Here’s how to take the plunge!

So you’ve seen all these other people getting success from Facebook ads and you’ve decided now’s the time to jump right in and set one up. But where do you start? You can have all the content and graphics or videos in the world but if it’s your first time in Facebook Ads Manager you might find yourself a little confused.

The Facebook way

If you’re an admin of a Facebook page you’ve probably seen the ‘Boost Post’ button on many of your posts. Facebook are explaining to you that if you spend x amount you can reach x amount of people with your post. This is Facebook’s way of getting you hooked on their ad system, and it works. However using this method to run your Facebook ads isn’t as effective as setting ads up from scratch in Facebook ads manager, or better yet…Power Editor.

The best way

Now this is very subjective and depends on many things, including opinion. But we wanted to offer our top tips for setting your Facebook ads up, to help you keep things organised for when you start to have lots of ads running at once. This method assumes you are running ads from one ad account for one business.

Campaign = Objective
Ad Set = Audience
Advert = Ad Creative

Campaign
When you set up a Campaign, you have to choose the objective. So if you’re objective is to get people to engage with your content then you’ll choose the Post Engagement objective. Once you’ve set up a campaign with this objective, you should then use that campaign to put any ad sets you set up with the same objective. So if your first ad has the objective of getting people to engage with a post about your new products, and your second ad has the objective of getting people to engage with your old products, they should go under the same campaign. We would tend to call this Campaign “Post Engagement Ads” and if it were a campaign for getting people to click through to the website it would be “Website Clicks Ads.” This should be done for each objective. 1 campaign per objective, then as many ad sets and ads as you want under those campaigns providing the objectives match up.

Ad Set
Ad sets should be used to test different audiences, so you can find which one performs the best for your content. You might have a very specific audience but that doesn’t mean that further down the line you won’t want to try and target all the people who have been on your website, and they would go in their own ad set. We tend to name our ad sets based on the audience they’re targeting, so that we can tell what the targeting options are by looking at the title of the ad set. This can include placement and other targeting options if you’ve used them.

Advert
This is the creative part of your campaign. You can either use posts on already on your page or create posts that will specifically be for adverts only and will never be published to your page. It’s entirely up to you, and you can have as many adverts in your ad sets as you like, but Facebook will weight it’s spend to the best performing one (See ‘Tricking Facebook’ for more on this). If you want to test the same post out to different audiences, then you can direct different ad sets to the same post. Or if you want to have the same audience see more than just one post it can be a good idea to create multiple ad sets that are identical, and then choose a different ad creative for each ad set.

There’s the structure

So that’s the structure we tend to use when setting up and running Facebook ad campaigns for businesses. Unless there are other factors that come into play that cause for alternative set ups, that’s how we do it! Give it a try, it should help you to keep things organised for when you’re checking results to see which ads are performing the best.