Spice up your Meta Ads Campaign

Facebook has become one of the key selling channels for small businesses. And even with the advent of Meta and shifts in consumer behaviour, advertisers on social networking can reach large audiences with relatively small advertising costs.

Facebook still has almost three billion active monthly customers and specific audiences, such as parents and older Millennials who grace its walls daily.

So if you’re looking to reach them where they are, and extend your presence across social media, you’ll need an understanding of how to make the most of Meta Ads Manager. This can all be done from your Facebook business page.

Let’s explore how you can get started getting more bang for your buck from your campaign budget.

But before we start your first ad campaigns…

What is Meta Ad Manager?

Ads Manager is an all-inclusive platform that enables you to create, manage and track ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. This makes it a central hub for initiating Facebook ad campaigns, controlling their scheduling and ad placement, and evaluating their success in relation to your marketing goals! The Ads Manager app, available on iOS and Android, helps you monitor your campaigns on the move. So you can create, modify and oversee everything you advertise, as well as manage your Facebook ad budget and schedules from anywhere.

Sprucing up your Facebook page and paid strategy

Facebook ads are exactly what they sound like – paid ads for reaching a wider target audience on this social media platform. You can use these to:

• Get more views on your posts
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase engagement through visibility
• Gain deeper insights into consumer behaviour and page performance
• Inform and improve your social media strategy
• Drive website traffic and build on app promotion
• Grow your community
• Create an entire campaign built from lead ads to collect contact information for re-marketing
• Create ads specific to your campaign objectives
• Access all your campaigns from one ad account

You can also get access to more features when you run Facebooks ads, like adding a CTA button to your ad creative. Most importantly for many growing companies, a new ad account can help you bring in new business and reach new buyers.

Prospecting: Find new customers using your account

Creating Facebook ads in Ads Manager can help increase revenue for any organization online. This form of prospecting targets customers who don’t interact with your business on social networks. So you have to go out and make your presence known.

Prospecting can be tricky in the noisy online landscape, where businesses compete for user attention. But using specific ad placements, and highly targeting your future campaigns, can help you stand out in the proverbial crowd.

Facebook ads offers two helpful tools for businesses to find a new customer:

1. Lookalike audiences in Facebook Ads Manager

Identify potential buyers and prospects using customer data from a strategy or previous ad campaign. The Lookalike audience tool is perfect for when you create new groups on Facebook that are have similarities to your current target audience.

2. Targeting in Facebook Ads Manager

This enables you to reach your target audience outside of your existing customers, based on user attributes, location, behaviours and more. So your Facebook ads can still reach a wide range of people without compromising on how targeted your marketing is. The more relevant the content is to these new audiences, the more likely they are to become followers, customers or at least more interested in what you’re sharing.

Let’s head over to your Facebook Ads Manager dashboard and get started

Set up your Meta Business Suite (formerly Facebook Business Manager).

A lot of new users abandon Facebook ads at setup and get overwhelmed by the amount of options to choose from – but it’s not as difficult as it may seem. The first step is to make sure you’ve set up the Meta Business account in a way that works for you. This is where Meta Business Suite comes in. It provides Facebook users with a platform to manage a Facebook page and business page. You also have the chance to get Meta-B2 Suite but then you’ll have to go to business.facebook.com and choose “Make a new user”. Facebook asks your name, your e-mail address, and if your business website is on Facebook. After that, you’ll have to set up another advertising account. Tedious but not too difficult.

Create your first ad campaign with Meta advertising!

When you’re creating a Facebook campaign, you’ll have to start by picking a “type”. This will affect how you pay for, target, and measure the ads you’re running in your campaign.

Your Facebook ads options include “auction” or “reach and frequency”. Auction is easiest to start out with and you’re in competition against other brands. Reach and frequency gives you more control but it takes time to get the best results. For this example, we’ll use auction:

• Step 1: Navigate to Ads Manager. Click Create to start.
• Step 2: Select Auction as your buying type.
• Step 3: Decide what your ad objective is.
• Step 4: Choose Continue so that you can start creating.
• Step 5: Name your campaign.
• Step 6: If it applies to you, you can switch on the Special Ad category and then use the drop-down to decide which one you’re picking. Special ad categories usually have content about finances, work, social topics, government content or commentary – so pick the one that applies. If you’d like to you can choose the option to run an A/B test to see which of two ads performs better in light of your campaign objective. You can also turn on campaign budget optimisation to help you manage campaign costs. A daily budget gives you the opportunity to pick your average ad spend per day. That way you won’t go over if you don’t have more budget. Facebook ads cost relatively little compared to other forms of advertising, so you’re likely to get good returns on what you invest. You could also choose to apply a lifetime budget so your new Facebook ad campaign has one budget that’s spent once it’s spent. If a lot of people see your ads in one day, it could be up sooner but this is a good option for days you’re expecting a lot of interest.
• Step 7: From here you can also choose Show more options and click to Run ads on a schedule which you can only do with lifetime budgets. You’ll also need to upload your new ad creative so the sooner that’s ready to go, the sooner you can get started. Once you’re done, you can view performance in the campaigns tab. Now create an ad set.

