Launching Your First Campaign

This is an exciting moment. Finally, you are launching your first-ever campaign on Facebook! Before you dive into it, here’s a quick recap of the basics:

• A campaign comprises one or more ad sets. At this level, you need to define your marketing objectives such as boosting traffic, raising brand awareness, and generating clicks on the business website

• An ad set contains ads grouped according to budget, schedule, target, and bidding and placement.

• An ad, being the smallest unit, refers to the creative you attach to a new or existing campaign or ad set.

With the definitions out of the way, follow these steps toward launching a Facebook campaign.

Step 1: Open Ads Manager

All of the action takes place in the Ads Manager. To go there, you can click . Once you see the display below, expand the menu by clicking Ads Manager on the upper-left side. Then click Create Ad.

Or find the drop-down menu on the upper-right corner of your Facebook feed. Click on Create Ads.

You will then be taken to the Guided Creation panel.

If a window pops up instead, just find the button asking you to switch to Guided Creation.

Step 2: Choose A Campaign Objective

A good advertising campaign starts with a well-defined marketing objective. Facebook lets you select a specific objective from any of three main categories, namely, Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.

Facebook defines each category and groups the objectives as follows:

Awareness: Objectives that generate interest in your product or service.

• Brand Awareness

• Reach

Consideration: Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it.

• Traffic

• Engagement

• App Installs

• Video Views

• Lead Generation

• Messages

Conversions: Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service.

• Conversions

• Catalog Sales

• Store Visits

Tip: If you aren’t sure which particular goal to go for, you can study each of the options first. Just hover over an item, look for the grey circle with a lowercase i in the middle, and hover over the circle. A short explanation about the objective will then pop up.

Likewise, you can click on the circle with i to choose it or to just get a larger view of the description.

You can customise the campaign name. Facebook also features split testing and budget optimisation, both of which you can switch on by flicking the buttons beside the labels.

When you’re done filling in information, hit Set up ad account.

Step 3: Set Up An Ad Account

The information you add here is going to be the basis of your billing and reporting data. Make sure you get the currency and time zone right. You can use your name or business name to label the account. You will be able to edit that by clicking Show advanced options.

Step 4: Create An Ad Set

Here, you will cover Audience, Placements, and Budget and Schedule. It’s best to break them down and tackle each one.

Audience

Before you reach out to people, you need to research who they are. If you’ve done your assignment before jumping into Facebook advertising, then you can breathe a little and skip this part. If you haven’t done it yet, then this part is for you.

A good starting point is Interest-based targeting. Know your audience’s location, age, gender, and of course, interests. You can crossreference these details on the Insights panel of your Facebook Page. Do not be afraid to narrow the range when you think it is going to make your targeting more effective. Moreover, an ideal audience size would be 250,000.

Tip: You can customise who you show your ads to. You can do this by filling out the Custom Audiences field with the any of this piece of information: email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs, or app user IDs.

Placement

As much as you can, avoid choosing Automatic placements. This default option will let Facebook display your ads in all available placements, which is not always effective.

It is not also advisable to use Messenger placement for your first ad. Save it for engagement and remarketing purposes.

Budget & Schedule

You need to invest in your campaign if you want to get the most out of Facebook advertising. Find a sizeable amount that will let you experiment on targeting and find people who are really interested in your product or service.

When it comes to scheduling, you can choose to run your ads continuously or within a specified time period.

Bidding strategy is another important thing to learn as you advertise on Facebook. According to Tomas Slimas of Oberlo, if your objective is Conversion, it’s best to select Optimisation for Conversions. Also, expand the Conversion window from 7 days to 28 days click or 1-day view. This technique will allow Facebook to make the most out of your data, Slimas adds. You can adjust the window once you get enough information about your audience’s conversion activities.

Step 5: Design Your Ad

Now it’s time to showcase your brand assets such as promotional posters and product images. You have five options to choose from when deciding how your ad looks.

Start off with a Single Image as it is also the easiest to produce. Create several ads showing various images of the same product to test which ones work for your audience. This format is also useful when you want to direct traffic to certain pages on your site. A carousel would be nice if you have multiple offerings that you want to feature in one ad.

Make sure you adhere to the standard 20% text rule, which requires that text should only be 20% of the entire image. Also, keep in mind that the recommended image size is 1200 x 628 pixels.

Be free, be bold when designing your ad. Look for pegs or samples. Find out what big brands are doing and take note of what you like. Tinker with tools that will help simplify asset creation for you. For instance, Canva is a favourite among digital marketers because of its nondesigner-friendly user interface and experience.

Lastly, your chance to really catch the attention of your target audience lies in your headline and description. So get creative, imaginative, and inventive. At the same time, proofread. You need to deliver that message without sacrificing quality.

Check how your ad will look on desktop and mobile feeds. On mobile, the Call to Action button can cover the description. So if you want to say something special in the description, just ditch the Call to Action button. However, you will have to add the call to action in the ad text.

Don’t worry about not getting everything perfect. It takes time to master Facebook advertising. You’re doing fine. Just keep coming back to this guide if you are feeling a bit lost. But don’t also let that keep you from learning more.