are just a complete beginner with Facebook ads, this tutorial will help you in creating your very first campaign.

How much does Facebook advertising cost?

Facebook advertising cost depends on the competition, targeting (interests, behaviors, and demographics) and the country you choose for your ads to show, placements, and even depends on how good your ads are.

You can place a limit on how much you’re willing to spend in a day or throughout the span of your campaign by setting a budget within the campaign or ad set level.

How does Facebook advertising work?

To give you a clear picture of how Facebook ads work, I have broken down these topics to make it easier for you to understand as a newbie to Facebook advertising.

Facebook Pixel

In order for Facebook ads to be effective, a pixel needs to be installed or integrated into your website.

The Facebook pixel reports every time someone visited your website and takes action. With this tool, you’ll see exactly the number of people who viewed your ad, engaged with it or converted. The more traffic visits to your store, the pixel will start to learn about the people who were more likely to buy and it will show your ads to people who fit that behavior and/or categories.

How to install Facebook Pixel?

Billing Information

The next crucial step is to set up your billing information in order for your Facebook ads to run without interruptions. Set up your billing information using your credit card or your PayPal account. After this step, you are ready to create your first Facebook ad campaign.

You have set up your billing info and have verified pixel to be working properly on your site, now what? Assuming that you already have a published Facebook page, you can now create a post that you want to promote – this will be the ad for your campaign. There is a different way of creating ads/posts which aren’t published on the Facebook page. They call it a “dark post” which is not visible as a regular page post and only appears as a sponsored ad/post. For the sake of making this Facebook ads tutorial for beginners, we will start with promoting the post which is already published on your Facebook page.

Setting Up Your Campaign

From your business manager menu, click on Ads Manager.

You will see a green button on the next page. Click on it and it will take you to a page where you can choose your campaign objective.

The campaign objective is your aim for a specific campaign. The objective tells Facebook what you want your ads to do. If your goal is for people to be aware of your emerging brand, choose awareness or reach. Yet, I do not personally suggest this objective considering my previous experiences with it. If you want people to click on your ad, comment, like or react to your ad/post; install an app, watch a video, or opt-in to a form; you can choose either one of the “consideration” objectives.

For online store owners, it is best to choose “conversions“. Preferably, people should do something on your website. It may be viewing content, adding a product to cart, or purchasing a product/service. Catalog sales objective is best for retargeting your audience. You can use this if you have set up a catalog within your business manager. We’re going to talk about that in a different post. Store traffic is meant to drive visits to your physical store. You can use this to show an ad to the people in your local place for them to visit your store physically.

Budget/Ad Spend

Picking a budget heavily depends on how much you are willing to spend in a day or throughout the campaign period. As a beginner, it’s advisable to start with a low budget. If your campaign is working and profitable, you can always up the budget anytime. I personally suggest turning on campaign budget optimization and pick a daily or lifetime budget for your campaign. CBO or campaign budget optimization is simply telling Facebook to spend your budget at the campaign level no matter how many ad set you create.

The Ad Set Level

On the next page, you are taken to the ad set level. It’s where optimization happens. Pick the conversion event based on what you are aiming towards this ad set. If you want people to purchase, pick the purchase event. This tells Facebook that you want your ads to show to people who are likely to make a purchase. Do not feel intimidated in using a purchase event even as a beginner. By choosing this objective, Facebook now has the idea that your website’s end goal is to gather buyers.

Choosing a target country is pretty self-explanatory. Start typing in the box the country you want to target. It will come up as a suggestion and click on it.

In the “detailed targeting” section, there is a box with a ticked option to expand your audience. Unchecking it means that you want to focus on the audience that you want to target for this ad set.

Picking your audience is a little bit tricky. Start by typing an interest that relates to your niche, product or service. Some audience suggestions show up for you to choose from. For a jewelry business as an example, just type in “jewelry” and click on one of the suggestions that show up. In the event the exact word isn’t suggested, it simply means that you can’t use the specific keyword. Demographic and behavioral targeting are other additional options.

Facebook initially ticks off all of the placements available for your ad and recommends leaving them as is. As a beginner, it’s best to follow their recommendation and see if it’s working for your campaign.

The Ad Level

Ads are what people see in your campaign. Now go back to the Facebook page post that you published for this specific campaign. Scroll down to the middle of the page. You can see that there are options to create a new ad or post, use existing posts, or use a mockup. For this tutorial, we talked about using an existing Facebook post that you already published. Go ahead and click on “existing post”. A page will pop-up with your existing Facebook page posts where you can choose one that you want to promote.

After assigning a post to promote, you have an option to add a “call-to-action”. Call-to-action buttons are simply a way for you to communicate with your audience on what you want them to do. It gives them a hint too on what to expect on the page that they are taken into.

If you want people to be curious about what you offer on your website, you can choose “learn more”. If you are offering a discount you can use the “get offer” CTA button. CTA will prompt people to take action on your advertisement. Setting up CTA buttons are quite simple. Choose from the dropdown options and paste the link to your website or a page that you want to promote.

All that’s left to do is click “submit” and wait for Facebook to approve your ad. After receiving a notification of approval, wait for it to start delivering to your targeted audience. Monitor campaign metrics in conjunction with its performance, and adjust ad set targeting to achieve better results.

No one is born a Facebook ads expert. It takes patience, practice, and a persistent attitude to get really good at Facebook ads.