Get your ad sets going in Facebook Ads Manager

These steps apply to campaigns that use auction as the buying type just like we did above. If you choose reach and frequency as your buying type, you can learn how to set that up here reach and frequency campaign.

Step 1: Name your campaign in Facebook Ads Manager (You might have already done this in the campaign set up above)

Step 2: Choose a conversion location – depending on what your aim is. Facebook is slowly introducing different campaign objectives so see if it applies to the ones you’ve chosen. You can switch on dynamic ads creative if you want to automate parts of your advertising but once it’s on, you can’t change your ads by placement in the ad level.

• Step 1: Choose the result you want to priotize in the Optimisation and delivery section. Just click Edit. Some objectives have more than one option but others don’t so don’t be alarmed if the option you chose doesn’t.
• Step 2: If it applies, you can pick your daily lifetime budget and put in the amount you’re comfortable with. But you won’t need to do this if you turned on Meta Advantage campaign budget when you were at campaign creation.
• Step 3: Choose your running dates (start and end). You won’t be able to put the start date in the past so you don’t need to worry about getting that wrong.
• Step 4: From here, you will choose Show more options if you want to schedule posts for specific times. This is only available for lifetime budgets and not for daily ones.
• Step 5: Define your audience. Remember custom and lookalike audiences? This is where that comes into play. Alternatively, you can hover your mouse over Locations, Age, Gender, Detail targeting and Languages, and pick Edit to create your new audience.
• Step 6: Then choose Save this audience which will enable you to use it again at a later stage.
• Step 7: Pick Facebook ads placements. You can do this manually or automate it by selecting advantage +placements for input.
• Step 8: Close to save your ad sets, or click Next to progress to ad creation.

And voila, you’ve got your ad sets.

Ad creation: it matters how viewers consume your content

Once you have your campaigns and ad sets set up you can input your ad content. There are various ad formats that appeal to different viewers. For example, an image ad can tell 1000 words in an instant, driving store traffic or even catalog sales. Short-format video can capture attention and get people feeling something.

The ability to mash together several different ad types (carousel ads, video ads, single image ads, etc.) allows for unmatched storytelling ability. Create the content you know your users respond to best and use it to up your creativity.

How to report on your ad campaign performance

One of the best parts of using Meta Ads Manager is that you get clear analytics into post and campaign performance. This helps you identify ads that you can use to improve your campaign effectiveness, see where you’re going wrong and what you’re doing right. And, a lot of this is automated, which means you can focus on the insights rather than collecting data. Simply view your Account Overview on ad manager. It will provide reports on campaigns performance which you can use to justify more budget to higher ups, to prove a point or to help redirect your strategy.

How granular can you go? Click on each report for the specific set and branded ads. Choose the Drop Down menu icon to view your report or select the most useful data you’re tracking. You’ll have enough information to inform your next move.

Pro tips for your ad creative and ad campaigns

87% of spending on social video ads (in the USA) is controlled by Facebook and can be found everywhere from feed posts to Instagram and Facebook stories.

Image ads are also more effective than copy-focused posts and even messenger ads, depending on the context. With this in mind, Facebook video ads are an effective way to reach new Facebook audiences and get more attention online.

If you don’t have the tools or expertise to start with videos, you can try slideshow ads for a video feel.

Pay attention to Facebook ad specs

There’s nothing more frustrating than having an ad rejected based on image quality or not meeting the basic specs. If your advertising is stretched, cropped or otherwise distorted, they won’t run. So, it is important to ensure your images and videos meet the correct size requirements. You can find out more about Facebook ad specs here.

Set up your Meta pixel

Your Facebook Meta Pixel helps your ecommerce store, website or other online real estate “talk” to your business account and enables you to create dynamic ads. Find out more about how to set up and use a Meta Pixel here.

What are you waiting for? Start Facebook advertising now

Almost anyone can create an ad but effective Facebook ads stand out with imagery, short copy and a particular ad format. And businesses that get the right support with reaching campaign objectives and ad types get the upper hand for campaign performance. But, it can be overwhelming if you’re just starting out or setting up a new account.

Luckily, we know how to do it. Contact YDA and find out how we can help you get more from every Facebook ad campaign.