Facebook is a key sales channel for many small businesses. With almost three billion monthly active users, advertising on the social media platform gives you the ability to reach lots of potential customers, with a relatively small advertising budget. Show
The only problem? Opening the Facebook Ads Manager for the first time can be incredibly overwhelming. You’ll find multiple reporting dashboards, ad format options, and audience insight tools—all of which make running a new campaign seem complicated. But it doesn’t have to be. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to create a Facebook Ads Manager account and use it to run successful campaigns. If you're a Shopify customer, add Facebook as a marketing channel in your Shopify dashboard and manage campaigns, sync your product catalog, and report on performance—all in one place. What is Facebook Ads Manager?Facebook Ads Manager is the platform used to buy advertising placements across Facebook and Instagram. More than 37.3 million businesses use a Facebook Ads Manager account to run campaigns on the advertising platform. In fact, the platform is so popular that ad spend exceeded $5.5 billion in the second quarter of 2021. Facebook and Instagram—both owned by Meta—accounted for 23.8% of digital ad revenue generated throughout the entire year. Ads Manager grants advertisers access to features to help them market their business, including:
How to open a Facebook Ads Manager accountReady to start advertising on Facebook? Here’s how to open an Ads Manager account.
How to run campaigns using Facebook Ads ManagerBefore we get to the tutorial, we need to understand the terminology around Facebook advertising. The Ads Manager divides new campaigns into three tiers:
1. Choose a campaign objectiveThe first stage in creating a Facebook ads campaign is to choose an objective. This is the overarching goal of your entire campaign and impacts who the advertising algorithm shows your ads to. Options include:
Children’s clothing retailer Sydney So Sweet started Facebook advertising with one goal: conversions. However, its owner and CEO, Jen Greenlees, says, “This was too short sighted. We have recently expanded our advertising to optimize for engagement as well, and since then we have seen exponential growth in our Facebook account overall. “As a store owner, it’s easy to get caught up focusing on sales as your only goal, but by increasing our overall engagement on Facebook, we have actually seen an even greater return on our conversion ads.” 2. Set a budget and scheduleMany new advertisers are cautious about going over their ad budget. Combat this by setting start and end dates for your campaigns, then selecting one of the following budgeting options:
The hard question is: How much should you allocate for Facebook ads? Experts like Ezra Firestone, founder of Smart Marketer, recommend investing between 10% and 30% of your store’s revenue. If you generate $100, for example, between $10 and $30 of that should go back into Facebook advertising. But the beauty of Facebook advertising is that you can spend as much (or as little) as you like. Just $5 per day can get the engine running. With this ad budgeting strategy, you can launch an ad for three days, evaluate how it performed, and then try a new ad for three days. Just $5 a day for a month gives you 10 different variations of your ads for $150 in total. When you’re budgeting for Facebook ads, remember that you’re not only spending money to buy customers. You’re also spending money to buy data and additional brand assets that are not customers, including audiences of people who’ve visited your site, watched your video, or subscribed to your email list. That’s why Ezra says Facebook advertising “is one of those things where you’ve got to be willing to consistently spend over time.” 3. Build an audienceNext, define the type of person whom you want to see your campaign, using one of the following options. Custom audiencesIf you’re starting your Facebook advertising strategy from scratch, build a saved audience. Add the demographics and traits your target market shares, such as their:
You’ll see the estimated audience size in the right-hand column. Go broad to begin with, and get more specific with your ad targeting once you begin collecting data. After two weeks, you might find that people aged 50 to 60 respond better to your campaigns than those aged 40 to 50. In that case, it would make sense to re-optimize your campaigns, by either removing the low-performing age bracket or dividing the ad set into two—with the better performing one receiving more budget. Lookalike audiencesA lookalike audience is a group of people who share similar traits to an existing list. The algorithm will find Facebook users to target in future campaigns who share traits with your existing customers. Shopify automatically makes a database of anyone who buys from you online. If your goal is to generate sales, upload this list to the Audience Manager. Choose how close of a match you want the new audience to be. A 1% lookalike is most similar to your existing customer list, whereas a 10% overlap expands the pool to create a bigger audience. Retargeted audiencesWith the pixel installed on your website, Facebook already knows who’s been looking at your products. Include these people in a retargeting audience. Shopify merchants can sync their catalog with both Facebook and Instagram. That gives you the option to run dynamic product ads. The algorithm will show them the product they’ve already been viewing, acting as a final nudge to purchase before they forget about it. As James Eaglesfield, digital marketing specialist at Autoweb Design, says, “Dynamic ads can target visitors to your website who didn’t quite get to the purchase stage. Your ad will show them the product they were interested in and a few similar options. These people are hot leads which you don’t want to give up on, and this extra nudge may be all it takes to get that sale.” Take this Facebook ad example from McBride Sisters Collection. The brand ran a campaign to retarget people who already knew the brand. The result: a 58% increase in online sales. 4. Choose a platform and ad placementFacebook Ads Manager allows businesses to promote products and services across both Facebook and Instagram. Choose which platform you want to advertise on under the Placements tab of Ads Manager. Automatic placement is checked by default. With this setting, the advertising algorithm chooses which placements will meet your goal best, maximizing the budget you have available. It’s a good place to start if you’re unsure which platforms or placements will work most for your audience. Alternatively, manually select platforms and placements. Choose from:
5. Build your ad creativeArguably the most important part of your Facebook advertising strategy is the ad creative. How your adverts look has a major impact on the likelihood of users completing your goal. People won’t engage with an advert that doesn’t grab their attention in a crowded feed. For this reason, Hector Gutierrez, CEO of JOI, recommends to “Change up your ad’s look. People get burnt out when they constantly see the same ads. Create a collection of ads for the same campaign and change the images and colors used on a single offer to boost engagement. “Advertisements need to be eye-catching and catchy, and they lose both of these qualities when you inundate your audience with the same exact one.” Options include:
Whichever format you choose, preview your ad creative before setting the campaign live. Facebook ad specs differ from device to device. Creatives need to look visually appealing across tablets, desktops, and mobile phones. Source 6. Review campaigns and publishBefore publishing your new Facebook ad campaign, review the information you’ve added so far. Images, videos, and ad copywriting should convey the right message to Facebook users you’ll reach with the campaign. If you’re happy with each element, submit the campaign for approval. It can take up to 24 hours for Facebook to review and approve the ad, though it’s typically much sooner—within a few hours. How to report on performance with Facebook Ads ManagerYour job isn’t over when you’ve launched your first campaign. Monitor ad performance to see whether your campaigns are meeting their goal or wasting money. Find the Account Overview tab inside Facebook Ads Manager. You’ll see a reporting dashboard of campaign performance. Click through each one to find individual reports for each ad set and ad creative. Hit the dropdown menu button to use a premade reporting dashboard, or select the most important metrics your business is tracking. Unsure how to use this information? Best practices for Facebook ad reporting include:
Remember: While the ultimate goal is to always make a sale, you might not get there right away. Don’t be discouraged. Look at the other data like reach and click-through rate to understand if people are seeing your ad—and more importantly, if they’re interested enough to click it. They’re signs you’re on the right track. Despite Facebook Ads Manager’s advanced reporting capabilities, the metrics you’ll see inside your account aren’t 100% accurate. Apple’s iOS14 update limits data advertisers can collect. Brandon Dill, co-founder and CEO of Fuse Lenses, says that because of the update, “Facebook was no longer able to track the impact of our ads on iPhone customers. That’s where 70% of our customers come from!” Brandon developed a smart workaround to calculate the now-defunct advertising metric: “We take the percentage of customers who said they found us on Facebook in our survey and assume that all of the revenue on our site came from the same percentage of Facebook customers. “We multiply the total sales by the percent of Facebook customers to get a total Facebook sales attribution. Then we divide that number by our total Facebook spend to get [return on ad spend].” Since using this workaround, Brandon says that Fuse Lenses has regained profitability: “It’s a little bit of work to report these numbers manually—takes about five minutes—but the juice is worth the squeeze on this one.” Replace Facebook Ads Manager with ShopifyFacebook plays a key role in many small businesses’ marketing campaigns. Nail your campaigns and unlock access to your target customers’ feed on a social media platform they’re likely to buy through. If Facebook Ads Manager is too complex for you, there’s a workaround. Add Facebook as a marketing channel in your Shopify dashboard and manage campaigns, sync your product catalog, and report on performance—all in one place. The best part? Connect Facebook with Shopify and you’ll have the ability to create social media storefronts, offer in-app checkout, and accept one-click payments with Shop Pay. Each removes a common obstacle shoppers have prior to converting through Facebook. How do I get to my Facebook Ads Manager?To navigate to Ads Manager right from your business Page, head to the left sidebar and click on the "Ad Center" dropdown arrow of any Facebook Page, then choose “All Ads” from the dropdown. At the bottom of that Page, there is an option to click "Ads Manager."
Does Facebook ads work in 2022?Facebook advertising is still relevant in 2022. Leaving Facebook out of a paid social media strategy means losing out on its huge user base, market share, and technological capabilities.
How do I switch to new ad manager on Facebook?Go to Ads Manager. Select the account dropdown menu in the upper left. You should see your account name, followed by the account id number in parentheses. Choose a different ad account from the dropdown.
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